Thermals

Sometimes it is better to allow forgetting to intervene after you’ve read a book; do not try to remember it, not yet; do not write about it, for to isolate this or that feature of what, in your memory, is a broad but indistinct plane, is to lose the whole. Let it settle then; let forgetting claim all of it, all at once, until it is only visible like a shipwreck close to the surface of the water: sea-changed, that is true, but all of it there, ready for you to pass over again, at another time.

I lost Vertigo almost as soon as I finished it, my annotated copy left on a seat on the train as I went to retrieve my bike. It’s appropriate, I tell myself; and besides, there are the other books you read just before it – The Emigrants: wasn’t it obscured, almost at once by the book you read after it, as The Rings of Saturn were obscured by The Emigrants? Of course Austerlitz obscured nothing – starting so well, how did it become so bloated and middlebrow? I shudder. – And how ready I had been to give myself to it! Betrayal: a fat and stupid book. Still, there were the others, which rise ever higher in the sky above the showman’s tent of Austerlitz.

The others; I have them here; I reread my annotations, but learn nothing. You cannot cut into these books; it is everything or nothing. The sweep of the whole, that is the thing. Read; sentence follows sentence. Sentence climbs atop sentence and then – suddenly – a great plateau is reached. The earth is flat around you and the whole sky above you and you ask: how is it that I found myself here?

But this is Sebald’s magic: to move through the particular, through the names of streets and the names of personages, through explanations and speculations, through imagined fact and true dreams until that high, wide place is found. Luisa’s memoirs in ‘Max Ferber’; Abros Adelwarth’s diaries: I will not quote a line. Context is everything and here context means exactly that: this is a weaver’s work, and the book is woven from details.

How I admire it: his prose’s constancy, the steadiness of Sebald’s hand on the tiller. We are moving, together, in one direction. Soon the wind fills the sails, and we are borne, not on the story Sebald tells, but one that he allows to tell itself in his telling. And now we learn that Sebald’s telling is the element in which other stories to rise, that like the thermals that rise up by the mountain range it is known by what it keeps aloft.

And so are memoirs of Luisa and Adelwarth’s diaries caught in that uprising. Does it matter that they may be fiction? It does not matter. Another voice is allowed to speak. Another’s voice – not that of the improbable Austerlitz, protagonist-to-please-all, but the kite that rises into the air and holds itself into the wind briefly before it falls again.

These voices are fragile as they reach us from the other side of death. Speak: Sebald’s commandment. Speak: Sebald the resurrector, Sebald the magician who conjures from texts that may or may not be real the fragile presence of those who, like us, will be broken against death.