The Rings of Saturn

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Sebald recalls staying with the Ashburys in Clarahill, an old aristocratic family now vegetating inside their decaying house, who turn out to be kindred spirits with him (and so, in some ways, with me). Catherine, one of the daughters, describes herself as, unfortunately, “a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.” And yeah, I most definitely don’t *get* it. I’m probably too much of a goal-oriented reader and not sophisticated enough to fully immerse myself in evocative beauty of the writing. I can’t keep my mind from wandering off, distracted by all the digressions. In Dunwich, humans, Canute-like, tried to defy the sea. Another marvellous set-piece of writing (also below) tells of how active destruction, in the form of fire, is indivisible from human civilisation.

So maybe it’s not the book, it’s me. I appreciate the experience — but my brain is not made for this. But maybe one day I’ll revisit this and my impression will change. Beyond the maze, shadows were drifting across the brume of the heath, and then, one by one, the stars came out from the depths of space. Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the sand. From my resting place in the pavilion I gazed out across the heath into the night. And I saw that, to the south, entire headlands had broken off the coast and sunk beneath the waves. Come quello con Alec Garrard che ha smesso di occuparsi delle sue terre e ridotto al minimo i capi da allevare, si dimentica persino di riscuotere dagli affittuari, e dedica tutto il suo tempo e la sua energia a costruire, all’interno di una stalla senza riscaldamento, un modello in scala (dieci metri quadri) del tempio di Gerusalemme, che rimase in piedi circa cento anni, mentre la sua riproduzione si augura il bricoleur possa reggere più a lungo: migliaia di persone, centinaia di colonne, pannelli di un centimetro quadro per rivestire il soffitto, fregi, tutto modellato e dipinto a mano, in scala rigorosa.

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The denial of time, so the tract on Orbius Tertius tells us, is one of the key tenets of the philosophical schools of Tlön. According to this principle, the future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past merely as memory. In a different view, the world and everything now living in it was created only moments ago, together with its complete but illusory pre-history. A third school of thought variously describes our earth as a cul-de-sac in the great city of God, a dark cave crowded with incomprehensible images, or a hazy aura surrounding a better sun. Dunwich, with its towers and many thousand souls, has dissolved into water, sand and thin air. If you look out from the cliff-top across the sea towards where the town must one have been, you can sense the immense power of emptiness. Perhaps it was for this reason that Dunwich became a place of pilgrimage for melancholy poets in the Victorian age." Aș mai menționa că textul lui Sebald este întrerupt de numeroase fotografii greu descifrabile (așa e și în original, din cîte am văzut), de tăieturi din ziare, de hărți etc. E greu de găsit o unitate în Inelele lui Saturn, principiul narativ este asociația aproape liberă de idei, digresiunea. Cred că este singurul lucru care evocă obiceiurile lui Sterne: „Stînd acum să mă mai gîndesc, îmi vine în minte faptul că pe vremuri...”.

It was difficult to imagine the holidaymakers and commercial travelers who would want to stay there, nor was it easy…to recognize the Albion as the “hotel on the promenade of a superior description” recommended in my guidebook, which had been published shortly after the turn of the century.Silman, Roberta (26 July 1998). "In the Company of Ghosts A novel uses a walking tour in East Anglia to meditate on links between past and present, East and West". The New York Times . Retrieved 9 June 2013.

Sebald’dan okuduğum bu dördüncü kitap (Vertigo, Hava Savaşı ve Edebiyat, Kır Evinde İkamet) bence en iyisi. Lütfen okuyun. By this point I was seventeen or eighteen and the interests that had sustained me through a solitary puberty, particularly classical archaeology, with its exciting promise of great riches lurking just below the surface, had yielded to a keen interest in literature. I began to keep a diary; I started to write stories and poems. I wanted to learn Greek; the books that I took out of the library each week were volumes of Sophocles and Plato’s Phaedrus, works that left me with inchoate and exalted yearnings that no model could ever depict. And indeed not long after this period of my life I went off to university to study Greek literature, which, however much it has suffered at the hands of time, has only rarely been the object of the kind of intentional ruination that has left such scant traces of so many ancient structures. Fa venire in mente un appassionato rigattiere che si muove nel suo negozio pieno di carabattole, ma per lui gioielli preziosi, cose di altri, e di tutto conosce la storia, il percorso, la vita.Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. Something of a travelogue then. And so in some sense a memoir of the narrator. But is it simply fact? Is there fiction too? Said to be a novel. Surely a novel must have some fiction in it? So a partly fictional memoir, partly fictional travelogue. I have no shelf for the book.

Certainly, Sebald’s descriptions of exploring Suffolk on foot are inspiring. If you have ever needed a reminder that you can write about anything and you can do it however way you like, this is it. Borgesian delight comes about out of nowhere. An in-depth and fascinating story about Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski. A bridge over the River Blyth that connects us to the Opium War, somehow. We are still in Suffolk! And then, out of nowhere, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam. I've read that a number of the men and women considered the great minds of the last few centuries were famous walkers, who were notorious for being unable to work out knotty problems while sitting down. Count Sebald's work as another variation that proves the theme.Fortin-Tournès, Anne-Laure (2012-12-18). "The Ruin as Kairos in W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn". Études britanniques contemporaines. Revue de la Société dʼétudes anglaises contemporaines (43): 153–162. doi: 10.4000/ebc.1330. ISSN 1168-4917.