Writing for Sebald

"For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, on could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life."

"But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight."

"The weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, it is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread." 

From W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn

Waiting

From Ian McEwan's Atonement: 

 "Through the material of his coat he felt the bundle for her letters. I'll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn't touch him now. It was clear enough -- one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word. He felt it pressing down, heavy as a greatcoat." 

 McEwan's novel explores the difference between continually producing one another in our shared narratives and experiencing radically different narratives. Waiting falls under the latter. Narratives, for McEwan, are what bind us to one another and drive us apart. To atone is to be "at-one."

From Mann's Magic Mountain

"Space, rolling and revolving between him and his native heath, possessed and wielded the powers we generally ascribe to time. From hour to hour it worked changes in him, like to those wrought by time, yet in a way even more striking. Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness, giving us back our primitive, unattached state." Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter

Protesting Inconvertible Money

A cartoon by George Cruikshank, parodying the form of the bank note in order to protest the government authorizing the Bank of England to temporarily refuse to change bank notes for bullion.

1979 Penny

That fateful image towards the end of Jeannot Szwarc's Somewhere in Time (1980), when Richard Collier (played by Christopher Reeve) pulls out the 1979 penny from his pocket, and is transported irreversibly back to his own time, leaving his love Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour) in 1912. What if one were to think of this time-travel romance as a metaphor? Across space or across ideology. The irreversible, insurmountable gaps that separate us, making no distinction between ideal and material existence. Is heaven to come or is heaven that which is reflected back upon? The eternal beckoning, "come back to me..."

Chicane's "No Ordinary Morning"

When I discovered the video (after having been familiar with the song), I was struck by this particular interpretation of the lyrics. A man leaves a woman. A woman chases a second man through a parking garage with her BMW. He escapes narrowly. At the top of the garage, the sun has set and the woman gets out of a car, approaching the first man who left her. He is now holding a bottle of champagne. The man and woman embrace and share a moment of intimacy. She throws the bottle of champagne over the edge, which dissolves into nothing upon hitting the concrete. And then she pushes him from the parking structure. He grabs her arm and she falls with him. But what is striking is the ending, after the "cut." Both the first man and the woman land on a air pillow. She is congratulated by her crew. The first man walks to a set trailer and glares at her intensely, as if in the "real" world he is the one in her position.

Virtual Value

Thomas Nast, "Milk Tickets for Babies, 'In Place of Milk'" (1876), on the post-Civil War debate over the gold standard versus the greenback.