Wg Sebald Rings Of Saturn Quotes

Unfortunately I am 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 get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.

This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.

Perhaps we all 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.

Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.

On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation.

Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.

No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.

I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

But that day, as I sat on the tranquil shore, it was possible to believe one was gazing into eternity.

There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace?

At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms. But then we never did. Oh, for the countless things one fails to do!

From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of those lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. 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.

For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one 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 all 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?

The future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past merely as memory.

They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.

I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals … Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea.

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.

Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade

The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

one of the chief difficulties of writing consisted in thinking, with the tip of the pen,

It seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost to Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

Но я не в силах справиться с фантомами повторения, с этими призраками, все чаще мелькающими в моей голове. В любом обществе у меня возникает чувство, словно я где-то когда-то уже слышал те же мнения, высказанные теми же людьми, таким же образом, теми же словами, в тех же выражениях, с теми же жестами.

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

Gleich ob man über Neufundland fliegt oder bei Einbruch der Nacht über das von Boston bis Philadelphia reichende Lichtergewimmel, über die wie Perlmutt schimmernden Wüsten Arabiens, über das Ruhrgebiet oder den Frankfurter Raum, es ist immer, als gäbe es keine Menschen, als gäbe es nur das, was sie geschaffen haben und worin sie sich verbergen. Man sieht ihre Wohnstätten und die Wege, die sie verbinden, man sieht den Rauch, der aufsteigt aus ihren Behausungen und Produktionsstätten, man sieht die Fahrzeuge, in denen sie sitzen, aber die Menschen selber sieht man nicht. Und doch sind sie überall anwesend auf dem Antlitz der Erde, breiten sich stündlich weiter aus, bewegen sich durch die Waben hochaufragender Türme und sind in zunehmendem Masse eingespannt in Netzwerke von einer der Vorstellungsvermögen eines jeden einzelnen bei weitem übersteigenden Kompliziertheit, sei es so wie einst in den Diamantenminen Südafrikas zwischen Tausenden von Seilzügen und Winden, sei es wie heute in den Bürohallen der Börsen und Agenturen in den Strom der unablässig um den Erdball flutenden Information. Wenn wir uns aus solcher  Höhe betrachten, ist es entsetzlich, wie wenig wir wissen über uns selbst, über unseren Zweck und unser Ende, dachte ich mir, als wir die Küste  hinter uns liessen und hinausflogen über das gallertgrüne Meer.

Nur selten soll es geschehen, dass einer der Fischer Kontakt aufnimmt mit seinem Nebenmann, denn obgleich sie allesamt unverwandt nach Osten blicken und am Horizont die Abenddämmerung und das Morgengrauen aufsteigen sehen, und obgleich sie, wie ich glaube, dabei bewegt werden von denselben unbegreiflichen Gefühlen, ist ein jeder von ihnen doch für sich ganz allein und hat Verlass nur auf sich selber und auf sein paar wenigen Ausrüstungsgegenstände, auf das Federmesserchen beispielsweise, den Thermosbehälter oder das kleine Transistorradio, aus dem kaum hörbar ein scharrendes Geräusch dringt, so als redeten untereinander die mit den Wellen zurückrollenden Steine. Ich denke nicht, dass diese Männer tage- und nächtelang am Meer sitzen, um, wie sie behaupten, die Stunde nicht zu versäumen, zu der die Wittlinge vorbeiziehen, die Flundern steigen oder der Kabeljau gegen die Küste schwimmt, sondern sie werden sich einfach aufhalten wollen an einem Ort, an dem sie die Welt hinter sich haben und voraus nichts mehr als Leere.

Ich bin leider ein von Grund auf unpraktischer, in ewigem Nachsinnen verfangener Mensch. Allesamt sind wir lebensuntüchtige Phantasten, die Kinder nicht anders als ich. It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder. Als Mrs. Ashbury mit ihrer Geschichte zu Ende war, schien es mir, als bestünde ihre Bedeutung für mich in der unausgeprochenen Aufforderung, ich möge bei ihnen bleiben un ihr Tag für Tag unschuldiger werdendes Leben teilen. Dass ich das nicht getan habe, dieses -- Versagen zieht  mir heute noch manchmal wie ein Schatten über die Seele.

A lo largo de días y semanas uno se devana inútilmente los sesos, no sabría, si se le preguntara por ello, si se sigue escribiendo por costumbre, o por afán de prestigio, o porque no se ha aprendido otra cosa, o por asombro ante la vida, por amor a la verdad, por desesperación o indignación, así como tampoco sería capaz de decir si mediante la escritura uno se vuelve más inteligente o más loco. Tal vez cada uno de nosotros pierda la perspectiva en la medida en que sigue construyendo su propia obra, y tal vez por este motivo tendemos a confundir la complejidad creciente de nuestras construcciones espirituales con un paso adelante en el conocimiento, mientras que, al mismo tiempo, ya intuimos que nunca vamos a poder comprender los imprevistos que ciertamente determinan nuestra carera.

I was saddened to see, in one of the otherwise deserted aviaries, a solitary Chinese quail, evidently in a state of dementia, running to and fro along the edge of the cage and shaking its head every time it was about to turn, as if it could not comprehend how it had got into this hopeless fix.

¿Qué clase de teatro es este en que somos escritores, actores, tramoyistas, escenógrafos y público, todo en uno? En la travesía de los espacios oníricos, ¿hace falta más o menos entendimiento del que uno se lleva consigo a la cama?

También es cierto que no soy capaz de preservarme de mis recuerdos, que con tanta asiduidad y tan de improviso me subyugan, si no es escribiendo. Si permanecieran aprisionados en mi memoria, con el paso del tiempo se tornarían más y más pesados, de modo que yo acabaría por desmoronarme bajo su carga en constante aumento. Durante meses y años los recuerdos reposan adormecidos en nuestro interior y siguen proliferando en silencio hasta que son evocados por una frusleria cualquiera, y de una forma extraña nos ciegan para toda la vida. ¡Cuantas veces no habré tenido por un negocio ignominioso mis recuerdos y la trasposición del recuerdo a la escritura, en el fondo reprobable! Y, sin embargo, ¿qué sería de nosotros sin los recuerdos? No seríamos capaces de clasificar los pensamientos más sencillos, el corazón más sensible perdería la capacidad de profesar afecto por otro, nuestro ser sólo se conformaría de una sucesión infinita de momentos sin sentido, y no existiría más la huella de un pasado. ¡Qué mísera es nuestra vida! Está tan colmada de fantasías erróneas, es tan vana, que casi se reduce a la sombra de las quimeras que nuestra memoria deja en libertad.

Looking back, she said, she realized that history consists of nothing but misfortune, and the troubles that afflict us, so that in all our days on earth we never know one single moment that is genuinely free of fear.

How wretched this life of ours is! —so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory.

Malteser fahren mit unbegreiflicher Todesverachtung nicht links und nicht rechts, sondern stets auf der schattigen Seite der Straße. ("Die Ringe des Saturn")

As I sat there in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed a quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, wrote Thomas Browne in the Garden of Cyrus and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of the night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if leveled by the scythe of Saturn – an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness

The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

People nowadays hardly have any idea of the scale of the operation, said Hazel. In the course of one thousand and nine days, the eighth airfleet alone used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs, and lost almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men. Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Somerleyton, and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight, and the survivors rooting about in the ruins.

Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. 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. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread.

A strikingly large number of our settlements are oriented to the west and, where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction. The east stands for lost causes.

There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three

He himself was now the battlefield on which the downfall of China was being accomplished, till on the 22nd of the month the shades of night settled upon him and he sank away wholly into the delirium of death.

Den Haag, das zu jener Zeit um die vierzigtausend Einwohner zählte, nennt Diderot das schönste Dorf auf der Erde und den Weg von der Stadt an den Strand von Scheveningen hinaus eine Promenade, die nirgendwo sonst ihresgleichen habe. Es war nicht leicht, diese Ansichten nachzuvollziehen, als ich selber die Parkstraat entlang in Richtung Scheveningen wanderte. Hier und da stand eine schöne Villa in einem Garten, aber sonst gab es kaum etwas, das mich aufatmen ließ. Wahrscheinlich war ich, wie schon so oft in fremden Städten, auf den falschen Wegen gegangen.

[О Вологде] Здесь только два сезона: зима белая и зима зеленая. Девять месяцев сюда поступает ледяной воздух северного моря. Термометр опускаетсся непредставимо низко. Ты окружен бесконечным мраком. Во время зеленой зимы идут непрерывные дожди. Сквозь двери домов просачивается слякоть. Это трупное окоченение переходит в чудовищный маразм. Белой зимой все мертво, зеленой зимой все умирает.

Вся человеческая цивилизация с самого начала была не чем иным, как с каждым часом все более интенсивным тлением, и никто не знает, как долго она будет тлеть и когда начнет угасать.

A strikingly large number of our settlements are oriented to the west and, where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction. The east stands for lost causes. Especially at the time that the continent of America was being colonized, it was noticeable that the townships spread to the west even was their eastern districts were falling apart.