Dave's late response to Sebald

Initially the reading had me perplexed and what I thought could be distilled from a multitude of themes, such as, transmigration, the uncanny, and the vastness of knowledge as well as knowing, had me somewhat deeply bothered. Sebald’s story shifts from a less desperate type of version of “The Butterfly and the Diving Bell” to a more depressing tale of two well educated and like minded friends of Sebald’s who both unmarried die within weeks of each other, the first of unknown causes and later by having lost such a dear friend which left her still very alive body susceptible to a disease that “swiftly consumed her.”  Sebald then goes on to talk about the places in which he encounters the later friend by the name of Janine. He talks about her office and the physicality of all of the writings she had done which existed solely there in her study as if it all were a physical extension of her mind, describing the accumulation of Janine’s notes in geological terms such as mountains and floods (all notes of which she was very aware of and could recover within minutes amidst the mass of paper.)Janine, it is revealed is very interested in Flaubert and to Janine her interests lay mostly in Flaubert’s intense “fear of the false”. Janine also adds that Flaubert, besides the fact that to her he was one of the finest writers, “he was convinced that everything he had written hitherto consisted solely in a string of the most abysmal errors and lies, the consequences of which were immeasurable.” This, for me, set up the first instance within the reading of a great dichotomy between grasp of knowledge and the never-ending abyss of doubt, which, happens to be as great or greater. While moving on to the next topic within the reading (Dr. Browne), I found the loss of page 10 to be a bummer. However, the inclusion of Rembrandts The Anatomy Lesson held me and began again to retell a similar story about great lies told under the guise of “a significant date in the agenda of a society that saw itself as emerging from the darkness into the light.” Sebald draws to our attention that, though the cadaver in Rembrandts work is that of a criminal, it is the cadaver whom lay victim to what little is understood of him through the dissection of his corpse and it is only the viewer (perhaps mister Browne) who is the only one that can see more as well as the dead man’s open mouth and eyes. Other allusions to death and transmigration follow in Sebald’s view of Browne and Browne’s view of knowledge. Browne says all knowledge is cloaked in darkness, and “We study the order of things but we cannot grasp their innermost essence.” I especially liked the part when while bedridden Sebald describes overhearing the nurse’s conversation of a vacation on Malta when one of the Maltese “with death-defying insouciance quite beyond comprehension, drove neither on the left nor on the right, but always on the shady side of the road.” And then comes in the reading the part about Browne’s fascination with the order of plants and obscure animals and Sebald’s dismay in discovering that Browne spent little time trying to understand the most ordinary of species (according to Browne’s geographic locale). It is interesting the notion of the Quincunx, of which Browne used heavily, and the ability to mathematically perceive the great distances at which we can obtain knowledge. Mathematics might actually be the only source of fathom-ability for which we can understand the great remaining and endless network of information before us in the dark beyond of which we can never have. I enjoyed that Browne did not exclude mythical or imaginary creatures from the realm of wonder as to place them under the category of invention. The most beautiful and thought provoking part I found in the reading, however, comes at its end. For Sebald it is true that Browne has come to know more about mortality than the “flowering of life”, but Sebald sees the beauty in cremation and transmigration just as the ashes of the deceased can be seen in parallel with Marx’s remarks on modernity that “all that is solid melts in to air”. This tells us of knowledge, existence and transmigration.