Sebald Reading Response

One of the most important passages from this reading was towards the end when Sebald is talking about the transitory nature of mankind. It makes me think of the funerary phrase, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…” which is something that I have kept in the back of my head for a long time, because it has always served to reframe my perspective on my life and make the conflicts and/or problems of everyday life seem so unimportant, i.e. it reduces anxiety. I find it interesting that Browne sought to find objects that had survived the destructive forces of nature, which provided him a sort of hope beyond the scope of his own or any person’s life. Although I would not do the same and do not empathize with Browne’s feelings about the historical objects, I can understand that someone would focus on objects when the melancholy of existing is too much – the objects are distractions from internal torment. Georges Perec, according to John Sturrock, the editor in the introduction of Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, also shared a fascination with objects due to an internal torment, though his was different in origin than Browne’s.

However, I find that authors or artists who obsess themselves with the notion of transience tend to exaggerate the implications of their chronological despair to the point that they neglect the opposite notion, which is that infinity exists within brief moments, and that the right kind of perspective on such moments is what expands them. Granted, expanding such a moment can obviously only be done in a retrospective thought-process, and does not undo the fate of all mankind. But it is a way of countering the realization and mental internalization of life’s ephemeral qualities, which can lead to the sort of melancholy described by Sebald’s writing. Transience, I think, is important to be aware of in terms of one’s own life, because it places a certain pressure on one to act, that is, to live and not to dwell on how futile living may or may not be.

Religion, of course, had to trickle into the Sebald reading since the topic of death was brought up in conjunction with the brevity of life, but I personally do not believe in life after death. For me, then, transience should produce a heavier anxiety than for someone who seeks to find eternity or some sort of salvation after death. But actually it is the opposite – transience reduces the significance and ‘weight’ of one’s life, making it easier to handle. Death, final judgment/salvation/damnation, and all of the other similar things, I think, increase anxiety over the brevity and importance of one’s life, because life attains a devastatingly heavy attachment to those transcendental (yet unlikely) realms of being. That is unless, of course, one’s religion advocates the meaninglessness of life and guarantees salvation to all after death.

Otherwise, the ideas of Browne that Sebald presented were a trip down de-ja-vu lane as I reread familiar ideas about how little we know but think we know more, how impossible it is to see ‘things’ for their ‘inner essences’, how we must inevitably truncate our expressions of nature because we are limited creatures, how the brevity of our lives and inability to transcend the ephemeral robs us and other things of greater significance, and so on into what seemed like a fatalistic and saturnine mental collapse. I think the fact that we are fairly obsolete in the larger scheme of time and the universe gives us a beautiful freedom to speculate about and enjoy the fact that we have been magically granted by chance the ability to live and even acknowledge that which will outlive us. We are, in short, in the presence of something greater, aka the universe.

Finally, I like that Sebald pointed out that the quincunx, like many other geometric or mathematical patterns (such as the Fibonacci sequence), can be applied to a limitless number of things, which seems to me to indicate that not only is it not specific enough to have any significance, but that just about any pattern derived from some sort of geometric regularity can be applied to describe natural things. Although I will say that it is fairly impressive that Browne’s application of the quincunx pattern to nature is so far ahead of his time, for it seems to have the kind of macro lens-thinking that some modernists fell into, particularly because of the interest in universal rhythms and studies being done in the early 20^th century.