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The Rings of Saturn

I do not think Mrs Ashbury had any idea what distant fields the seed she collected might one day fall on, any more than Catherine and her two sisters Clarissa and Christina knew why they spent several hours every day in one of the north-facing rooms, where they had stored great quantities of remnant fabrics, sewing multi-coloured pillowcases, counterpanes and similar items. Like giant children under an evil spell, the three unmarried daughters, much of an age, sat on the floor amidst these mountains of material, working away and only rarely breathing a word to each other. The movement they made as they drew the thread sideways and upwards with every stitch reminded me of things that were so far back in the past that I felt my heart sink at the thought of how little time now remained. On one occasion Clarissa told me that she and her sisters had once intended to start an interior decorating business, but the plan came to nothing, she said, both because of their inexperience and because ...
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The Rings of Saturn

Across this horrific three-dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled, one’s gaze is drawn to the horizon, to the enormous mural, one hundred and ten yards by twelve, painted in 1912 by the French marine artist Louis Dumontin on the inner wall of the circus-like structure. 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. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted his...
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The Rings of Saturn

In February 1890, twelve years after his arrival in Lowestoft and fifteen years after his departure from the station at Cracow, Korzeniowski, who now had British citizenship and his captain’s papers and had seen the most far-flung regions of the earth, returned for the first time to Kazimierówka and the house of his Uncle Tadeusz. In a note written much later he described his arrival at the Ukrainian station after brief stops in Berlin, Warsaw and Lublin. There his uncle’s coachman and majordomo were waiting for him in a sleigh to which four duns were harnessed but which was so small that it almost looked like a toy. The ride to Kazimierówka took another eight hours. The majordomo wrapped me up solicitously, writes Korzeniowski, in a bearskin coat that reached to the tips of my toes and put an enormous fur hat with ear flaps on my head, before taking his seat beside me. When the sleigh started off, to a soft and even jingle of bells, a winter journey back into childhood began for me. T...
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The Rings of Saturn

I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise or the cod come in to the shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.
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W G Sebald: The Rings of Saturn

Three or four miles south of Lowestoft the coastline curves gently into the land. From the footpath that runs along the grassy dunes and low cliffs one can see, at any time of the day or night and at any time of the year, as I have often found, all manner of tent-like shelters made of poles and cordage, sailcloth and oilskin, along the pebble beach. They are strung out in a long line on the margin of the sea, at regular intervals. It is as if the last stragglers of some nomadic people had settled there,
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Charles Ferdinand Ramuz: Beauty on Earth

The view on the water that day extended hardly farther than 300 meters until suddenly it was like a curtain falling from its rod in heavy folds. Milliquet came back with the glass and the carafe, Rouge kept quiet. Milliquet stared through the window at the cheerless curtains of fog which came across the lake one after the other, like a hand was bringing them and arranging them along a hanging rod;—eventually a question was asked behind his back (it took Rouge a long time to ask it). “And otherwise?” Milliquet looked at Rouge over his shoulder. “I mean, how does she look like?” “I couldn’t say.” That was all. At six o’clock, Milliquet had the serving girl bring her some coffee with milk; she didn’t show herself the entire day. When it was dark, Milliquet went to look from the terrace whether there was any light on in her room; he saw there was none. And no one heard the slightest sound, even though the planking in her room was simple pine without a carpet and the room where Mr. and Mrs....
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Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-La-Morte

Stumbled on this little novel in stumbling around a city I've not yet been too.;) Excerpt: Before going out, Hugues waited until she had put the furniture back, checking that everything dear to him was undamaged and in its right place. Then, reassured, with the doors and shutters closed, he set out on his usual twilight walk, even though the heavy drizzle, common in late autumn, did not stop, fine rain, tears falling vertically, weaving moisture, sewing down the air, setting the smooth surface of the canals abristle with needles, capturing and transfixing the soul, like a bird, in the interminable meshes of a watery net!
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