Where he and his family had lived for years, taking CharlottenstraBe for a grey wasteland, so I too found the familiar city, extending from the hospital courtyards to the far horizon, an utterly alien place. And just as Gregor's dimmed eyes failed to recognize the quiet street I could not help thinking of the scene in which poor Gregor Samsa, his little legs trembling, climbs the armchairĪnd looks out of his room, no longer remembering (so Kafka's narrative goes) the sense of liberation that gazing out of the window had formerly given him. In the tortured posture of a creature that has raised itself erect for the first time I stood leaning against the glass. Several times during the day I felt a desire to assure myself of a reality I feared had vanished forever by looking out of that hospital window, which, for some strange reason, was draped with black netting,Īnd as dusk fell the wish became so strong that, contriving to slip over the edge of the bed to the floor, half on my belly and half sideways, and then to reach the wall on all fours, I dragged myself, despite the pain, up to the window

Indeed, all that could be seen of the world from my bed was the colourless I can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that room on the eighthįloor, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot. It was then that I began in my thoughts to write these pages. Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the dayĪfter I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. Paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place. At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the That certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star. I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old superstition Point for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast. And in fact my hope was realized, up to a In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.

The rings of saturn by wg sebald