Austerlitz:
Only at Liverpool Street station, where he waited with me in MacDonald's until my train left, and after a casual remark about the glaring light which, so he said, allowed not a hint of a shadow and perpetuated the momentary terror of a lightning flash - only at Liverpool Street did he resume his story.
From "The Emergence of Memory, conversations with W. G. Sebald":
WGS: Well, yes, writing, as I said before ... you make something out of nothing. It is a con trick.
JC: But there seems to be quite a preoccupation with making what is written true.
WGS: That's the paradox. You have this string of lies, and by this detour you arrive at a form of truth which is more precise, one hopes, than something which is strictly provable. That's the challenge.
"I think how little we can hold in mind," he writes after a visit to a Belgian prison used by the Nazis, "how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on."
I am reminded of Sebald's account of an experiment that intrigued him: "They put a rat in a cylinder that is full of water and the rat swims around for about a minute until it sees that it can't get out and then it dies of cardiac arrest," he told me. A second rat is placed in a similar cylinder, except that this cylinder has a ladder, which enables the rat to climb out. "Then, if you put this rat in another cylinder and don't offer him a ladder, it will keep swimming until it dies of exhaustion," he explained. "You're given something - a holiday to Tenerife or you meet a nice person - and so you carry on, even though it's quite hopeless. That may tell you everything you need to know."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._G._Sebald
