Winfried Sebald - After Nature

into which without a word the breath

of legions of human beings had been absorbed.

And the water carried them downstream

together with salt and ashes

through the marshland out

to the sea. Those silent mutations

clear the way to the future.

In the course of three generations

the working classes of Manchester

had become a race of pygmies.

Volunteers who in war-time attempted

to escape into military service

were rejected by the selection boards

as unfit, unless they could be accommodated

in one of the so-called bantam battalions

which recruited diminutive soldiers from the city

and throughout the surrounding area.

In either case they were

part of the obscure crowds

who fuelled the progress of history.

From my workplace I thought

I could see the will-o’-the-wisps

of their souls, as with tiny lanterns

they haunted the rubbish dumps

of the City Corporation, a smouldering

alpine range which, it seemed to me,

extended into the beyond.

In the dusk I often saw

searchlight beams from

bulldozers creeping about there

that pierced the void, and aeroplanes,

our grey primeval brothers,

rose with infinite slowness

from the lagoon and the bogs.

I recall that these images

often plunged me into a quasi

sublunary state of deep

melancholia and that then

I heard the incessant monotonous

vibrations of a Jew’s harp

and repeatedly had to step out

of doors in my oppression.

Whole days long in the basement

of the university library I read

the works of Paracelsus, in which

it is written that from septentrion

nothing good emanates and

that the body is dyed

by illness like a piece of cloth

by an extraneous colour.

Often on my wanderings

through the streets I resorted

to one of the many infernally

glittering hostelries, for preference

to Liston’s Music Hall

where a radiantly blue-eyed,

down-and-out heroic tenor,

who always wore a winter coat

too long for him and a Homburg hat,

sang Tannhäuser arias accompanied

by a Wurlitzer organ. And to

the Gospel Chapels I went

from time to time, witnessing

how row after row of the sick

amid the congregation’s shrieking

were healed and even the blind

had their sight restored.

Once, while searching

for the star-shaped Strangeways

Prison, an overwhelming

panoptic structure whose walls

are as high as Jericho’s, I found

myself in a sort of no-man’s-land

behind the railway buildings, in a terrace

of low houses apparently due

for demolition, with shops left vacant,

on whose boards the names

Goldblatt, Grünspan and Gottgetreu,

Spiegelhalter, Solomon,Waislfish

and Robinsohn could be made out.

In the wind a door moved

as if as a sign. Stuck to it

was an old placard

for the musical Oklahoma!

The entrance to nature’s theatre

stood open. I still strained

to hear the ethereal waves

when with martial brass music,

bugle horns and drums,

a procession of olive-green

child soldiers marched

down the street, passed

by me and suddenly vanished

as though swallowed by the earth.

If I told Mr. Deutsch

about these things

he shook his head

and said: “Strange, very

strange.” Mr. Deutsch,

born in Kufstein, had come

to England as a child

in nineteen thirty-eight.

There were many things he could not

remember; some others he could not erase

from his mind. He had never

mastered the English language

although for years, day in

and day out, he followed

on TV with an expression of

the utmost attention the entire

evening schedule, as if

at any moment he expected

a message that would

change his whole life.

When, in the summer of last year,

I visited the engineer D. in Zürich

he was sitting by an open window

and kept turning a piece of feldspar

around in his hands. You see,

he said, outside, the garden grows rank,

my place now is in the midst of the foliage.

That reminds me of the migration

through the desert. How many machines

I’d built, how many works designed,

before I lost my belief

in the science I’d always served.

I had arrived at one of the dead

bays of time, like that Tatar

with the red headcloth and the white

curved feather, had climbed the mountain

and surveyed the city, as it lay

before me, a faded picture

of the great diluvium.

I sensed the trembling

of the aerials on the roofs

of houses as a frizzle

in my brain, could hear from far away

outside me

the Gaussian roar, an unremitting

sound extending over the whole scale

from the earth up to the heavens

where the stars drift

in the aether. Many

terrible midnights

of doubt have I passed

since that time, but now peace

returns to the dust and I read

in the descriptions of nature

of the eighteenth century how a

verdant land is submerged

in the blue shadows of the Jurassus

and in the end only the age-old

ice on the Alps retains a faint

afterglow. A strange light pervades

the lines of Haller and Hölderlin

and yet even here there is vagary

as far as the heart reaches. For

the revolutions of great

systems cannot be

righted, too diffuse are

the workings of power

the one thing always

the other’s beginning

and vice versa. Taurus

draconem genuit et draco

taurum, and nowhere

a stop. So you’d better be off,

said the engineer D., this very day.

The country’s on fire already and everywhere

the forests are ablaze, there’s a crackling

of fire in the fanned leaves

and the drought-stricken African

plains are expanding. Still

perhaps on your travels

you’ll see a golden coast

a land veneered with rain or

a schoolboy on his way home

over a beautiful meadow. Then

another joy will have been lived,

thinks one who recovers a little.

The shady shore of a lake

emerges, the water’s surface,

the ribbons of rocks and

on the highest summit the dragon’s

many-coloured plumage, Icarus,

sailing in the midst of

the currents of light. Beneath him

time divides the Rhine glacier

into two mighty branches,

the Churfirsten peaks emerge,

the Säntis range rises,

chalk islets, glowing

bright in drifting ice.

If his eyes are now

lowered, if he falls

down into the lake,

will then, as in Brueghel’s

picture, the beautiful ship,

the ploughing peasant, the whole

of nature somehow turn away

from the son’s misfortune?

These questions carry me

over the border. On the Arlberg

a thunderstorm gathers.

I gaze down into the valley

and my soul is sent reeling.

Another summer gone by and

as ivy hangs down, Hölderlin wrote,

so does branchless the rain. Moss roses

grow on the Alps. Avignon sylvan.

Across the Gotthard a horse gropes its way.

When morning sets in,

the coolness of night

moves out into the plumage

of fishes, when once more

the air’s circumference

grows visible, then at times

I trust the quiet, resolve

to make a new start, an excursion

perhaps to a reserve of

camouflaged ornithologists.