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Sunday,
April 10, 2005
Here is part of the sections from Austerlitz
to which I was referring to below.
Austerlitz, W.
G. Sebald
“…In face at this time, usually when
I came home from my nocturnal excursions, I began seeing what might be
described as shapes and colors of diminished corporeality through a drifting
veil or cloud of smoke, images from a faded world: a squadron of yachts
putting out into the shadows over the sea from the glittering Thames estuary
in the evening light, a horse-drawn cab in Spitalfields driven by a man
in a top hat, a woman wearing the costume of the 1930s and casting her
eyes down as she passed me by…
…I had several such experiences in Liverpool
Street Station, to which I was always irresistibly drawn back on my night
journeys. Before work began to rebuild it at the end of the 1980s this
station, with its main concourse fifteen feet below street level, was
one of the darkest and most sinister places in London, a kind of entrance
to the underworld, as it has often been described…
…I remember, for instance, that one quiet
Sunday morning I was sitting on a bench on the particularly gloomy platform
where the boat trains from Harwich came in, watching a man who wore a
snow-white turban with his shabby porter’s uniform as he wielded
a broom, sweeping up the rubbish scattered on the paving. In doing this
job, which in its pointlessness reminded me of the eternal punishments
that we are told, said Austerlitz, we must endure after death, the white-turbaned
porter, oblivious of all around, performed the same movements over and
over again using, instead of a proper dustpan, a card board box with one
side removed, and nudging it along in front of him with his foot, first
up the platform and then down again until he had returned to his point
of departure, a low doorway in the builders’ fence reaching up to
the second story of the interior façade of the station. He had
emerged from the doorway half an hour ago and now disappeared through
it again, with an odd jerk, as it seeming to me. To this day I cannot
explain what made me follow him, said Austerlitz. We take almost all the
decisive steps in our live as a result of slight inner adjustments of
which we are barely conscious. But in any case, that Sunday morning I
suddenly found myself on the other side of the tall fence, facing the
entrance to the Ladies’ Waiting Room, the existence of which, in
this remote part of the station, had been quite unknown to me…I
hesitated to approach the swing doors, but as soon as I had taken hold
of the brass handle I stepped past a heavy curtain hung on the inside
to keep out drafts, and entered the large room, which had obviously been
disused for years…Minutes or even hours many have passed while I
stood in that empty space beneath a ceiling which seemed to float at a
vertiginous height, unable to move from the spot, with my face raised
to the icy gray light, like moonshine, which came through the windows
in a gallery beneath the vaulted roof, and hung above me like a tight-meshed
net or piece of thin, fraying fabric…”
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