Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald

No, the report isn’t here. You have to visit The Selfdivider to read his excellent account of attending Christian Moser’s recent lecture at Columbia University’s Deutsches Haus - “Peripatetic Liminality” - on the cultural history of walking and W.G. Sebald.

One sentence in particular caught my attention.

Drawing from passages from Browne’s Religio Medici and other works, Moser established that there is a sense of levitation in Browne’s prose and philosophy (which Sebald also noted), and that Browne combines the myopic vision of the walker with the cosmic perspective of a flyer.

This sentence brought into sharp focus for me the episode in Campo Santo when Sebald leaves a hiking trail with its “terrifying curves, sharp bends and zigzags, [and] …rocky precipices” to go for a swim in the Bay of Ficajola.

I swam out to sea with a great sense of lightness, very far out, so far that I felt I could simply let myself drift away into the evening and so into the night. But as soon as, obeying the strange instinct that binds us to life, I turned back after all and made for the land which, from this distance, resembled a foreign continent, swimming became more and more difficult with every stroke, and not as if I were laboring against the current that had been carrying me on before; no, I was inclined to think that I was swimming steadily uphill, if one can say so of a stretch of water. The view before my eyes seem to have tipped out of its frame, was leaning toward me, swaying and flickering of its own accord, with the upper rim of the picture skewed several degrees in my direction and the lower rim skewed away from me to the same extent. And sometimes I felt as if the prospect towering so menacingly in front of me was not a part of the real world but the reproduction of a now insuperable inner faintness, turned inside out and shot through with blue-black markings. Even harder than reaching the bank was the climb later up the winding road… It took me a good hour and a half to climb to Piana again, but once there I could walk as if weightlessly, like a man who has mastered the art of levitation… [pages 16-17]

In this passage, in which swimming is bracketed by descriptions of treacherous and agonizing hikes, Sebald’s time in the water offers him a powerful - and temptingly final - release from the world. Nevertheless, when he finally returns to the village of Piana (where he immediately visits the local graveyard!), a sense of weightlessness and levitation returns.The agony of coping with the world and resisting death, of simple human perseverance, somehow leads to momentary ecstasy, and then, a few seconds later, Sebald is returned to normalcy, pondering the world around him with renewed curiosity.

Now click over to The Selfdivider, read for a few minutes, then go outside and take a walk.Or go for a swim.