The scientist Richard Dawkins is only the latest in a long line of scholars who have all noted a wondrous but fearful truth: humans are the only animals capable of comprehending their own deaths. But this knowledge that in the midst of all life death and nullity inevitably, unswervingly awaits is not one we like to face on any regular basis. Indeed - apart from the sub-genre of dying celebrity’s memories - contemporary culture resolutely turns away.
W.G. Sebald is a German professor who has lived and worked for the last thirty years in Norwich, but he has only come to literary prominence with the publication of this strange and bleakly moving book. In ‘The Rings of Saturn’ three distinct trajectories are seen; the first being that of the physical walk Sebald takes through coastal Suffolk - from Lowestoft to Southwold to Bungay. He wanders between ancient villages, through sandy heathland and along the long beaches facing the North Sea. A walk is the most basic way that humans can move, slow enough for observation, slow enough for the meditations upon those observations to grow into narratives, and yet with the insistent pace of onward movement transcending the physical motion and becoming embedded in the text.
The central intellectual trajectory, found in every aspect or scene that Sebald inquires into, is the basic one of life being followed by death. Before the walk the even begins Sebald, digressing upon his stay in hospital and the death of friends, turns to thoughts of Thomas Browne. Browne, a 17th century writer and antiquarian is most famous for his tract ‘Urn Burial’ - part-archeological enquiry and part-metaphysical speculation, but Sebald approaches him through a consideration of his skull which had been previously been kept in the local museum, moving on to the first public dissection of a corpse (in Amsterdam in 1632), and the depiction of this by Rembrandt. Browne, Sebald conjectures successfully, was watching this act of mordant scientific investigation, and this is then woven into a meditation on Browne’s conception of living matter - "the quincunx", then passing on to silk, and - finally - cremation. Browne - who the narrative loops back to again at the end - is quietly offered a justification or historical precedent for Sebald’s spirit of inquiry that finds links, recurrences and beauty - while still being aware - in the words of Browne: "all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance... [and] ...on every new thing there already lies the shadow of annihilation"
It is with this invocation of transience as a guide that Sebald sets off, first on a train to observe the traces of a country house and note the history of meteoric rises and falls - and the suffering that is inescapably linked (he broods on a demented guinea-fowl, the last in the menagerie). A stop in Lowestoft at the Seaman’s Mission brings together another series of links. For Lowestoft was the homeport of the Skimmer of the Seas, a small coaster that plied up and down the east coast, complete with, in the Summer of 1878, ordinary seaman Konrad Kozeniowski; a man who later anglicised himself into Joseph Conrad. And as he sat in Lowestoft Sebald watched a documentary concerning Roger Casement, the only honorable European Conrad said he ever met in the nightmare of the Belgium Congo. But the story of Casement, and his anti-slavery efforts together with involvement in the Irish Easter 1916 uprising - while heroic in the extreme - ends in the limepit at Pentonville prison, where his body was interred after execution.
The third trajectory central to this compelling book is of the decay of all objects into ruins and then nothingness. This neutralises the plaintive secular hope that at least our works, our art or our buildings will outlast our corporeal selves. As Sebald passes through Dunwich, a town eroded and drowned by the sea, he notes the traces that survive - the litany of church names: "St. James, St. Leonard, St. Martin, St. Bartholomew, St Michael, St. Mary, St. John, St. Peter and St. Felix, one after the other, toppled down the steadily receding cliff-face, and sank into the depth, along with the earth and stone of which the town had been built." This sentence carries the smooth authority of marking and mourning the past through the act of commemoration - yet without the judgement that is present in, perhaps, the poem 'Dover Beach’ by Mathew Arnold - a work also composed on a sea-shore marking what has been lost, but drawing a resolutely despairing moral lesson.
Along the coast at Ortfordness Sebald finds the derelict site of a former MoD range is sinisterly forlorn. For here, throughout the cold war, the firing mechanisms and triggers for all of Britains nuclear weapons were tested and prepared. The pebbled beach, marshy lagoons and blank concrete structures are seen as unworldly (but this type of atomic territory is to me always J.G. Ballard-land) It is unsurprising that the confidence of Sebald’s narratival voice shows cracks; faced with the traces of utter destruction, the nuclear flash that would have ended any gentle progression towards death, he is truly disorientated: "where and in what time I was that day at Orfordness I cannot say, even now as I write these words." Yet for a reader this is a revelatory point, as it allows the idea of the walk as artifice, and the connections as artfully chosen, to become hesitantly visible. The gap between the day at this site and the day when he wrote the words should undermine our belief in Sebald, we should think that he has just been elegantly clever, so far, at implying the naturalness of all of his connections - and has now been found out. Yet it does not. Instead the weakness and human frailty on Sebald’s part when faced with what he feels as "the emptiness within and the emptiness without" means that you trust him more and admit that this journey, like any journey, is a subjective work shaped by the author/traveler.
The last chapter builds on this, and other glimpses we had been given of Sebald’s life, weaving them into a historical narrative of death and displacement, silkworms, pattern books and Sir Thomas Browne (son of a silk merchant). But this is an austere modernist text, offering no consolations of faith, or the ideal of a progression from barbarity towards some sunlit uplands (Indeed one of the most chilling sections concerns Kurt Waldheim, an Austrian diplomat who spent his early career as a intelligence officer in Nazi occupied Yugoslavia - concerned with "resettlement". It is Waldheim’s voice, in his later capacity as UN Secretary General, that recorded a greeting from earth on the tape in Voyager II, a space craft currently leaving our solar system.) So it is hard while avidly reading - for despite the range of material the sinuous and yet magisterial (some have said Proustian) hold of Sebald’s prose draws all aspects into the journey - to feel at all happy.
But yet part of the conundrum of this work is the tension between its subject - the trajectories of loss and transience; and its richness as an object - speckled with reproductions of drawings, photographs, diaries, paintings, maps and newspaper articles. In the midst of noting the loss of so much, the book itself is proof of how much can be remembered - and here without the text/visual divide. For the words and images together here have a magic of synergy, of being more than their separated parts combined, of acting as a true memorial to what has passed. (It also reminds me how much we lose as we grow into adulthood and read "proper" books that contain no illustration, with the implication that this is praiseworthy and more "serious".)
The bleakness of the continual and recorded loss in ‘The Rings of Saturn’ is though rewarding, as it allows us to perceive with clarity the world, and acknowledge the beauty that can be found, even as we understand the trajectory towards oblivion. Even the seemingly discordant title reflect this, for while the rings of Saturn are beautiful to see, they are just traces of moons that have been torn apart, and can now only endlessly orbit as lustrous fragments.