We all have appointments with the past.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that our past experiences and memories are integral to our identity, and we must confront them.
W. G. Sebald's quote highlights the inevitability of reflecting on our past, emphasizing that our history shapes who we are in the present and influences our future. These 'appointments' serve as moments of reckoning where we encounter our memories, traumas, and experiences that define our character and perspective on life.
In practice
During a motivational talk about personal growth, one might quote Sebald to emphasize the importance of understanding one's history.
How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.
When I was a boy, I'd hide under the kitchen table and wind string around the chairs. I have a sense now that I am pulling on those threads. The more I pull, the more it comes unraveled.
If you're based in two places, on a bad day you see only the disadvantages everywhere. On a bad day, returning to Germany brings back all kinds of spectres from the past.
The seasons and the years came and went...and always...one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.
You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.
No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.
As soon as a women gets to an age where she has opinions and she's vital and she's strong, she's systematically shamed into hiding under a rock.
I also learned that a person was not necessarily bad just because you did not agree with him, and that if you believed in something, you had better be prepared to defend it.
We have built a thousand temples to Fortune and not one to Reason
If we assume the best in people, we can radically redesign our democracy and welfare states.
India may be a land of over a 100 problems, but it is also a place for a billion solutions.
There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.
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