Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the connection between human emotions and the machines we create, suggesting they too possess a diminishing essence.
W. G. Sebald's quote draws a poignant parallel between human desires, our physical existence, and machines. It suggests that just as our bodies and feelings can wither and deteriorate over time, so too can the machines we build—suggesting a shared fragility and the inevitable decay of both the organic and the artificial. The imagery of a heart reduced to embers symbolizes the fading spirit or vitality in both humans and their creations.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of technology on human emotions.
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.
The future is a convenient place for dreams.
When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.
I am Oz, the Great and Terrible," spoke the Beast, in a voice that was one great roar. Who are you, and why do you seek me?
But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here.
I was asked why I did not give a rod with which to fish, in the hands of the poor, rather than give the fish itself as this makes them remain poor. So I told them: The people whom we pick up are not able to stand with a rod. So today I will give them fish and when they are able to stand, then I shall send them to you and you can give them the rod. That is your job. Let me do my work today.
In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.
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