I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the contrast between inner emotional turmoil and the outward appearance one projects to the world.
W. G. Sebald's quote explores the idea that personal feelings of coldness and desolation may lead individuals to display a facade of warmth and liveliness. This 'fraudulent showmanship' suggests that people often mask their true emotional states, using external appearances to convince others—and perhaps themselves—that they are not as lost or troubled as they feel inside.
In practice
A discussion on the importance of mental health could incorporate this quote.
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.
I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.
The basic thesis of gestalt theory might be formulated thus: there are contexts in which what is happening in the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the separate pieces, but conversely; what happens to a part of the whole is, in clearcut cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole.
Even if you play perfectly, a fault of your opponent's can destroy the entire beauty of the game.
In our society, as people pass out of young adulthood, they tend to relate to themselves more in terms of what they are no longer than what they are now, and that's psychologically low-grade devastating.
Investing a lot of time and money in external beauty and caring little about internal beauty.
We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
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