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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the challenges of duality in living between two places, especially during difficult times.
W. G. Sebald's quote captures the essence of how one's perspective can shift based on their emotional state and environment. When faced with adversity, being situated in two contrasting places can exacerbate feelings of nostalgia and past traumas, as one tends to focus on the negative aspects of both locations. The reference to returning to Germany conjures memories that might not always be pleasant, illustrating how our emotional experiences are often tied to physical locations.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a discussion on the emotional impacts of relocating or living abroad.
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.
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.
Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.
It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one's heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.
It's said that when we die, the four elements - earth, air, fire and water - dissolve one by one, each into the other, and finally just dissolve into space. But while we're living, we share the energy that makes everything, from a blade of grass to an elephant, grow and live and then inevitably wear out and die. This energy, this life force, creates the whole world.
A weak understanding of what the Bible says about sin is tied to a weak understanding of what the Bible says is achieved by the cross.
It is bad for a young man to sin; but it is worse for an old man to sin.
MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.
As breath stills our mind, our energies are free to unhook from the senses and bend inward.
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