Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Austerlitz

London

Hamish Hamilton

2001

"At any rate, said Austerlitz, Gerald then moved from Cambridge to continue his work at an astrophysics research institute in Geneva, where I visited him several times, and as we walked out of the city together and along the banks of the lake I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselves, gradually emerged from the whirling nebulae of his astrophysical fantasies."

[...] At any rate, said Austerlitz, Gerald then moved from Cambridge to continue his work at an astrophysics research institute in Geneva, where I visited him several times, and as we walked out of the city together and along the banks of the lake I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselves, gradually emerged from the whirling nebulae of his astrophysical fantasies. On one of these occasions Gerald also told me about the flight he had made over the gleaming, snow-covered moutains in his Cessna, over the volcanic peaks of the Puy-de-Dôme region, down the beautiful Garonne and on to Bordeaux. I suppose it was inevitable that he would fail to come home from one of these flights, said Austerlitz. It was a bad day when I heard that he had crashed in the Savoy Alps, and perhaps that was the beginning of my own decline, a withdrawal into myself which became increasingly morbid and intractable with the passage of time.
(pp. 115-6)

Physics::Nebulae Physics::Stars

Reading

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2001)

05/18/2011