On Writing and Shadows

 
"Austerlitz" by W.G. Sebald and "In Praise of Shadows" by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki.

I recently finished the novel Austerlitz, a 2001 novel by W.G. Sebald. About two thirds through the book, we find Austerlitz holed up in his very gray London flat – a flat stripped of color and containing only the bare necessities for furniture. He is at an existential impasse reconciling a past that refuses to be captured in words. The tension is between the desire to record memory and the failing of words to fully do so. These quotes about writing from that part of the book resonated with me:

“Now and then a train of thought did succeed in emerging with wonderful clarity inside my head, but I knew even as it formed that I was in no position to record it, for as soon as I so much as picked up my pencil the endless possibilities of language, to which I could once safely abandon myself, became a conglomeration of the most inane phrases.”

“All I could think was that such a sentence only appears to mean something, but in truth is at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.”

“However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again. Soon I could not even venture on the first step.”

Austerlitz's home in London is described as on Alderney Road (near Mile End Junction), near the Alderney Road Cemetery, Mile End – Ashkanz. I went on Google Maps street view to try and at least imagine the flat from the outside.

The “out-of-time" nature of Austerlitz’s flat, or at least how I imagined it, intrigued me. It reminded me of a quote from the 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, by the Japanese author Jun'ichirō Tanizaki.

"Have you ever felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find that you had grown old and gray?"

That quote appears in section 9, with the title “An uncanny silence”, sectioning as given by Wikipedia page. I imagine Austerlitz’s house would be like this.

The essay lays out Tanizaki’s (and by extension the Japanese) aesthetic and as you might guess from the title, it has to do with shadows. Friends gifted us the book to get ready for an upcoming trip to Japan. We will be searching for those shadows and a glimpse of Austerlitz.