W.G. Sebald and the Politics of Melancholy

I love to read W.G. Sebald. For several years I'd been on the lookout for a book called The Emigrants by the Swedish author Moberg, but the author's surname had never really stuck in my mind, I just knew about the book.

One day in a bookstore my son pointed out The Emigrants to me, which seemed serendipitous, so I bought it and took it home. Only after getting home did I realise The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald was not the book I'd had on my list all those years.

It turns out that the situation was very serendipitous indeed. Sebald was an amazing writer with a voice all his own, dreamlike and meditative, full of insight. The Emigrants is a story of loss and exile and yet somehow optimistic, or perhaps not; with Sebald it's enjoyably unclear.

I went on to read The Rings of Saturn, which I also enjoyed. The setup for the book is that a man is going to walk around Suffolk for a few days, basically. But it's not about that at all - as the man wanders so does his mind, and the book is basically an endless stream of digressions about any topic that enters his head. He might round a corner and see a church spire, for instance, and then before you know it he's talking about the colonial history of the Congo, which perhaps makes him think of Conrad, and suddenly we're onto the history of the church in Poland, etc etc. He never loses the thread, though. All of the digressions are interesting and insightful and together they all add up to something. Really great author.

The bias of the article is strong, and I appreciate that. I actually despise performative unbiased reviews.

While that bias initially frustrated me, once again comparing some contemporary thing a writer disagrees with to the rise of the Nazis, the underlying topic is actually in line with a lot of my own recent thinking.

I think a disease of the modern mind is the belief in and desire for finality. A belief in the finality of contemporary models of physics, the finality of political systems, the finality of literature analysis. And seeing authoritarianism as an expression of this desire for finality is an interesting take.

It reminds me of "Man's search for meaning" where Frankl reflects on the the meaning of facing suffering with dignity. Or Camus' story of Sisyphus where a man is forced to perform a pointless repetitive task with no conclusion or meaning, and yet Camus argues we must see Sisyphus as happy.

It is interesting how we associate this by comparing it to emotions. Anxiety for Kierkegaard, Nausea for Sartre, Suffering for Frankl (and Buddha) and apparently Melancholy for Sebald. It is also interesting to see the different approaches each have for dealing with it.

Power is "parasitic rather than powerful"... what a beautiful zeitgeist published 81 years earlier.

An excellent example in the article is Trump's desperate attempt at legacy and power... "He let the water flow" is Trump's "the trains run on time." Except Trump and his lackeys are vastly more ignorant and incompetent.