The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald (1995)

Somewhere along the Suffolk coast, a sight as ordinary as a derelict herring fleet or a kitchen-garden gone to ruin sets the narrator of _The Rings of Saturn_ thinking, and the thought never returns to where it began. A walk becomes a descent. From the empty beaches it falls through the Congo atrocities Roger Casement witnessed, the skull of Thomas Browne passed hand to hand, the silkworm cultures that ate whole Chinese forests and then were gone. Photographs interrupt the page, grainy and unexplained, as if memory itself were leaking through. Sebald writes in long, grave, patient sentences that seem to be in no hurry to arrive anywhere, and that is the point: he has trained his attention to receive only what is perishing. Saturn was the planet of melancholy, and its rings are the debris of a body that came apart. To walk beside him is to look at everything you love and feel, without warning, that it is already passing.