Extract

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.

A solitary walker moves along the Suffolk coast, and what begins as a record of landscapes and fatigue becomes an encyclopedic meditation on destruction, silk cultivation, herring fisheries, the Congo, and the orbital decay of everything human beings build. W.G. Sebald published this sui generis work in 1995, weaving history, memoir, and elegy into a form that resembles nothing so much as the melancholy investigations of a mind that cannot stop noticing connections between distant catastrophes. The grainy photographs scattered through the text refuse to illustrate; they haunt. Every chapter circles the same realization: that what we call civilization is a pattern briefly visible in the dust before the wind resumes.