44
" We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us: the fallen drummer boy, the infantryman shown in the act of stabbing another, the horse’s eye starting from its socket, the invulnerable Emperor surrounded by his generals, a moment frozen still amidst the turmoil of battle. Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered. "
― W.G. Sebald , Austerlitz
47
" Δεν νομίζω ότι καταλαβαίνουμε τους νόμους, είπε ο Άουστερλιτς, τους οποίους ακολουθεί η επιστροφή του παρελθόντος, ωστόσο έχω όλο και περισσότερο την εντύπωση ότι ο χρόνος δεν υπάρχει, υπάρχουν μόνο διάφοροι χώροι, κλεισμένοι ο ένας μέσα στον άλλο σύμφωνα με μια ανώτερη στερεομετρία, και ανάμεσά τους κυκλοφορούν οι ζωντανοί και οι νεκροί αναλόγως με τα κέφια τους, και όσο το σκέφτομαι τόσο περισσότερο πιστεύω ότι εμείς που ζούμε ακόμη είμαστε στα μάτια των νεκρών όντα μη πραγματικά, ορατά μόνο υπό συγκεκριμένες προϋποθέσεις, ανάλογα με το φωτισμό και τις ατμοσφαιρικές συνθήκες. "
― W.G. Sebald , Austerlitz
48
" The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because the chaff in them disintegrated over the years, shrunken... as if they were the mortal frames of those who lay there in that darkness. "
― W.G. Sebald , Austerlitz
49
" Hilary could talk for hours about the second of December 1805, but nonetheless it was his opinion that he had to cut his accounts far too short, because, as he several times told us, it would take an endless length of time to describe the events of such a day properly, in some inconceivably complex form recording who had perished, who survived, and exactly where and how, or simply saying what the battlefield was lie at nightfall, with the screams and groans of the wounded and dying. In the end all anyone could ever do was sum up the unknown factors in the ridiculous phrase, "The fortunes of the battle swayed this way and that," or some similarly feeble and useless cliché. All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us: the fallen drummer by, the infantry man shown in the act of stabbing another, the horse's eye starting from its socket, the invulnerable Emperor surrounded by his generals, a moment frozen still amidst the turmoil of battle. Our concern with history, so Hilary's thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered. "
― W.G. Sebald , Austerlitz