saturnine sentience : starting Sebald
...restarting — for I'd already cracked open W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn some time last summer, and put it down after the first several pages as, for some reason, it didn't feel quite right just then.
I'm still not sure what that sensation or notion was, or why it alit upon me on beginning the work of a writer I had long wondered about and whose name and writings had impinged on my consciousness in various unusual and disparate ways, over a couple of decades. But who I hadn't bothered to finally read, until this year. Again, for some reason.
And so here we are, in the waning days of this year (for which I have no idea where it went! ::chuckle::) and in the waning daylight hours of this day. And now, the time and the moment to walk along with this book, and this protean writer, feels just so.
This time, on these cold and rainy days and months, the book has taken hold of my imagination; and I'm now enraptured with the strange and yet endearing flow of the narrative, as historical characters arrive... only to vanish in the space of a few paragraphs but who nevertheless stay fixed in the reader's imagination like a particularly lucid dream.
I am looking forward to walking with Sebald for the indefinite, unspecified, time ahead.