"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. And in fact my
hope was realized, up to a point; for I have seldom felt so
carefree as I did then,
walking for
hours in the day through the thinly populated
countryside, which
stretches inland from the
coast. I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old
superstition that certain ailments of the
spirit and of the
body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the
Dog Star. At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed
sense of
freedom but also with the
paralyzing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the
traces of destruction, reaching far back into the
past, that were evident even in that remote
place. Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. It was then that I began in my
thoughts to
write these
pages."
W.G. Sebald,
Rings of Saturn, Vintage, 2002, 3-4.
