APS TOGETHER
Day 1
Dr. Henry Selwyn
June 10, 2021 by Elisa Gabbert
“And I recalled the château in the Charente that I had once visited from Angoulême.” A very Sebaldian sentence! For Sebald, seeing begets memory; his walks, travels, & reading are all ways of looking, thus ways of cultivating encounters with memory.
Sebald once said “The older you get the more the passage of time between your present age and your childhood or youth begins to shrink somehow.” We see this in Selwyn’s story, the *closeness* of Naegeli, the way the sharp images of Lithuania return.
It’s as though aging involves a reversal of time as well as a racing forward. (I think of William Maxwell: “I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living”—for Sebald’s characters memories can be both treasured and traumatic)
