Day 7

From Ambros’s diary: “A day out of time.” And later: “Are we no longer part of time?” It’s time travel for Cosmos and Ambros, and for Sebald, reading the diary, and for us reading The Emigrants.

The lostness in time reminds me again of Maxwell—memory is dangerous
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/09/magazine/nearing-90.html

Again one has to wonder if these beautiful passages are straight transcription from the diary or fictionalized, stylized, at all. (The photocopied pages are illegible to me; German speakers, can you make anything out?)

This embedded tale of Ambros and Cosmo’s journey is very dreamlike, or play-like, as in theater, everything condensed on a stage, like the schooners that pass by so close you could touch them.

We are suddenly immersed in their world; the agenda opens and we enter it like a magic storybook. And we never quite leave it; Sebald doesn’t quite close the parenthesis, ending on A’s words, not his own.