Day 8

Max Ferber’s aestheticization of dust! “The grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved”! Made me think of this Jeremy Gordon essay on dust as “metaphor for the futility of the human experience.”
https://theoutline.com/post/7692/im-upset-dusting-is-a-waste-of-time

There is so much mist and dust in this book. Mist the unreal and ineffable; dust the banal real, the deathly real.

Sebald is so cute with a phrase sometimes: “a little ratcatcher”; “an incomparable stylish apathy.” Endearing little Sebaldisms.

The fresco in the restaurant recalls Cosmo’s mirage in the theater, the one that tipped him over into madness. Recurring images are part of what makes Sebald’s work feel fictive (while still highly nonfictive, as in nonfictionlike, for a novel!).