The Rings of Saturn by W.G.Sebald || Suffolk's desolate history,Sebald's bleak mourning
I’ve been reading The Rings of Saturn, with its 106 pages and 11 chapters, for two months now.
At first, W.G. Sebald’s depiction of the nurse made me think it was merely a collection of prose or diary entries, documenting ordinary events and everyday people. Then, out of nowhere, Thomas Browne’s skull appears alongside De anatomische les van Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. And just as abruptly, the narrative shifts back to the reality: “The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us.”
Gradually, I found myself immersed in Sebald’s words, his vivid interpretation of windy weather, threadbare seats, deserted ruins, gloomy backwaters, and a motionless world cloaked in melancholy.
By the time I reached Chapter 2, Fisherman on the Lowestoft Beach, the book had truly captivated me. I became enchanted by its seemingly mundane settings, each infused with layers of history and meaning.
Those lone tents on Lowestoft Beach, facing eastward, feel as though they have turned their backs on the world. Before them lies nothing but emptiness, a boundless void. They seem to be gazing into eternity.
One night , while staying at a coffee bar in Southwold, he noticed a curtain embroidered with the date "the 28th of May 1672". It stirred memories of history--the Dutch fleet appearing offshore from the drifting mists. After recounting the traces of that event, he turned back to the present and began describing the night once more ,quoting Thomas Brown:
"The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn—an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.”
Other tranquil yet haunting places leave a lasting impression on me--vividly the sun- and sea-bleached Eccles Tower of Chapter 6, and the endless, winding paths through Dunwich heath in Chapter 7
*"Dunwich itself was once a thriving hub of trade, enriched by exports of wool and grain and imports of timber, fish, and furs from the north, fine cloth from Holland, and wine from France
Shingle shifted by the sea began to incur on the harbour forcing those whose livelihood relied on it to physically remove sand and stones by hand.Then, in 1286, came the first of many devastating storms which swept away swathes of the town.Forty-two years later, fierce winds and waves destroyed priories and blocked Dunwich harbour, forcing trade further up the coast – 19 years after that, 400 houses, two churches, shops and windmills were swallowed by the sea: Dunwich’s reign as one of Britain’s principal towns had come to an end.
The hideous sight of sea-bleached skeletons exposed in the sandy graveyard. One September day years ago, when the tower of Eccles Church still stood on the dunes, there came a north-easterly gale and a ‘scour’ which swept the sand from the old graveyard, leaving the long outlines of the graves washed clean by the sea. In one lay an almost perfect skeleton embedded in the clay, the hollow-eyed skull gazing up at the limitless sweep of the sky.
If you look out from the cliff-top across the sea towards where the town must once have been, you can sense the immense power of emptiness. Perhaps it was for this reason that Dunwich became a place of pilgrimate for melancholy poets in the Victorian age
Eccles on Sea - absolutely nothing to do there at all except sit on the beach. No facilities whatsoever."*
For the Dunwich Heath : The low, leaden sky; the sickly violet hue of the heath clouding the eye; the silence, which rushed in the ears like the sound of the sea in a shell
Whenever the narrative turns to heath , I can't help but think of Wuthering Heights .
All of the locations and people included in The Rings of Saturn carries a sense of solitude and desolation permeating my soul. W.G.Sebald interwines Suffolk's history with its specific landscapes, weaving an entire lifetime into just a couple of pages .
In those a few pages,he captures a life and history, leaving one to marvel at the transient and trivial aspects of existence, along with the helplessness and even sorrow feelings brought the vastness of time.
In Chapter 5, Sebald vividly portrays the life and exile of Joseph Conrad's parents in Vologda, a desolate, godforsaken place:
*"the houses, even the garishly painted wooden palaces of the provincial grandees, are erected on piles driven into the morass at intervals. Everything round about rots, decays and sinks into the ground. There are only two seasons: the white winter and the green winter. For nine months the ice-cold air sweeps down from the Arctic sea. The thermometer plunges to unbelievable depths and one is surrounded by a limitless darkness. During the green winter it rains week in week out. The mud creeps over the threshold, rigor mortis is temporarily lifted and a few signs of life, in the form of an all-pervasive marasmus, begin to manifest themselves. In the white winter everything is dead, during the green winter everything is dying.
In early April 1865, eighteen months after the departure from Nowofastów, Evelina Korzeniowska died in exile aged thirty-two of the shadows that her tuberculosis had spread through her body, and of the home-sickness that was corroding her soul. Apollo's will to live was also almost extinguished. "*
At the twilight years of Conrad's father ,Apollo was "grieving for his lost wife, for the wasted years, and for his poor and lonely boy"
"It is a book about uprooted destinies," he once said to Konrad, "about individuals cast out and lost, about those eliminated by fate, a book about those who are solitary and shunned."
This chapter also delves into Joseph Conrad’s resolve to become a sea captain, a decision that would take him on a life-altering journey to the Congo. Sebald further recounts Roger Casement’s profound compassion for the Congolese, enslaved under Belgian trading associations, and Casement’s subsequent prosecution for leading Irish republican efforts against the United Kingdom.
Finally in this chapter, Sebald narrates a reflective journey to Waterloo, reimagining the historic battle led by the Duke of Wellington. .
Chapter 8 bears similarities to chapter 5, as both telling the story of prominent historical figures. In this chapter, Sebald takes a Dutch sugar businessman to visit the estate near Bougle, where Edward FitzGerald's grave is located. After the businessman departs, Sebald reflects on the illustrious FitzGerald family—their opulent lifestyle and storied legacy.
"The FitzGeralds were an old Anglo-Norman family and had lived in Ireland for more than six hundred years before Edward FitzGerald's parents decided to settle in the county of Suffolk. The family fortune, amassed over generations through warring feuds with other lords, by ruthless subjection of the local people and by a no less ruthless marriage strategy, was legendary even at a time when the wealth of the topmost social strata was beginning to exceed all that had hitherto been known, and consisted principally, apart from properties in England"
But for Edward FitzGerald ,he detested the family fortune , the gilded furniture, works of art and trophies of travel that adorned his family's estates.After graduating from Cambridge, he retreated to a secluded life in a tiny two-room cottage on the perimeter of the family estate. Like Roger Casement, Edward FitzGerald practiced what Irish refers to as "the English vice." Sebald suggests that Casement’s homosexuality heightened his sensitivity to the exploitation, enslavement, and suffering of others. Edward's eccentricity, I think, may also have stemmed from his sexual identity.
Edward's life was marked by loneliness and emotional withdrawal, particularly after the death of his closest friend, William Browne. Their paths first crossed on a walking tour of Wales when FitzGerald was 23 and Browne just 16. Of Browne, FitzGerald wrote that he “seemed to him like someone he had missed for goodness knew how long.” After Browne’s death, FitzGerald’s retreat from society deepened, and his later years were spent searching for someone who might remind him of his lost friend—his yacht voyages emblematic of this longing. From his childhood, when he was too intimidated by his mother’s grandeur to approach her, to his heartfelt connection with Browne, to his final days dying in a vicar's bed, Sebald masterfully encapsulates Edward’s life in just two or three pages.
Chapter 8 also introduces Mrs. Ashbury, a member of the declining Irish landlord class, whose family witnessed the destruction wrought by the Irish Republican independence movement. This marked the gradual impoverishment of Ireland’s land-owning elite in the decades following the civil war. Her story naturally parallels the narrative in Chapter 6 about the Opium Wars and the decline of Tz’u-hsi’s Qing dynasty. Both Mrs. Ashbury and Tz’u-hsi represent a waning aristocracy, forced to confront the unforeseen collapse of their worlds. For both, life becomes a relentless burden, weighed down by the slow erosion of their power and influence.
"Looking back, she said, she realized that history consists of nothing but misfortune and the troubles that afflict us, so that in all our days on earth we never know one single moment that is genuinely free of fear."
It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder."
literary style
W.G. Sebald’s literary style is unmistakable.Even the Claude or ChatGPT can discern and rephrase in a W.G.Sebald style accurately. By drawing connections between similar circumstances, he seamlessly weaves together different eras, offering observations from his various travels. His focus often revolves around battles, politicians, manor houses, and aristocratic poets and writers, creating a rich tapestry of history and reflection.
As he strolled toward Orford, the barren, desert-like landscape reminded him of the aristocracy’s pheasant hunts, which devastated the local ecosystem. “There (at Sudbourne Hall) were times when six thousand pheasants were gunned down in a single day, not to mention the other fowl, hares, and rabbits.”
"Men of middle-class background who had achieved great wealth through industrial enterprise, wanting to establish a legitimate position in higher society, acquired large country mansions and estates, where they abandoned the utilitarian principles they had always upheld in favour of hunting and shooting,"
From Orford, Sebald transitions to one of the foremost shooting domains: Quilter’s Bawdsey. “The craving for power in men of his kind was at its most acute,” he notes. Suddenly, perhaps because Bawdsey is near Felixstowe, his narrative shifts to Felixstowe’s heyday and its connections with the German Kaiser, ultimately leading to reflections on the First World War
"In the years following the First World War, countless estates were broken up in the same way as Quilter's Bawdsey. The manor houses were either left to fall down or used for other purposes, as boys' boarding schools, approved schools, insane asylums, old people's homes, or reception camps for refugees from the Third Reich."
Sebald also intertwines his dreams into the narrative, using them as a bridge to his reflections. In one instance, he recounts: “Whilst I, though in the dream I was unable to see myself and was thus like a ghost, sat opposite FitzGerald, playing a game of dominoes with him.”
Another hallmark of Sebald’s work is his inclusion of photographs of the people and places he writes about. While these images add a layer of authenticity and context, they also impose a sense of confinement on the reader’s imagination, anchoring it to the visuals he provides.
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submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality
the burning of the frozen substance of life
These dancers, about whom nothing else is known, have long since disappeared, as soundless as shadows, as silent as the heron I saw when I set off once more
scenes of destruction, mutilation, desecration, starvation, conflagration, and freezing cold.
One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by
When at last I reached the beach I was so tired that I lay down and slept till afternoon. I heard the surge of the sea, and, half dreaming, understood every word of Dutch and for the first time in my life believed I had arrived, and was home.
Whenever I am in Southwold, the Sailors' Reading Room is by far my favourite haunt. It is better than anywhere else for reading, writing letters, following one's thoughts, or in the long winter months simply looking out at the stormy sea as it crashes on the promenade
long six-inch guns fired off shells into the unknown African continent, with neither purpose nor aim.
If one obeyed one's instincts, the path would sooner or later diverge further and further from the goal one was aiming to reach.
every foot traveller incurs the suspicion of the locals, especially nowadays, and particularly if he does not fit the image of a local rambler.
Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work
With each step that I took, the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew ever greater and the silence more profound.
epilogue
The chapter that resonates with me most is the recounting of Joseph Conrad's parents' story—their "uprooted destiny" and exile across the vast Russian expanse. It evokes the haunting landscapes and human struggles depicted in And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov and Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
As for Joseph Conrad himself and the colonial themes in his novels, particularly those inspired by his travels to the Congo, they hold less interest for me. My attention gravitates toward what I consider genuinely beautiful. What strikes me about Conrad is not his subject matter but his steadfast resolve and personal revolution.
The desolate scenes of Nowofastów stir a memory of an old convent in Baiwangshan, Beijing. Fortunately, we managed to publish a short video of that decaying structure in Youtube, capturing its forlorn and melancholic aura. This same pervasive melancholy is the defining tone of The Rings of Saturn.
substack,Youtube,WeChat: pamperherself
