Rings of Saturn

W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn is an astonishing book. I think what I might like most about it is the book’s amazing confidence. It intersperses an uneventful walking tour of southeastern Britain with seemingly random remembrances and ponderings on an eclectic range of topics.

While reading the book, everything seems so arbitrary. For God’s sake, he goes on about silkworms for 20 pages! But the more you think about the book, the more you see how virtually everying in it is a rich metaphor. And then you even see how it all starts to link together.

But what’s so impressive is that Sebald seems to not give a damn if you see any of it or not. He just does his thing. Maybe in the entire book there’s two or three sentences meant to nudge you in the right direction, but that’s it. That’s what I mean by the book’s amazing confidence.

Here’s something interesting I encountered while researching this book online. It illustrates what I’m trying to say.

I had recently one of the most astonishing experiences of my reading life. On page 248 in The Rings of Saturn, W. C. Sebald is recounting his interviews with one Thomas Abrams, an English farmer who has been working on a model of the temple of Jerusalem–you know, gluing little bits of wood together–for twenty years, including the painstaking research required for historical accuracy. There are ducks on the farm and at one point Abrams says to Sebald, "I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colors of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind." It is an odd thing to say, but Sebald’s book is a long walk of oddities. I did not remember this passage in particular until later the same day when I was reading the dictionary, where I came upon the meaning of the word speculum: 1) an instrument inserted into a body passage for inspection; 2) an ancient mirror; 3) a medieval compendium of all knowledge; 4) a drawing showing the relative position of all the planets; and 5) a patch of color on the secondary wings of most ducks and some other birds. Did Sebald know that a compendium of all knowledge and the ducks’ plumage were one and the same? Did Abrams? Or was I the only one for whom the duck passage made perfect, original sense? I sat in my chair, shocked. I am not a scholar, but for the imaginative reader there can be discoveries, connections between books, that explode the day and one’s heart and the long years that have led to the moment. I am a writer, and the next step is inevitable: I used what had been revealed to me in my own writing.

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