Tag: German Literature

W.G. Sebald’s leftovers – Campo Santo

As a reader, W.G. Sebald seems to have loved what is marginal and passed over. It only seems fair then, that after his death in a road accident in late 2001 we should be able to peruse his own marginal works and see what light they throw upon his major ones. Campo Santo is a collection of essays and prose pieces, of which the latter are far more interesting than the former. Snarky readers who know Sebald already may ask what the difference between an essay and “prose” is for Sebald, given that his “fiction” is already strangely essayistic and impressionistic, akin to very wise travelogues. The answer that comes out here is that in the prose the narrator is in the world, instead of merely contemplating it. In other words, he has legs.

Composed between The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, and which may had Sebald lived longer have come together as another book close to the former in approach, but which instead bob like buoys, disconnected and out at sea, the four prose pieces set in Corsica are the best part of Campo Santo. I read them not only because I now love Sebald, but also because I wanted to see whether perhaps in these pieces the carefully constructed machinery underlying his novels might be more visible. Sebald is one of those writers whose prose seems deceptively simple, thoughtless even, and it was only with equal care and attention that I could shake that impression when I first read him.

Sebald is all about mood. He describes a world we recognise as our own while somehow making it sinister, unnerving, uncanny and tinted with melancholy. “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” is a case in point. This, the first of the prose pieces, begins with the kind of sentence that makes you do a double take, so far from Sebald’s towering reputation does it seem:

In September last year, during a two-week holiday on the island of Corsica, I took a blue bus one day down the west coast to Ajaccio to spend a little time looking around the town, of which I knew nothing except that it was the birthplace of the Emperor Napoleon.

Certainly, there’s a sense of potential mystery – what will this town hold – but the main word I’d use to describe this sentence is “banal”. I could write it or its like. Here you go:

“In the beginning of May, taking advantage of the generous German public holidays that month and feeling a certain unease at the thought of another weekend spent at my new home in the Ruhr region, I took two trains and a ferry north to the island of Norderney, of which I knew nothing other than that it was where the poet Heine had composed his cycle of prose and poems “Die Nordsee”.”

If we hoped that the “something more” would come at once from Sebald, we are disappointed by the information in the subsequent sentence that it “it was a beautiful, sunlit day”, and a description of the palms swaying. Our first sense of something possibly being off is “a snow-white cruise ship” which looks “like a great iceberg”. Here, at last, do we have something out of place – an iceberg in Corsica. It’s not startling by any stretch, but it is odd enough that we might notice the image half-consciously. “Dark, tunnel-like entrances” to houses, the houses themselves like “citadels”, give further images that, especially through their contrast with the charming day, serve that Sebaldian unease.

Sebald works his moods upon us less by shock than by a gradual accumulation of things half-noticed, unimportant in themselves but which by contrast with a safe or sanitised version of reality, the one we ourselves normally perceive, send us off-kilter. Within “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” we have women who seem to look like Napoleon, another one who looks dead while she sits in her chair, and a certain absence of people generally, an emptiness and darkness to contrast with the light, colour, and babble we normally associate with travel.

Unease also comes from the narrator himself, whose voice is decidedly slippery. He starts talking about an image of Napoleon, describing his situation and even his emotions, only to begin the next paragraph with a lurch – “Or so at least we might conclude from an article in Corse-Matin published on the day of my visit”. What we had trusted to be his voice was only his mediation.

We jump from normality to the strange, from voice to voice, but also from time to time. Within this piece alone we go from the present to Kafka in 1911, to Flaubert visiting the same museum as the narrator, to “Mary and Joseph”, and of course to Napoleon himself. If Sebald’s narrators do not live horizontally, in the sense that they struggle to connect to humans around them, they do however live vertically through time, endlessly connecting to past figures and ideas as intimates and friends, or at least frames of reference. This, too, is hardly typical, and encourages the reader to see the world the same way.

Once we are seeing as Sebald did, he can start encouraging us also to share a more specific view, beyond just unease and scepticism of his sources – his pessimism. “The unfathomable misfortune of life” is how he names it here, but other similar phrases are scattered throughout, not so often as to be overwhelming yet unmissably there. One way this is justified is through violence, overt in places, but more often bubbling.

At the end of the first prose piece, a bomb goes off – it is Corsica after all. The second piece talks about burial practices, but also the banditry of Corsica. The third details the devastating effects of hunting and logging on the original ecosystems of the island, and local inhabitants’ inability to connect the consequences to their own actions. Such violence is blatant. Once we start thinking in terms of violence we are able to pick up its more subtle traces, such as in the manias affecting various figures (including at times the narrator himself). Or even, in a description like this:

Before leaving the museum I went down to the basement, where there is a collection of Napoleonic mementos and devotional items on display. It includes objects adorned with the head and initials of Napoleon—letter openers, seals, penknives, and boxes for tobacco and snuff—miniatures of the entire clan and most of their descendants, silhouettes and biscuit medallions, an ostrich egg painted with an Egyptian scene, brightly colored faïence plates, porcelain cups, plaster busts, alabaster figures, a bronze of Bonaparte mounted on a dromedary, and also, beneath a glass dome almost as tall as a man, a moth-eaten uniform tunic cut like a tailcoat, edged with red braid and bearing twelve brass buttons: l’habit d’un colonel des Chasseurs de la Garde, que porta Napoléon Ier (The uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs de la Garde, worn by Napoleon I).

Sebald’s reading, his mood, his drifting gaze, draw us into a way of looking where we cannot read this description of a typical museum’s clutter without seeing in it a certain horror. How did an ostrich egg reach Corsica? Certainly, we might innocently say trade, but in the context of Napoleon it’s much easier, and probably more correct, to say imperialism. Perhaps the “Egyptian scene” is ancient, rather than Napoleonic – it’s much harder to say the same about Napoleon riding a camel. The pointless military adventure to Egypt is not mentioned, but a knowing reader cannot but think of it. The colonel’s uniform is more explicitly related to violence, but like all the others it is something apparently innocuous which, chosen and placed alongside the others in this paragraph, becomes transparent so that we see the blood behind it.

Such a paragraph, such a working of associations, perhaps exemplifies Sebald’s project. Indeed, in one of Campo Santo’s essays there is a telling remark on “my method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life.” That, ultimately, is how Sebald’s prose works. Every comment, or rather cut, whether deep or shallow, obvious or subtle, works to advance his world upon us. And since that prose seems to be both factual, with the vast erudition implied by its author, while also being highly authentic, for here the narrator is in the world and experiencing and sharing it with us, the whole book seems silky and very seductive.

Yet still, once we read the other essays of Campo Santo we might find a certain tension, should we return to the prose pieces. Sebald praises this objective, reporter-like style, saying “the ideal of truth contained in the form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreversible foundation of all literary effort” precisely because it prevents the “human faculty of suppressing any memories that might in some way be an obstacle to the continuance of life”. However, once we see the work that goes into constructing this memory-preserving prose, it’s hard to see it as anything objective anymore. If we still see the narrator as a charming guide to the world, now we see Sebald himself, furiously stabbing at his stone – what we have here is rather extremely subjective, but well masked. And what do we make of the fact that the narrator, though as obsessed with memory as the man who wrote him, remains as silent as the latter on his own past and personal life?

The excitement of Sebald is that he teaches us how to read and look anew upon the world, finding the violence and horror of history behind the slightest of objects. We come away with a greater sense of memory, its passage and the challenges of its conservation. Inevitably though, we must turn that same critical eye back towards the man who made the prose. How far can we trust a man who has such knowledge, yet is so little of the earth itself? We like mysteries, and Sebald himself provides them in his work and also in his person. The recent, in literary terms, scandals (for example here and here) over the biography of Sebald written by Carole Angier and its revelations concerning where Sebald blurred the lines between truth and fiction suggest that these mysteries are unlikely to disappear any time soon.

Peter Handke – The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which I read in the original German, is not a book that brought me much pleasure. It is probably the best-known work by the Austrian author Peter Handke, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. Thankfully, it is quite short. I covered my copy with annotations, but with me, that is not always the sign of a good book. In fact, I was quite convinced the novel was a complete waste of time and energy until somewhere around the halfway mark when I began to perceive some actual sense in it and dutifully upgraded it to merely a book I will be glad both to have read and never to have to read again.

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is a novel about Bloch, a former goalkeeper who loses his job, murders a random woman, and then loses his mind, though possibly not in that order. The murder happens early on and after it, Bloch leaves town and spends time loafing about near the Austrian border. He gets into fights and flirts with various women, and he goes on walks and goes mad while looking at things. This is all that happens. From such nothingness, it is for us as readers to work out why the book has gathered the reputation of a literary masterwork. As much as I want to complain, I will try to turn my complaints into strengths for the book.

The way I found to appreciate this book was to consider it as part of the rather rich tradition of German literary works dealing with madness, such as Büchner’s “Lenz”, Hoffmann’s “Sandman”, and Heym’s “The Madman”. As a theme, madness is a rich one because it naturally turns itself around to raise questions about who is actually mad – Bloch, us, or society. At the same time, the particular form of Bloch’s madness, which so often seems to relate to perception and speech, connects The Goalie’s Anxiety… to the language crisis affecting German letters at the beginning of the 20th century, where Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler were only some of the big names that tried to consider our ability to represent anything at all with words.

Translations are my own.

Language of Experience

In a way, reading in another language gives you a sort of madness akin to the one afflicting Bloch. Much more so even than when we closely read on our own, we notice thingswhen we have to trudge through a foreign tongue. Words and phrases that repeat strike us, and odd formulations strike us too. From the beginning, The Goalie’s Anxiety… strikes us with its numbness. The very first word in German is “dem” – the dative, telling us that something is happening to Bloch, rather than the other way around. That something is his firing.

The passive voice we tend to associate with passivity and numbness, and that is the dominant note of the book. The language is simple, and the sentences are short. Handke’s narrator typically refers to characters with their roles, not their names. Even Bloch’s ex-wife and child are deprived of the emotional significance that a name would give them. Most of the dialogue is reported, rather than given directly so that it too is numb. When Bloch calls a woman, he has to talk for some time “until she knew who he was.”

This numbness is Bloch’s world. Sometimes he stretches out to play an active role, as when he commits murder, but mostly things happen to him, like random fights and his anxiety in the city. He reads a lot of newspapers but there’s no real sense that he takes anything in. It seems compulsive more than anything. But newspapers themselves, like the cinema that plays an important role, are sites where we are passive receivers rather than active agents. A newspaper tells you, in essence, that something was happening in the world, but you weren’t involved. Just as a film shows action you also can only see as a spectator.

This general numbness is what makes the book hard to read. There are paragraphs, but nothing like white space for pauses or chapters. This has, again, a levelling effect. Everything that happens, from murder to looking at a field, is equally important – or, we might better conclude, equally unimportant. It also leads to a certain perception of determinism because there are no breaks to the logic. One thing just follows on from the other, except for the “plötzlich” (“suddenly”) that begins the paragraph with the murder. In other words, the way the story comes to us makes us numb and feel our own powerlessness.

Bloch’s Madness

We never really see into Bloch’s mind, only as far as his perceptions of things. Unlike Arthur Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else”, where mental collapse is seen from within, here madness is seen almost from without – “Everything he saw disturbed him”. We learn, at other times, how things disturbed him. But the language is thoroughly unemotive. “Bloch was” either “excited”, or “not at peace”, or “disturbed” – this is a typical and repeated sentence. He does not have an inner world, at least not one that is revealed. Neither firing nor murder actually results in any feeling that we can see.

Instead, our understanding of Bloch comes from the surface, both from his actions and perceptions. The least interesting thing is that he struggles with any kind of commitment or acknowledgement of others’ existence – he is numb to the idea of it. He has no real friends; his marriage has collapsed; he organises meetings with women and then leaves the bar with another person before the original person arrives; he casually murders another woman after a night together.

More interesting, though is his perception of things. Martin Swales’ comment on Büchner’s “Lenz”, that it is the tale of “a mind already unhinged, in the sense that there is no coherent and sustaining relationship to the world”, is perfectly apt here. In that novella, there is no violence, but there is the same problem – a man walking about trying to make sense of things and failing utterly. (“Lenz”, about a poet who went mad, is more enjoyable to read for Büchner’s beautiful language, which shows that poetic mind at work.)

Bloch’s problems circle around sensory problems and odd fixations, but these specific problems change. At one point, he notices persistence – of urine on a market wall, of shells he was chewing the day before. At another, he becomes obsessed with asking the price of objects. At still another, he wants to find something that has been lost and refuses to believe that someone else has found it when he is told, as if he wants to be some kind of hero.

What links these oddities and all the others? Perhaps the key one to me is the idea of control. In the numbness of Bloch’s world, fixations – like murder – are a way of trying to impart a framework and meaning and personal presence onto things. They are a reaction to individual powerlessness. We read the word “wehr” (“defence”) more than a few times here in the context of Bloch’s attempts to survive life. He is actually trying to find some way of holding on to his grip on things, even if that way looks even more mad than what came before it to us.

Words, words, words.

Which brings us to the language problem. Ultimately, stories like The Goalie’s Anxiety… are made of words. So, madness must come to us in words. Bloch’s final collapse comes to us as a “Wortspielkrankeit”, a “problem of language games” or “punning”. He stops finding any meaning in language. He hears a woman scream and thinks it has no meaning, so he ignores it. He tries to tell a story but finds he needs to explain the meaning of every single word before he can use it, so he is unable to tell the story at all. Things swerve rapidly into an overabundance of meaning, however, when Bloch becomes paranoid and convinced that everything is a code only he can read if only he can see behind the language. Still, words are failing him – giving him too much, or altogether too little.

In Austria, at the beginning of the 20th century, something similar was happening. Language had been exhausted by realism, and poets like Rilke, Trakl, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal sought to recover the meaning of words like “spirit” from simple definitions that killed their significance. There was both a huge sense of hidden meaning, with Freud gaining popularity and showing hidden mental worlds even we could not access, and a striving to find meaning in the desperately desolate world left by god-killing thinkers like Max Weber and Nietzsche. Sometimes the struggle was too much. Hofmannsthal gave up on poetry with the fictional “Letter of Lord Chandos”, which shares much with Bloch’s own problem.

In that work, the fictional Lord struggles with the fact that he has “totally lost the ability to put anything coherent together in word or thought.” He has only a personal language, uncommunicable. “Words… break apart in my mouth like rotting mushrooms”. This is what Bloch has too. He stops being able to communicate, so he just becomes more and more isolated from others while his internal language grows stranger and stranger. He is left adrift in a world he cannot find words for, but nobody cares.  

Whose madness? Film and Society

The “Letter of Lord Chandos” is a letter, written by one man. The Goalie’s Anxiety… puts the same kind of madness into a social setting. How does that change our understanding of that madness? For one, we see that it goes beyond just Bloch. Near the end of the book he talks to a village schoolmaster who reveals that nearly all the children there are unable to create full sentences. If that is the case, then the problem is not just Bloch’s. We know this already, though. Bloch is subject to random violence himself, and on the streets, he greets people who don’t return that greeting. The world itself is numb and cruel. If it is so, then the same solutions – conspiracist thinking, odd fixations, and finally murder – may appear to others too. It’s not just noblemen who get word-sick.

Then there is the cinema, a modern intrusion Hofmannsthal did not have to worry about. Like the newspapers that Bloch is constantly reading, cinema runs through the book – the woman he kills works at one, and Bloch regularly compares things in real life with things he has seen in films. The significance of cinema, it seems to me, is twofold. I have already mentioned how it numbs the world by making it seem like life is elsewhere. For example, Bloch reads about the police hunting him in the paper, but he does not react to it – because it does not feel real, it feels like it is happening somewhere else. But then, films also represent reality without being a reality. They create a space for us to lose our sense that the world we see is the real world, and in that space Bloch wanders, unable to see sense.

Conclusion

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is thus a novel of madness and the breakdown of language, rather than just a boring story about a man who commits a murder and then mooches around. It sits in a tradition of such works in German literature and contributes to it by having a perspective – external and sensory rather than stream-of-consciousness as in Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else” – and a focus – language collapse as social rather than purely individual, as in Büchner’s “Lenz” – which sets it apart from other works. It is a strange little novel.

But reading it brought me no joy, and analysing it, now that I don’t pay professors to read that analysis and say nice things about it, was not very joyous either. If our world is as numb and miserable as Bloch’s, why read about it? As for Bloch himself, the perspective choice means that even if he were charming (Humbert Humbert was dead wrong when he said “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”), we would hardly know it. Else is likeable – I feel sad when she goes nuts. Bloch was an empty, violent man from the beginning. His only character development consists of actually losing his mind.

So, interesting, but a tale that’s hard to recommend. “Lenz” is much shorter and more beautiful, “Else” much more emotionally impactful, and “Lord Chandos” more likely to come to mind when you try to live and say things in this world of ours. Handke kicks the ball, but it hits the post.

The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald

We hear occasionally of writer’s writers, but surely W. G. Sebald is the writer who most deserves the title of the professor’s writer. There was not a lecturer in all the German department at university who was not constantly in rapture over the fellow, which is perhaps a little ironic given that the kind of essays Sebald writes in his fiction would receive very low marks were they ever handed in to a supervisor. Sebald is a magical writer because he is entirely sui generis. His fiction, so far as I can make out, with Austerlitz and The Emigrants and a few of his essays under my belt, consists entirely of slightly befuddled narrators wandering about and reading inscriptions, letters, journals, architecture, and other remnants of the past out of a malaise they cannot quite give a name to.

Where in essays we are told to write arguments that are clear and precise, where in fiction we are told to show, rather than tell, Sebald does the opposite with his storytelling. Yet is it not a little curious that precisely this kind of obstruction in prose produces works which, when an intellect is applied to them like a knife to a whetstone, give that intellect the highest of pleasures? The joy of Sebald consists of being led from place to place, from thought to thought, from figure to figure, and being dimly aware of the significance of it all. There is a pattern, a web of connection, spreading across the words on the page – we just cannot see it all. Like those other extremely visceral writers (Borges, Mann), we feel a little stupid when we read him. But as with those writers, what little we do understand leaves us elated, proud, and wiser.

The Rings of Saturn is about a walking tour of Suffolk in England. Structurally, it has something in common with Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, in that its ostensible travel through the English countryside pales beside the distances travelled in the mind. But where Ishiguro’s story is about Stevens’s personal history, Sebald’s novel is more general. Throughout its ten chapters we encounter many individuals and delve into many real pasts, but the narrator is always a spectator, a witness. His heart and his story is always closed, so we are left to draw the connections between, and the emotional significance of, what he relates entirely by ourselves.

What is told concerns the more melancholy side of the world we are but brief guests in: death, decay, destruction. Countless dying towns and discarded mansions provide the narrator ample opportunities to reflect upon everything from the opium wars to the consequences of Thatcherism and EU farming policy, from the Troubles to the French Revolution. Each place and sight sweeps the narrator into the past. As a writer, Sebald has a strange familial linkage to those adventure and ghost narratives involving material stumbled upon by outsiders. In considering the past he uses among others letters, memoirs, conversations, and old educational films. Taken together, they add a documentary precision to the story. It is one of those reasons why we can think of Sebald as a supremely realistic writer. It helps that The Rings of Saturn is one of those strange books that is neither fiction nor memoir, but somewhere in between.

This style is extremely distinctive, hence also easily parodied. In each chapter we have some physical movement by the narrator, followed by the reflections on a place, which lead to a reflection on the people who lived there. People encountered, in body or spirit, include Joseph Conrad, Sir Thomas Browne, Chateaubriand, a Chinese Empress, various Austrian monarchs, and many others. We read about the decay of British seaside towns, the collapse into the sea of the medieval village of Dunwich, the slow overgrowth of a still-inhabited Irish manor house. What separates Sebald’s narrator’s musings from that of the average educated individual at some prestige literary magazine is Sebald’s magnificently broad erudition and the alarming ease with which he shifts from topic to topic. The prose is so smooth you have to slow yourself down or you might miss the brutality of almost everything Sebald actually narrates.

For it is with a certain resignation that Sebald compasses human existence with his vision. Human nature is not on some glorious ramp of improvement. Destruction seems to be in our very veins, we feel as we read descriptions of the vast burnings of old-growth forest in England by its first settlers and then thousands of years later, of Chinese palaces by British soldiers during the Opium Wars. We seem, as a species, determined to exploit and destroy. The very image of our mastery for Sebald is the light we send across the darkened sky, but it is for him a thing more of disquiet than of joy. At one point he notes a vision of an historical village, still lit late at night by the workers forced to weave the silk that contributed to the beginnings of Great Britain’s economic hegemony. We create light, through fires, fuelled by things we destroy – from forests to the buildings annihilated in the Allied firebombing campaign in World War II.

The first chapter states something that might seem ridiculous, I think, to the average Brit – that as Sebald’s narrator began his walk he had been attacked with “the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.” Yet The Rings of Saturn is a document of so many of these horrors that I, who confess to finding the landscape of England for the most part forgettable and uninspiring, now think I shall never be able to look at it in quite the same way. We may dismissively say that Sebald’s narrator demonstrates the dangers of education, in revealing to us too much. But really what he does is explore the networks of complicity and guilt that bind us all to the earth and which can sometimes be easily missed.

Now, naturally, we are wiser to the worst excesses of our past. At the National Portrait Gallery, where I was yesterday, I heard a small boy ask his mother whether one of the people on the wall was “like Colston”. This struck me, on balance, as progress. That the wealth behind many manor houses came from exploitative practices is not likely to come as news to many, but perhaps the range of practices is. We see the decline of the herring through overfishing, the decline of fishing as a result of that, and then the decline of the countryside as the gentry became obsessed with hunting to the detriment of all else. We see, all told, humanity overstepping limits it did not know or else refused to recognise, and being crushed by an indifferent nature, in the form of fire and of storm, the latter of which destroyed the great village of Dunwich, casting it into the sea.

The sea, appropriately for a walking tour of Suffolk, is probably the central image in The Rings of Saturn. It reflects the cyclical view of history that Sebald presents here, where destruction follows creation, ebb follows flow. For if this book were merely a chronicle of human failings, it would be perhaps too bleak to read. Instead, it is chequered with human successes, some of them well worthy of recollection. We have a man recreating the temple of Jerusalem in miniature, we have the memories of the towns and houses before they fell into their present states, we have good men like Roger Casement, who reported on colonial atrocities and fought for Irish independence, and we have so many achievements of the mind – in Browne, in Conrad, in Swinburne, in Edward Fitzgerald.

Reading a book like The Rings of Saturn is something like a game, more so than even other serious literary works which at least have a story for us to follow. Here we are constantly on the lookout for connections, for patterns in this grand tapestry of historical tragedy. I wrote little diagrams at the end of some of the chapters, with lines connecting the topics. A train was connected to Dunwich and China, which were both in turn connected, albeit separately, to the poet Swinburne. The educational film on herring in chapter III led Sebald also to the documentation of silkworm cultivation in the Third Reich which ends the final chapter. Thomas Browne pops up here and there, as does Borges’ mysterious story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Throughout history, we see the destructive power of the sea and of fire, and a constant disregard for proper burial. Browne was reburied, as was Sir Roger Casement.

Reading Sebald is always an experience. On the one hand, the pleasure of finding these connections, of joining him in the recovery of the past, is great. On the other, there’s something false about the narrator’s reticence. He describes, but his emotions are always kept locked away. This refusal to provide answers might make the work intellectually rewarding, but it also makes the work emotionally ambiguous. Why not condemn what is worthy of it, why not say explicitly what you wish to say? I feel like that sometimes, but there is a counterpoint below which on reflection is probably more valid.

This short article, which says precisely the opposite of what I am saying, is worth glancing at. Sebald is, after all, one of those people who is deeply occupied with the Holocaust, indeed with all holocausts. He knows, we can fairly say, the limits to our expression. After all, it becomes trite after a while to say that war is bad or men are cruel. These are just words, however great the feeling behind them is. And words repeated empty themselves of their own meaning, their own force. Perhaps the effort of drawing the connections between the objects of his novel is precisely what Sebald thinks is the only morally responsible way of engaging with our past, so that when we step back, having finished with our diagrammatic representation of the work, covering our entire wall from floor to ceiling, only then are we able to truly appreciate the sinews of pain and mourning that are the one true and constant keynote in human history.

Yes, no doubt he is right.