am I real or fiction
in his eyes?
World Kigo Database (W. G. Sebald)
Note: W. G. (Winfried Georg) Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic, highly regarded by literary critics as one of the greatest authors since the Second World War and frequently being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his 2007 interview, Horace Engdahl, former secretary of the Swedish Academy, mentioned that Sebald would have been a worthy laureate. Generally speaking, his novels deal mainly with the issues regarding memory, both personal and collective.
My haiku alludes to the key ideas explored in the following two passages from Sebald’s final novel entitled Austerlitz, known for “the lack of paragraphing, a digressive style, the blending of fact and fiction, and the inclusion of a set of mysterious and evocative photographs, scattered throughout the book:”
"How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper."
"It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision."
