Lovely to get a namecheck for Climbers in the comments here. I agree with “nickum” on James Salter: Solo Faces is such a sharp novel. I’d add “any essay by Jim Perrin” to the list, too; & also anything by John Krakauer. This is not to mention Robert McFarlane.
Re-reading: TM Wright, A Manhattan Ghost Story. The Telos edition has an interesting introduction. Here’s Wright on the dead (to add to WG Sebald on the dead)–
“.. you are allowed to know them and to see them, but not well, not at all well, only as well as you see the living.”
That’s such a fabulous quote. Really fabulous. Aside from what it tells about how well we can know the living (not well, not at all well) I just love the formal strucure of its near self-cancellation/reversal. I’ve been writing death, ghosts, Klaus Kinski and butterfly’s at my Notebook lately so I guess this hit a nerve. What’s the Sebald on death – a general tendency or is there a specific quote I can obsess over? Very nice review of The Private Patient by the way, had me laughing out loud.
can i try? is it:
[...] 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.
(from Austerlitz)
sorry to intrude, just read the passage last night.
also, and apologies for being fannish, but: thank you for The Broken World, Mr Etchells, am enjoying it immensely.
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Oh. Thanks Chiles. That’s also great – Austerlitz is one of the few I’ve read from him in fact but this wasn’t in my recall. And thanks for the comment on The Broken World too. I just hopped over to your blog – the Hoban quotes hook up pretty well to some of the stuff I wrote in Broken World concerning glitches. Hope you continue to enjoy the book!
Hi Tim.
That TM Wright quote is just a perfect form-to-content relationship, isn’t it ?
Another dead quote from Austerlitz:
Evan also describes the dead as “only a little taller than the walls round the fields through which they went.”
(Thanks for recommending David Williams’ Skywriting blog by the way: I’ll be enjoying that for some time to come.)
Yeah. Very nice. I like the combination of banality with the dead which all these quotes do in some way, esp the one you just added. I wrote a sentence years back, not sure if I ever used it, about how, in a certain world “scientists had discovered radio broadcasts from the dead. It was nothing special, gardening programmes mostly.”
Skywriting is good stuff. You should meet David sometime.
Thanks very much for mentioning the quote from “A Manhattan Ghost Story” here: I enjoyed the comments immensely.
And thanks, as well, for mentioning “AMGS” in your review of Stephen King’s latest collection in The Guardian.
I have one problem: I can’t find the quote you referenced here in the introduction to the Telos edition of “AMGS,” though I know the quote is mine. I’ll have to keep searching.
T.M. Wright
Hi TM Wright
It’s a real pleasure to hear from you.
The quote–which is, as Tim Etchells says above, fabulous–is actually from the main body of the text. Sorry–my fault for making it seem as if it was from the Telos intro. Too compressed a post.
–MJH