We left from here for Marienbad only last Summer. And now—where will we be going now?

– W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck @ Indiebound

Quotes

The customs of man are like footholds carved into inhumanity, she thinks, something a person who’s been shipwrecked can clutch at to pull himself up, and nothing more. How much better it would be, she thinks, if the world were ruled by chance and not a God.

It was a matter of honesty, such honesty as left each individual lying there as if naked before the other. But who would this other be? And what is the deepest layer one can lay bare? In the end, does coming clean mean scraping the very flesh from your bones?

And then, what are bones?

As she falls, she knows that she is falling, she knows that the railing is already too far away to reach with her left hand (much less the right), and suddenly she remembers the railing on the stairs in Vienna and how huge the eagle at the end of the banister had looked to her as a girl, how the stairwell always smelled of whitewash and dust, all of this occurs to her as she falls, as if memory, too, were a form of falling, …How do you recognize your final moment? Is it that more thoughts can be thought in it than any other? What is this abyss gaping open before her and swallowing up all the thoughts a person can think, and where was it before? If she tumbles out of life, what will happen to her son?

Somewhere he’d once learned or read that New York was built on stone, perhaps this is why he wants to stay here, for on rocky ground he can be quite sure of not following in anyone’s footsteps

What might please his mother? His mother who didn’t want to take anything when she moved to the rest home but the yellow wall hanging with its Uzbek sun, …He wouldn’t mind acquiring this set of Goethe’s writings for his own use the final authorized edition, surprisingly complete with all its volumes-that no doubt costs less here than at an antiquarian bookshop. At random he pulls out Volume 9, the spine of which is a bit scraped, and leafs through it; he reads “Farewell,”…