According equal status to the living and the dead—after all, they jostled side by side for space in his mind—Sebald would perhaps view his own passing with equanimity. He is spared the labor of writing the next book. For the rest of us, not having that book to look forward to is a blow, a subtracted hope.
I am reminded of Sebald’s account of an experiment that intrigued him. “They put a rat in a cylinder that is full of water and the rat swims around for about a minute until it sees that it can’t get out and then it dies of cardiac arrest,” he told me. A second rat is placed in a similar cylinder, except that this cylinder has a ladder, which enables the rat to climb out. “Then, if you put this rat in another cylinder and don’t offer it a ladder, it will keep swimming until it dies of exhaustion,” he explained. “You’re given something—a holiday to Tenerife or you meet a nice person—and so you carry on, even though it’s quite hopeless. That may tell you everything you need to know.”
He chuckled. Disconsolately, merrily, companionably, bitterly, resignedly, darkly, theatrically, dourly, inconsolably? One is in no position to say.
—The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald (Crossing Boundaries, p. 172)
