Not Sebald

"I sat at a table near the open terrace door, my papers and notes spread out around me, drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order." --W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

What a perfect description of what I try to do every time I sit down to write. But why is Sebald so much better at it? Just look at the smug bastard.


After that sentence he's able to segue as smooth as a Spanish midfielder from checking out an innkeeper in a mirror to a discussion of provincial Italian theatre to a remembrance of a Chinese optician named Susi Ahoi who keeps making everything go out of focus and then back in, now as then.