On His Bed and No Longer Among the Living

82 1. R eading and writing are much the same activity: words employed to carry some part of the world or the mind across the divide that separates the two. When I want to write, I read, and when I want to read, I write, so I have been reading The Rings of Saturn, by W. G. Sebald. Reading that book and writing this piece have been extremely difficult. Sebald’s novel is a kind of travelogue that follows a journey through English towns, recounting the events and thoughts that preoccupy the traveler. The boundaries between fact and fiction are impossible to discern. The book is illustrated throughout with photographs, which seem to give credence to the factual basis of the narrative, though the book is called a work of fiction, and the photographs only vaguely correspond to the text. The principal thread is the passage of time: things lost, passed away, diminutively regained and reimagined—the Empress Dowager, the Irish Civil War, a deceased friend, a scale model of the temple of Jerusalem. Perhaps, in telling his story, Sebald does not participate in it. Perhaps the narrator is Sebald, perhaps not. Perhaps what moves me most about the book is the way in which Sebald is unafraid to take part in his story, to tell only his version of certain events. Though perhaps I’m drawn most to his detachment. Everything in Sebald’s vision finds a relation to everything else, no matter how seemingly distant ideas, objects, people, and memories may be. Disparate voices are all one. Sebald’s voice is rare: the voice of a calm mourner, one always accepting the steady slipping away of everything it can and can’t articulate. Sebald seems to be the observer, rather than the writer, of his story. What more could a mourner want than the cool capacity to simply watch without longing? More than the return of all that was lost—that is impossible—the bereaved wish to observe loss happening to them. In life, loss happens too fast to see—it’s ON HIS BED AND NO LONGER AMONG THE LIVING CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER 83 Teicher over before one can know it began; the bereaved want to watch loss defining them. ~ What is a story? Is it different from the narrative made by stringing together a series of memories? Is it the voice of the teller that unifies the story? If I am the author of my story, is this my voice, because it is the voice that speaks the story? To what extent do I choose to take part in the events I am about to recount? Do I choose to tell them, or do I tell them because they are all that is available to me and I want to say something, to bring something into being and so define myself? My mother died when I was fourteen; she exists now in the fact of my making. Is my mother a story? Is she, as Sebald says, a treasure house that existed purely in his head and to which there is no access except through the letters on the page? Was she always, even before I read that line? ~ My mother is alive again. She has returned from death in a hospital , under a doctor’s care. We have been told that she is very fragile, that we should expect another death soon. We set her up in the house. Sometimes it is only my father and I. Sometimes my stepmother, stepbrother, and stepsister are there too, caring for my mother, though they did not know her. Sometimes we take her around with us in a car and worry. I am happy. She is alive again, with me. I have longed for her, am always longing. But I know she will be gone again soon and will not come back. I feel a special, precious sadness. I will lose her again, but this time I know I will lose her. Love is what ties someone to something that goes away. I wake homesick and happy. ~ But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which...