A Most Unfortunate Way

Earlier in the Fall I’d dined with my best friend’s older son in Beijing.  He was joining my pal and his girlfriend on a visit through town and we talked a lot that night about literature.  He’d recently graduated with a degree in literature from Oberlin and we had many good titles to swap.  He’d done his thesis on W. G. Sebald, about whom I knew nothing.  Today I made my way through his fourth work: “The Rings of Saturn.”

Disarmingly approachable, we join the author on a walking tour of the Suffolk seaboard in East Anglia.  Thoughts meander from the east of England to bombing raids into Germany and battlefields in France and, much to my liking the war-torn fabric of mid nineteenth century, Qing China during the Taiping Rebellion.  It struck me, as I suppose it did countless others who read his work that he thinks the way I do.  And he writes the way I wish I might.

Discussed in his day as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, the German author died not far from Suffolk in another east Anglian town of Norwich.  He was driving with his daughter there in 2001 and suffered from an aneurism and crashed his car and died at the age of 57.  His daughter survived the crash.  That seems a most unfortunate way to go, having a critical health condition of any sort, behind the wheel.  I didn’t mean to, but I kept envisioning his death, as I drove to the market. 

Later on, my bike ride, where one might perhaps survive such a mishap, I was coming back from the south.  As we know every day is a little bit longer now and though it was just about dark at 5:00PM, I continued along to the turning point and headed back in increasing darkness.  I bought a light for my bike, though I confess, I haven’t quite figured out how to make it work. Someone approached me, biking along with a light on that was very bright and distracting.  I was glad when he passed.  And then, not far from home I felt, as much as saw a large shape swoop ten feet above me.   The bird had a large bulk and a great black wingspan and I originally assumed it was a large raven but when I turned to look at the shadow settle in the trees I saw a Great Horned Owl and considered myself lucky that I was too big a mammal to be carried away by the great predator. 

Wednesday, 01/15/20