PASSAGES

It is late at night.  Raining.  I’m reading.  Vertigo, by W G Sebald.  There is an unnerving passage that demands being read, over and over … .

There is something peculiarly dispiriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain. If no one answers, it is a disappointment of huge significance, quite as if these few random ciphers were a matter of life or death. So what else could I do, when I had put the coins that jingled out of the box back into my pocket, but wander aimlessly around until well into the night. Often, probably because I was so very tired, I believed I saw someone I knew walking ahead of me. Those who appeared in these hallucinations, for that is what they were, were always people I had not thought of for years, or who had long since departed, such as Mathild Seelos or the one-armed village clerk Furgut. On one occasion, in Gonzagagasse, I even thought I recognised the poet Dante, banished from his home town on pain of being burned at the stake. For some considerable time he walked a short distance ahead of me, with the familiar cowl on his head, distinctly taller than the people in the street, yet he passed by them unnoticed. When I walked faster in order to catch him up he went down Heinrichsgasse, but when I reached the corner he was nowhere to be seen. After one or two turns of this kind I began to sense in me a vague apprehension, which manifested itself as a feeling of vertigo.
W G Sebald (1999) Vertigo (first published in 1990 as Schwindel. Gefuhle)

A doppelganger moment.  Recognition.  Walk out of one door and into another from long ago.  The feeling of Vertigo throws down a golden thread, and suddenly I am elsewhere, yet there …

I stop to listen. I am cold, my ears hurt; they must be all red.  But I no longer feel myself; I am won over by the purity surrounding me; nothing is alive, the wind whistles, the straight lines flee in the night. The Boulevard Noir does not have the indecent look of bourgeois streets, offering their regrets to the passers-by. No one has bothered to adorn it: it is simply the reverse side. The reverse side of the Rue Jeanne-Berthe Coeuroy, of the Avenue Galvani. Around the station, the people of Bouville still look after it a little; they clean it from time to time because of the travellers. But, immediately after that, they abandon it and it rushes straight ahead, blindly, bumping finally into the Avenue Galvani.  The town has forgotten it. Sometimes a great mud-coloured truck thunders across it at top speed. No one even commits any murders there; want of assassins and victims. The Boulevard Noir is inhuman.  Like a mineral. Like a triangle. It’s lucky there’s a boulevard like that in Bouville. Ordinarily you find them only in capitals, in Berlin, near Neukoln or Friedrichshain—in London, behind Greenwich. Straight, dirty corridors, full of drafts, with wide, treeless sidewalk. They are almost always outside the town in these strange sections where cities are manufactured near freight stations, car-barns, abattoirs, gas tanks. Two days after a rainstorm, when the whole city is moist beneath the sun and radiates damp heat, they are still cold, they keep their mud and puddles. They even have puddles which never dry up— except one month out of the year, August. The Nausea has stayed down there, in the yellow light.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1949) Nausea (first published in 1938 as La Nausee) (An earlier version of the manuscript was called Melancholia)…

This mental segue becomes even more uncanny.  I write down the words Vertigo and Nausea, like a list of symptoms to discuss with a doctor … and the diagnosis comes from centuries past.  From Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a seventeenth century tome, which advises the symptoms of Hypochondriacal Melancholy are, among other manifestations such as a heavy heart and swooning … none other than Vertigo and Nausea…