12: TRANSIT

Ernesto Pérez Zuñiga, poeta [España]

Translation (subtitles): Carlos Ortega

Transcription:

Matsua Basho says: “To those that let their lives float aboard ships or grow old riding horses, each day is travel and their home is also travel.” Sebald says: In fact I felt that the waiting room where I stood as if dazzled contained all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained, as if the black and white diamond pattern of the stone slabs beneath my feet were the board on which the endgame would be played and it covered the entire plane of time. [Austerlitz, 136]”. Transit: The itinerant place where stories happen, the moving place where stories are anchored. Sebald says: “If, say, in my walks through the city, I come across one of those still yards in which nothing has changed for decades, I almost feel physically how the current of time decelerates in the gravitational field of forgotten things.It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.” W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz