its four-thirty ... i've been up for more than three hours, woken by thirst and by the stiffness that creeps in to and cramps my lower back when i lay still for too long. Hoping to induce further sleep, i made a sandwich and a mug of cocoa fortified with spanish brandy ... Torres Diez. No luck, and so i cast my gaze over the sitting room bookshelf wondering if i might discover comfort in some ancient favourite. But my eye and my heart cannot agree and the shelf-scanning takes on a kind of anxiety and urgency until an expressionless little grey face looks right through me from the spine of a book which had somehow hidden itself in plain view at the very far end of a shelf. I recognized a book I'd found in the Reigate Oxfam; the fading receipt was still pressed inside the cover, 29th November, 2013, £1.50, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. A forbidding cover, a sober sounding name, the author a dead German who had worked in England. Yet countless living writers have praised him whilst i've been avoiding our first meeting, fearful of a debilitating encounter with pain and misery. Rightly ! But beyond that, he illuminates and affirms the principle that "knowing" and "understanding" are all we have to buttress and support the assailable fortress of the "soul". Now why would i give such a four letter word the respectability of becoming a Noun as well as an abstraction ? The Soul ? Souls can only exist in my imagination, and yours, innit ? But if we have to honour the notion of souls, how much time can we afford to waste in contemplation and speculation about their substance, their improbability ? Whoa ! Here come the armies of dead writers whose only legacy is an array of fictional souls, seen through the wobbly prism of the printed alphabet and the empty spaces between their words and sentences in which we hang our own imaginings like so much laundry, etc, etc. But i digress ! ...
