Sebald on Handke

such magnificent essays   in Silent Catastrophes  

And in allowing the particular light

which filters through the leaves of the canopy

or the canvas of a tent to shine through from time to time

between the words placed with often astonishing care and precision,

Handke, in Die Wiederholung,  succeeds in making the text itself a place of refuge

among the arid zones which, even in the culture industry, are encroaching further by the day.

The book of a journey on foot through the Karst landscape . . . islands of calm . . . in whose depths

. . .  the beasts of the Karst could assemble . . . . 

Inscribed into this image of a peaceable kingdom, reminiscent of the Ark, is the hope that,

despite the unfavourable circumstances, some small part of our natural Heimat may yet be saved after all.

In Handke's work, teaching and learning are ways of preserving the world. 

I can think of no more beautiful image . . . than this page of Repetition dedicated to the road mender and sign painter.  

Seen in this light, the journey on foot becomes a kind of Pilgrim's Progress, and the stages along the way those of an imagined history of salvation.  The decisive factor . . . is the act of walking itself: 'Set out on the road to one goal or another, whether actually or merely in thought: between the goal and the intention there is something that contains both, namely the act, the progression.  This progression is as good as the goal:  for this will certainly be reached, if the decision is firm and the conditions adequate; and yet this progression can only ever be called intentional, because the walker can always just as easily be paralysed before the last step as before the first."   from Goethe's Color Theory 

This progression is what Handke calls the continuum, in his later books.  

They are the incidental results of the hope for redemption from the guilt-ridden conditions of life, a hope fleetingly realized in art, in the creation of images which allow author and reader to enter almost bodily into the nature of all things, which yet remains forever strange to us.  

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I'm glad a read some of Stifter so I could enjoy the more the essay on Stifter and Handke.  I plan to read The Castle in our week on the cruise ship and when we get back I can then read Sebald's essay on that book.