Lapsing Into Oblivion

The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind…

Regents Canal, Lisson Grove, Westminster, NW8

…how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself…

Leake Street, Waterloo, Lambeth, SE1

…in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, Hackney, N16

From WG Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001)

Brace of Gasometers

‘I come here to your beautiful country -’ Mr Raj saw through the window bare branches, coil after coil of dirty clouds, washing on neighbour lines, forlorn pecking birds, a distant brace of gasometers.

Regent's Canal, Haggerston, Tower Hamlets, E2

‘- your beautiful country, I say,’ he said defiantly.

Queenstown Road, Battersea, Wandsworth, SW8

‘…So far I have had mixed career. Fights and insults, complete lack of sexual sustenance – most necessary to men in prime of life – and inability to find accommodation commensurate with social position and academic attainments…’

Imperial Road, Hammersmith & Fulham, SW6

From Anthony Burgess’ The Right to an Answer (1960)

The Dream

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed

The Stade, Folkestone, Kent, CT19

Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,

Spring Gardens, Coding Street, Vauxhall, Lambeth, SE11

And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;

Church of St John-at-Hackney, Lower Clapton Road, Hackney, E5

They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,

Brentford, Middlesex, TW8

They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,

Dawlish, Devon, EX7

And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past -they speak

Cleopatra's Needle, Embankment, Westminster, WC2N

Like sibyls of the future; they have power -
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;

RAF War Memorial, Embankment, Westminster, WC2N

They make us what we were not -what they will,
And shake us with the vision that’s gone by,

George Blackall Simonds' Maiwand Lion, Forbury Gardens, Reading, Berkshire, RG1

The dread of vanished shadows -Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? -What are they?

From Lord Byron’s The Dream (1816)