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)

Victoria and Albert Museum

From time to time, and just for a split second, I saw huge halls open up…

Terunobu Fujimo's Beetle's House, V&A, Cromwell Road, Kensington & Chelsea, SW7

…with rows of pillars and collonades leading far into the distance…

Helen and Hard Architects' Ratatosk, V&A, Cromwell Road, Kensington & Chelsea, SW7

…with vaults and brickwork arches bearing on them many-storeyed structures, with flights of stone steps, wooden stairways and ladders, all leading the eye on and on.

Rural Studio's Woodshed, V&A, Cromwell Road, Kensington & Chelsea, SW7

I saw viaducts and footbridges crossing deep chasms thronged with tiny figures who looked to me, said Austerlitz…

Rintala Eggertsson Architects' Ark, V&A, Cromwell Road, Kensington & Chelsea, SW7

…like prisoners in search of some way of escapefrom their dungeon, and the longer I stared upwards with my headwrenched painfully back, the more I felt as if the room where I stood were expanding…

Studio Mumbai's In-between Architecture, V&A, Cromwell Road, Kensington & Chelsea, SW7

From WG Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001)