Running for Your Life: Émigré Eminence

W.G. Sebald (“Vertigo, The Emigrants”) makes much of bloodline rituals, of being rooted in place, yes, but also in bloodstream.

Yet not in the obscene way of a rigidly viewed superior, more the faith of doubt is teased out among those who share relations.

Take the fleeting memory of the Émigré Eminence, Great Uncle Ambros Adelwarth in “The Emigrants.”

There is a seed of Sebald here; something that presages for him a path out of the ordinary. Not a stranger, a person encountered in a book, but someone who shares a common lineage. One of them.

Sebald was one who had to read, think, reflect on what he knew, then dip all that into the vat of his capacious, serum-enriched mind of aggregate knowledge and experience, capture the byproduct – not just mental – but spiritual and physical, a charge of feeling, say, or a shiver of awareness, if not certainty.

Next: Running for Your Life: Bye-Bye Facebook