Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

Natuerlich wuerde sich niemand mit solchen Studien beschaeftigen, wenn es nicht wirklich ein Wesen gaebe, das Odradek heisst. Es sieht zunaechst aus wie eine flache Zwirnspule, und tatsaechlich scheint es auch mit Zwirn bezogen; allerdings duerften es nur abgerissene, alte, aneinander geknotete, aber auch ineinander verfitzte Zwirnstuecke von verschiedenster Art und Farbe sein. Es ist aber nicht nur eine Spule, sondern aus der Mitte des Sternes kommt ein kleines Querstaebchen hervor und an dieses Staebchen fuegt sich dann im rechten Winkel noch eines.
"Wie heisst du denn?" fragt man ihn. "Odradek," sagt er. "Und wo wohnst du?" "Unbestimmter Wohnsitz," sagt er und lacht; es ist aber nur ein Lachen, wie man es ohne Lungen hervorbringen kann. Es klingt etwa so, wie das Rascheln in gefallenen Blaettern.
Die Sorge des Hausvaters, 139-140

At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colours. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle.
"Well, what's your name?" one asks him. "Odradek," he says. "And where do you live?" "No fixed abode," he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves.
The cares of a family man, 428

ein Kalkwerk, das sich ausdehnte ueber ein Areal von einer Quadratmeile und mehr: Schlote und turmhohe Silos, die in der niedrigen Wolkendecke verschwanden, riesige Quaderbloecke aus bruechig gewordenem Beton, mit rostigem Wellblech verdeckte, auf- und abwaerts fuehrende Foerderbaender, Muehlen zum Zermahlen des Kalksteins, kegelfoermige Schotterberge, Baracken und Gueterwagons, alles unterschiedslos bedeckt von blassgrauem Sinter und Staub.
Austerlitz, 318-19

a lime works extending over a square mile or more, with chimneys and towering silos disappearing into the low clouds above, huge square buildings of crumbling concrete roofed with rusty corrugated iron, conveyor belts moving up and down, mills to grind the stone, conical mounds of gravel, huts and freight trucks, all of it uniformly covered with pale-grey sinter and dust.
Austerlitz, 310

Ein ganzes Jahr habe er sich nur mit der Wirkung von Kratzgeraeuschen auf das Gehoer beschaeftigt, mit Schlaggeraeuschen, Bohrgeraeuschen, Tropfgeraeuschen, Sausen, Surren und Summen, denke er, soll er zu Fro gesagt haben. Blasen. An die hunderte und tausende Schabversuche, die Aufnahmefaehigkeit ihres Gehoers fuer Zwoelftonmusik, soll er zu Fro gesagt haben, haette die groesste Rolle in seinen Experimenten gespielt.

For an entire year, he is supposed to have said to Fro, did I occupy myself with the effects of scratching noises on the faculty of hearing, with beating sounds, drilling sounds, dripping sounds, swishing, buzzing. Blowing sounds. Hundreds and thousands of chafing sounds, and her faculty to absorb twelve-tone music had played the utmost part in his experiments.

Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain.

Sejour ou des corps vont cherchant chacun son depeupleur. Assez vaste pour permettre de chercher en vain. Assez restreint pour que toute fuite soit vaine.

Eine Bleibe, wo Koerper immerzu suchen, jeder seinen Verwaiser. Gross genug fuer vergebliche Suche. Eng genug, damit jegliche Flucht vergeblich.

Beckett, The Lost Ones, Le depeupleur, Der Verwaiser

Klaus hielt sich hinter der verfallenen Scheune verborgen bis er sicher sein konnte, dass das Spuerkommando seine Faehrte verloren hatte. Er wuerde diese Gruppe nicht leicht abschuetteln koennen. Er wusste, dass er diesen drei Maennern in den Ruecken fallen musste in irgendeinem Waldstueck, wie sie hier die riesigen Weiten des Landes immer wieder zerteilten. Den Offizier hatte er bereits irgendwo einmal gesehen, so eine Narbe vergass man schlechthin nicht. Aber seine Untergebenen sahen zu jung aus, um fuer den Geheimdienst hinter der Front zu werken. Klaus zaehlte erneut seine verbliebenen Patronen. Er vermisste Tania.
F.K. Konsalik, Die Verdammten der Taiga, 179

For somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

Wirklich gegenwaertig geblieben ist mir eigentlich nur der Waschbaer, den ich lange beobachtete, wie er mit ernstem Gesicht bei einem Baechlein sass und immer wieder denselben Apfelschnitz wusch, als hoffe er, durch dieses, weit ueber jede vernuenftige Gruendlichkeit hinausgehende Waschen entkommen zu koennen aus der falschen Welt, in die er gewissermassen ohne sein eigenes Zutun geraten war.
Sebald, Austerlitz, 11

Man muesste einmal, sagte er noch, einen Katalog unserer Bauwerke erstellen, in dem sie ihrer Groesse nach verzeichnet waeren, dann wuerde man sogleich begreifen, dass die unter dem Normalmass der domestischen Architektur rangierenden Bauten es sind - die Feldhuette, die Eremitage, das Haeuschen des Schleusenwaerters, der Aussichtspavillon, die Kindervilla im Garten-, die wenigstens einen Abglanz des Friedens uns versprechen, wohingegen von einem Riesengebaeude wie beispielsweise dem Bruesseler Justizpalast auf dem ehemaligen Galgenberg niemand, der bei rechten Sinnen sei, behaupten koenne, dass er ihm gefalle.
Austerlitz, 31

Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings, listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size - the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lock-keeper's lodge, the pavillion for viewing the landscape, the children's bothy in the garden- are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels.
Austerlitz, 23

Why then should he ever leave Concord? The story has it that after he graduated from Harvard his mother suggested it might be time to make his way in the outside world. Henry became tearful and had to be reassured by his sisters that he didn't have to go. So, having everything he needed to hand, or within sauntering distance, he never really did go. Most famously and succinctly, he put it thus: "I have travelled a good deal in Concord."
TLS, Jan 7 2005, 13

Arthur Conan Doyle believed in ghosts, telepathy, psychic powers, automatic writing, clairvoyance, fairies, communication with the dead, ectoplasm [...] The exhibition at the British Library includes an entertaining oddity - a recording of what purports to be the "spirit voice" of Doyle himself, recorded at a séance four years after his death. Needless to say, the voice on the tape seems nothing like our extant recordings of the author, sounding instead like what it almost certainly was - a quavery-voiced actor grappling with a peripatetic Scots accent and muttering incomprehensibly about the "mysteries of the great divide."
TLS, Jan 7 2005, 16

"The year's most egregious price gougers, polluters, union-busters, dictator-coddlers, fraudsters, poisoners, deceivers and general miscreants."

He enumerates: the people we used to know; the people who died; the people we grew tired of; the people who were waiting for a different life to come along when we knew them; the people none of us really knew; the people who showed up and left again so quickly that they only left an image dissolving in a doorway; the people who hung around for years familiar as an old shoe and one day transformed themselves, changed everything from the ground up, flew off like butterflies or crashed to earth from a preposterous height; the people who withdrew, monastically, into a harsh discipline of silence; people who cleaned up their acts and went nowhere with them; people we envied their great looks, their money, their mastery of situations, who crumbled physically and mentally collapsed after decades of furtive dissipation; the people we still know but never see; the people we disliked for years, but came to appreciate; the people we liked at first and grew to despise after long periods of almost unconscious study; people we wanted to sleep with but didn't; people we slept with impulsively, more or less by accident; people we yearned for and made fools of ourselves over, who rejected us then, and years later, when everything that inflamed us about them had long sputtered out, attached themselves to us with fierce unwanted desire; the people who lived in a different world, and mistook us for other kinds of people than we were.
G.Indiana, Do everything in the dark, 12

Zuerst erwehrte Tania sich seiner Gegenwart. Aber in seinen rauhen Haenden lag eine unerwartete Zaertlichkeit verborgen. Hier im Heu waren die Sorgen der Welt fern und der Himmel versprach Liebe, Schwalben kreisten frohsinnig. In Hemdsaermeln trat er an sie heran, sein Blick verlangte nach ihr. Sie liessen sich nieder, spielten noch kurz Zaghaftigkeit vor. Dann gaben sie einander hin.
F.K. Konsalik, Die Verdammten der Taiga, 47.

One strange motif, in which three hares chase each other round a circle, with the tips of each hare's single depicted ear meeting in the circle's centre, crops up in sixth-century painted ceilings at Dunhuang, thirteenth-century floor tiles in Chester Cathedral, and places in between. A fragment of late Tang painting from Mogao that looks for all the world like a classic Chinese Bodhisattva turns out on closer inspection to have blue eyes - and a Maltese cross on breast and head-dress. He may be a Nestorian saint; it was adherents to the Nestorian sect who first brought Christianity to China
TLS, Jan 7, 2005, p.4

Deussen in his later synthesis, forces foreign and disfiguring Western philosophical ideas onto Indian thinking and he also assigns universal validity to specifically Indian traits. [...] Deussen's work must be criticised philosophically, not because his exceedingly clearly expounded insights are transmitted to the layman in an almost primitive manner, but because he subordinates - in the fashion of a religious messia - the results of his serious research to his universal idea of truth. In doing so he concocts an extract out of very heterogeneous elements.
Heimann, Schopenhauer Yearbook 1931, 252

original release comparativist, 2005

Klaus versank tiefer in den Schnee. Seine Landsermuetze verbarg seine Miene und der eisige Wind heulte durch die Fichtenwaelder. Jetzt eine Zigarette anzuzuenden waere Selbstmord; der Feind koenne den Rauch ueber Meilen hinweg verfolgen, so hatte sein Offizier immer wieder gepredigt. Klaus liess das Streichholz fallen und griff nach Tania. Die Kaelte setzte ihr zu, aber dieser Kuss wuerde sie beide aufwaermen.
F.K. Konsalik, Die Verdammten der Taiga, 159

At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinuishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live.

Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perception. He could not get a grip on the runaway world. He knew things. It wasn't that he didn't know.

DeLillo, Libra, 211