Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

The Cotswold Country, old and quaint, ridden with ghosts and legends, is today very much on the tourist route. After "doing" Oxford, it seems a shame not to travel on another twenty miles or so to see some of the historic village with the picturesque names— Stow-on-the-Wold, Chipping Norton, Minster Lovell, Burford [...]
For some reason Swinbrook, only three miles away, seems to have escaped the tourist trade, and has remained as I remember it more than thirty years ago. In the tiny village post office the same four kinds of sweets—toffee, acid drops, Edinburgh Rock and butterscotch— are still displayed in the same four large cut-glass jars in the window.

Crowds of beggar children were going from house to house or climbing up on to the railings of the front steps, trying to catch a glimpse through the window of a splendor that was denied to them. Sometimes too a door would suddenly be flung open, and scolding voices would drive a whole swarm of these little visitors away out into the dark street.

Th. Storm, Immensee. Transl. C.W. Bell.

Frederick Farrar hatte mir erzählt, daß am Abend des Wohltätigkeitsballs die gewöhnliche Bevölkerung, die zu einer solchen Veranstaltung naturgemäß keinen Zugang hatte, in hundert und mehr Booten und Kähnen an die Spitze des Piers hinausruderte, um dort draußen von ihren sachte schwankenden und manchmal etwas abdriftenden Warten aus zuzusehen, wie sich die bessere Gesellschaft zu den Klängen des Orchesters im Kreise drehte und in einer Lichterwoge gleichsam schwebte über dem nachtdunklen, zu dieser frühherbstlichen Zeit meist schon von Nebelschwaden überzogenen Wasser.

WG Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn

'Odd, this neurotic tendency in the American businessman. Can you account for it? No? I can. Too much coffee.'
   'Coffee?'
'That and the New Deal. Over in America, it appears, life for the businessman is one long series of large cups of coffee, punctuated with shocks from the New Deal. He drinks a quart of coffee, and gets a nasty surprise from the New Deal. To pull himself together, he drinks another quart of coffee, and along comes another nasty surprise from the New Deal. He staggers off, calling feebly for more coffee, and...Well, you see what I mean. Vicious circle. No nervous system could stand it.'

The house where, a week after her surgeon had shaken his head bitterly and sewn her abdomen back up, she'd grilled her most trusted daughter-in-law on the idea of an afterlife, and my sister-in-law had confessed that, in point of sheer logistics, the idea seemed to her pretty far-fetched, and my mother, agreeing with her, had then, as it were, put a check beside the item "Decide about afterlife" and continued down her to-do list in her usual pragmatic way, addressing other tasks that her decision had rendered more urgent than ever, such as "Invite best friends over one by one and say goodbye to them forever."