Comfort Control

W.G. Sebald

I remember very well how, as a child, I stood for the first time by an open coffin, with the dull sense on my breast that my grandfather, lying there on wood shavings, had suffered a shameful injustice that none of us survivors could make good. And for some time, too, I have known that the more one has to bear, for whatever reason, of the burden of grief which is probably not imposed on the human species for nothing, the more often do we meet ghosts. On the Graben in Vienna, in the London underground, at a reception diven by the Mexican ambassador, at a lockkeeper’s cottage on the Ludwigskanal in Bamberg, now here and now there, without expecting it, you may meet one of those beings who are somehow blurred and out of place and who, as I always feel, are a little too small and shortsighted; they have something curiously watchful about them, as if they are lying in wait, and their faces bear the expression of a race that wishes us ill.

They are still around us, the dead, but there are times when I think that perhaps they will soon be gone. Now that we have reached a point where the number of those alive on earth has doubled within just three decades, and will treble within the next generation, we no longer fear the once overwhelming numbers of the dead. Their significance is visibly decreasing. We can no longer speak of everlasting memory and the veneration of our forebears. On the contrary: The dead must now be cleared out of the way as quickly and comprehensively as possible.

In the urban societies, where everyone is instantly replaceable and is really superfluous from birth, we have to keep throwing ballast overboard, forgetting everything that we might otherwise remember: youth, childhood, our origins, our forebears and ancestors. All will dissolve into the ether, and the whole past will flow into a formless, indistinct, silent mass. And leaving a present without memory, in the face of a future that no individual mind can envisage, in the end we shall ourselves relinquish life without feeling any need to linger at least for a while, nor shall we be impelled to pay return visits from time to time.

For Sale - Comfort Control

Comfort Control, the book after which this website is named, is now available for sale in both hardcover and paperback. It consists of four years worth of photography, writings, collected images and text. It’s an exercise in emotion and restraint. I’m pretty proud of it and I hope you like it too. Just click through the links below. Thanks!