I realise that making in prose a decent pattern out of what happens to come your way is a preoccupation, which, in a sense, has no higher ambitions than, for a brief moment in time, to rescue something out of that stream of history that keeps rushing past. This is why, among other reasons, I have photographs in the text, because the photograph is perhaps the paradigm of it all. The photograph is meant to get lost somewhere in a box in an attic. It is a nomadic thing that has only a small chance to survive. - W. G. Sebald