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J. D. Daniels's avatar

"Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear."

I am reading Olivia Laing's "The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise," and this paragraph about Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn" made me think of your blog:

"I remembered the temple but I'd forgotten that the chapter ended with an apocalyptic vision of dying trees, not just the catastrophic devastation of the Great Storm but the diseases that preceded it in the 1970s: first Dutch Elm disease and then a kind of dieback I thought was the exclusive province of my own century, which caused the crowns of ash to become sparse, and the foliage of oaks to thin and display what Sebald calls 'strange mutations'."

Given Laing's tendency to Shakespearing around on the slightest pretext -- Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Hamlet -- it seems like an unusual oversight. But maybe I don't understand.

"It was then also that I noticed the crowns of ash trees were become sparse, and the foliage of oaks was thinning and displaying strange mutations."

-- from"The Rings of Saturn," end of chapter nine.

http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2012/07/apocalypse-by-wb-sebald.html

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