W.G. Sebald

Even now, when I try to remember… the darkness does not lift but becomes heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing in oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

W.G. Sebald