In "Campo Santo", the eponymous essay of his posthumous collection, Sebald describes a visit to a Corsican cemetery. In excellent Sebaldian style he plunges past the yawing headstones and surrounding shrubbery to the underlying cultural practices -- the surround. In describing the local theatrics of mourning, he has this (which seems somehow emblematic) to say:

"In truth of course there is no discrepancy between such calculation and a genuine grief which actually makes the mourners seem beside themselves, for fluctuation between the expression of deeply felt sorrow, which can sound like a choking fit, and the aesthetically -- even cunningly -- modulated manipulation of the audience to whom that grief is displayed has perhaps been the most typical charateristic of our severely disturbed species at every stage of civilization."

Of course now, here, almost five years out from his own death, his description of physically and mentally wandering around in a cemetery feels like an instance of horrible, reified prescience. But then so did all his work. Strange, moving to register that his catalogues of/meditations on doom and destruction were so beautiful too.