This, for some strange reason, popped up from the archives of my email.
All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us ... Our concern with history, ..., is a concern with performed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.
- -WG Sebald, Austerlitz. (New York: The Modern Library. 2001, 71-2.)