Huezo Zúñiga family album | album of Monferrato

Austerlitz sometimes sat for hours, laying out these photographs or others from his collection the wrong way up, as if playing a game of patience, and then, one by one, he turned them over, always with a new sense of surprise at what he saw, pushing the pictures back and forth and over each other, arranging them in an order depending on their family resemblances, or withdrawing them from the game until either there was nothing left on the gray tabletop, or he felt exhausted by the constant effort of thinking and remembering and had to rest on the ottoman.

W. G. Sebald, "Austerlitz," 119