loss of timelessness

i have been reading Sebald's The Emigrants, which i picked up last week after finishing his haunting masterwork The Rings of Saturn. As with the latter, The Emigrants is a evocation of memory and loss. Sebald devotes each chapter to an individual, displaced early in life who is forced to develop a new identity as they struggle to preserve the fragments of dissolving memory and while at the same time attempt to release themselves from the torturous reminders of lives forever lost. In The Emigrants however, personal history and character still provide centralizing influences - a repository or screen against which the individual's memories and history play out as a ribbon unwinding in a storm. The Rings of Saturn has lost even this personal historical anchor and the ghosts of the lost worlds find themselves free (or more accurately, condemned) to wander the wastes of time. This fragmentation and loss of subjectivity is reflected in the breakdown of Sebald's narrator as a consequence of his own wanderings - physically and psychically - through the landscapes of memory. I suppose i am senstive to these subjects due to my own losses - those chosen and those forced upon me - accompanying my move to berlin, but perhaps it is also due to my growing recognition of the relentless march of time which drags us all along with it, battering our bodies and souls against the immovable objects of fate...