Bild unserer irren Anwesenheit / auf der Oberfläche der Erde. L’immagine come storia naturale del presente nella poetica di W. G. Sebald

The poem Nach der Natur by W. G. Sebald, real germinal place of its author’s subsequent literary production, is a salient moment of confrontation for today's philosophical gaze; our historical time and our own humanity are configured as “natural history” (Benjamin), in a compositional game in which the present time acquires the character of a timeless distance projecting it on the background of a mournful nature, entrusting to the roughness of the poetic material and to its conceptual weaving the task of an unprecedented presentification of some layers of reality of rare density.