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I refused to hear the limpid beauty of the songs, or the dark anguish

I grew to be wary of that rich emollience of tone, that tempered, bourgeois liquidity

Sebald employs the the antique, somewhat 'literary' locution of 'soul'

The tone is elegiac, muffled, but also curiously intense

[...] When I left this country 18 years ago, I didn’t know how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have done? It’s one of time’s lessons, and can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth…