Activity

channeled young American's fear and insecurity into often inchoate action

the shirts 'had changed to a color milder than white'. (The cerements, again.)

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'