Life & Wisdom Quote by W. G. Sebald

Sebald nails the bilingual condition with the kind of bleak, precise candor that makes his work feel less like confession than diagnosis. He grants the obvious upside first - access, mobility, advantage - only to puncture it with the private cost that polite multicultural rhetoric tends to skip. The real "sore point" isn't grammar; it's credibility. Language, for Sebald, is where the self audits itself. When that system glitches, you don't just miss a word; you lose your footing as a thinking person.

The subtext is shame, but also suspicion: bilingualism promises an expanded mind, yet it can produce a split tribunal inside your head. On good days you translate; on bad days you interrogate. The phrase "you don't trust yourself" is doing the heavy lifting. Trust is normally what your first language guarantees - the home base where meaning feels automatic. Sebald suggests exile can infect even that. Your native tongue stops being native; it becomes another instrument you might mishandle.

Calling himself a "complete halfwit" is strategic self-deprecation with an edge. It's funny in the way despair can be funny: not a joke, but a pressure valve. Sebald, a German writer long resident in England, is speaking from a postwar European reality where language isn't neutral baggage; it's history, guilt, and belonging. In that context, bilingualism isn't just a skill. It's an identity lived on probation, where eloquence and inadequacy sit uncomfortably close, and the smartest person in the room can suddenly feel illiterate.