Taking into account the metaphor »scythe of Saturn« that refers to the god as well as the planet of melancholy that the title of Sebald’s book recalls from the beginning, one might consider the vision of the globe as a graveyard as part of a baroque topos of vanitas and transitoriness—in the sense that Walter Benjamin pointed to the significance of saturnic melancholy within the ruinous world of seventeenth-century German tragedies.

The perfect experiment suggests the anti-zombie: a creature which is conscious, perhaps in just one respect, as in Cohen and Dennett«s isolation of colour consciousness, but gives no sign of it.

A supply of good drinking water is essential.

Nevertheless, the zonula is most often considered as the principal agent of transmission.