'... a sign of silence somehow...'

'We know the biblical phrase, dust to dust and ashes to ashes, so the allegorical significance of dust is clear. The other thing is that dust is a sign of silence somehow... There are some people who feel a sense of discomfort in tidy, well-kept, constantly looked-after houses. And I belong to those people. I've always felt it to be difficult to be in a house where this sort of cold order is maintained... By contrast, if I get into a house where the dust has been allowed to settle, I do find that comforting somehow. I remember distinctly that around the time when I wrote the particular passage you are referring to, I visited a publisher in London. He lived in Kensington. He had still some business to attend to when I arrived, and his wife took me up to a sort of library room at the very top of this very tall, very large, terraced house. And the room was all full of books, and there was one chair. And there was dust everywhere; it had settled over many years on all those books, on the carpet, on the windowsill, and only from the door to the chair where you would sit down to read, there was a path, like a path through snow, as it were, you know, worn, where you could see that there wasn't any dust because occasionally somebody would walk up to that chair and sit down and read a book. And I have never spent a more peaceful quarter of an hour than sitting in that particular chair. It was that experience that brought home to me that dust has something very, very peaceful about it.'

From The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Seven Stories Press, 2010), pp.58-59