Horses in winter landscape

Shadowy shifting forms looming
like memories
though a thicket of tangled thoughts

"What would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is!—so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory.” 

W.G.Sebald, Rings of Saturn