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4.24 AVERAGE
4.24 AVERAGE
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Just do it, ok? Trust the lovers on this one.
Sooooo beautiful…..skipped the essay on Leskov bc I’ve never heard of him lol. But I really liked his analyses of Baudelaire and Proust’s works, have heard work of art in the age lectured to me like a billion times by literature profs, and wow unpacking my library is really great. “How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!” Bought this at a used bookstore in Paris hehe
The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov by Walter Benjamin
"Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant. To present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increasing our distance from him." (83)
"one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman" (85)
"If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university. In it was combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place."
"Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom" (86-7)
"The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks." (89)
Herodotus, Histories:
When the Egyptian king Psammenitus had been beaten and captured by the Persian king Cambyses, Cambyse was bent on humbling his prisoner. He gave orders to place Psammenitus on the road along which the Persian triumphal procession was to pass. And he further arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a maid going to the well with her pitcher. While all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing this spectacle, Psammenitus stood alone, mute and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground; and when presently he saw his son, who was being taken along in the procession to be executed, he likewise remained unmoved. But when afterwards he recognized one of his servants, an old, impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of the deepest morning." (89-90)
"The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. a story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time." (90)
Herodotus's story of King Psammenitus "from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing astonishment and thoughtfulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day." (90)
"There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story's claim in the memory of the reader..." (91)
"The traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel." (92)
"Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death." (94)
Hebel: "In the meantime the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years War came and went, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit Order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria Theresa died...America became independent, and the united French and Spanish forces were unable to capture Gibraltar. ...Napoleon captured Prussia, and the English bombarded Copenhagan, and the peasants sowed and harvested. The millers ground, the smiths hammered, and the miners dug for veins of ore in their underground workshops. But when in 1809 the miners at Falun..." brought up his body." (95)
"A man who dies at the age of thirty-five," said Moritz Heimann once, "is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five." Nothing is more dubious than this sentence . . . A man . . . will ... remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at thirty-five." This is the nature of character. The meaning of his life is revealed in his death. The characters make the reader understand that death is waiting.
Paul Valery: "Artistic observation," he says in reflections on a woman artist whose work consisted in the silk embroidery of figures, "can attain an almost mystical depth. The object on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in their own inner self." (107-8)
"The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself." (108-9)
Other Benjamin:
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule."
"Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time."
"Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant. To present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increasing our distance from him." (83)
"one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman" (85)
"If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university. In it was combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place."
"Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom" (86-7)
"The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks." (89)
Herodotus, Histories:
When the Egyptian king Psammenitus had been beaten and captured by the Persian king Cambyses, Cambyse was bent on humbling his prisoner. He gave orders to place Psammenitus on the road along which the Persian triumphal procession was to pass. And he further arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a maid going to the well with her pitcher. While all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing this spectacle, Psammenitus stood alone, mute and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground; and when presently he saw his son, who was being taken along in the procession to be executed, he likewise remained unmoved. But when afterwards he recognized one of his servants, an old, impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of the deepest morning." (89-90)
"The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. a story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time." (90)
Herodotus's story of King Psammenitus "from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing astonishment and thoughtfulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day." (90)
"There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story's claim in the memory of the reader..." (91)
"The traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel." (92)
"Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death." (94)
Hebel: "In the meantime the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years War came and went, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit Order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria Theresa died...America became independent, and the united French and Spanish forces were unable to capture Gibraltar. ...Napoleon captured Prussia, and the English bombarded Copenhagan, and the peasants sowed and harvested. The millers ground, the smiths hammered, and the miners dug for veins of ore in their underground workshops. But when in 1809 the miners at Falun..." brought up his body." (95)
"A man who dies at the age of thirty-five," said Moritz Heimann once, "is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five." Nothing is more dubious than this sentence . . . A man . . . will ... remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at thirty-five." This is the nature of character. The meaning of his life is revealed in his death. The characters make the reader understand that death is waiting.
Paul Valery: "Artistic observation," he says in reflections on a woman artist whose work consisted in the silk embroidery of figures, "can attain an almost mystical depth. The object on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in their own inner self." (107-8)
"The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself." (108-9)
Other Benjamin:
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule."
"Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time."
challenging
informative
reflective
Walter Benjamin was the definition of an idiosyncratic thinker. He's deeply connected to the critical theory of the Frankfurt school due to his personal association with Adorno and Horkheimer, but his Marxist tendencies strike more as peripheral than central. He considered himself first and foremost a literary critic, and though Illuminations touches on a number of topics, keeping this front of mind I think will provide the most valuable reading experience.
Benjamin's writing style was almost akin to the plunderphonics artists in music, where the intention was to use a plethora of different source materials in tandem to create something greater than the sum of their parts. He had an original scholarly voice, but he saw himself as a curator of great ideas before anything else; he once wished he could write an entire book with just quotes. Some may say that they feel left out in the cold because they don't have a reference point for all of these works, but I don't think it is necessary per se. The best essays in the collection are the ones untethered from a single writer like "Task of the Translator" and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and even the ones with a singular focus give you enough to chew on so you aren't entirely lost in the minutiae.
More than anything however, I love Benjamin's willingness to get lost, to throw himself fully into something. His writing on the Flaneur and his library collection are entrancing because he speaks about things many consider unintersting like leisurely strolls and book collecting with such a passion. I can see why some of Han's writings on inactivity use Benjamin as a source, as I think they both tap into the value of the everyday against pure novelty.
This collection isn't going to become one of my favourite works ever, as I don't feel it created a truly deep impact on me. However, I think anyone with a mild interest in philosophy and literature could get something out of this.
Benjamin's writing style was almost akin to the plunderphonics artists in music, where the intention was to use a plethora of different source materials in tandem to create something greater than the sum of their parts. He had an original scholarly voice, but he saw himself as a curator of great ideas before anything else; he once wished he could write an entire book with just quotes. Some may say that they feel left out in the cold because they don't have a reference point for all of these works, but I don't think it is necessary per se. The best essays in the collection are the ones untethered from a single writer like "Task of the Translator" and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and even the ones with a singular focus give you enough to chew on so you aren't entirely lost in the minutiae.
More than anything however, I love Benjamin's willingness to get lost, to throw himself fully into something. His writing on the Flaneur and his library collection are entrancing because he speaks about things many consider unintersting like leisurely strolls and book collecting with such a passion. I can see why some of Han's writings on inactivity use Benjamin as a source, as I think they both tap into the value of the everyday against pure novelty.
This collection isn't going to become one of my favourite works ever, as I don't feel it created a truly deep impact on me. However, I think anyone with a mild interest in philosophy and literature could get something out of this.
Although it contains the excellent essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Theses on the Philosophy of History, this collection is subject to the weaknesses of most anthologies: We are made to glide along the surface of the text, which Arendt has paternalistically selected for us to peruse. Though Benjamin is not well-known for his long-form (and though this is a limitation of short books by definition) Illuminations would have done well to include a single more substantive selection from his longer work instead of padding itself with lightweight selections such as, Unpacking My Library.
Exploring my Water Benjamin era. I didn't really understand the hype around Benjamin, but he appeared to be a melancholic figure, someone who glimpsed at the world from a very unique perspective, a lonely sight. And some of his essays I didn't care for too much, although they are probably of great interest if you're into German literature. But when Benjamin writes something good, it's supreme. These small fragments that pop out of nowhere, sometimes standing out like a sore thumb, they are just fantastic. The final fragment in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, where Benjamin skips from a study of film and the apparatus to, suddenly, Fascism as the aestheticisation of politics and Communism as the politicisation of aesthetics/art. He is taken over by brilliance and ends the essay on an explosive note. Similarly with the Angel of History, just great, powerful writing that retroactively changes how the rest of the essay is read.
The strongest essays are definitely his rethinking of translation hierarchies in "Task of The Translator"; his writings on crowds in "On Some Motifs In Baudelaire" (and his comparison with workers in a factory, brilliant); of course, the great inspiration for John Berger's *Ways of Seeing*: "The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction", *especially* the final fragment on Fascism; and finally, "Theses on The Philosophy of History" and its iconic imagery of the angel of history.
The strongest essays are definitely his rethinking of translation hierarchies in "Task of The Translator"; his writings on crowds in "On Some Motifs In Baudelaire" (and his comparison with workers in a factory, brilliant); of course, the great inspiration for John Berger's *Ways of Seeing*: "The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction", *especially* the final fragment on Fascism; and finally, "Theses on The Philosophy of History" and its iconic imagery of the angel of history.
I've taken a long time to get around to reading this collection in full, having read a couple of the pieces (Work of Art, Philosophy of History) some years ago and snippets of others (Unpacking My Library, Kafka) more recently. Still others (The Storyteller, Proust) had long been on my list of subjects to investigate, thus more or less justifying a full read of the collection. I knew I enjoyed Benjamin's style, but what I didn't expect was that even the pieces on subjects in which I had little prior interest (Epic Theatre, Baudelaire) would turn out to be entirely riveting, and indeed to kindle in me a fierce fascination with those subjects. Throughout the pieces Benjamin moves across dense, even miserable subjects with due solemnity, but also with a humour so light as to make his touch feel weightless. It is evident how much of this effect is owed to Kafka, both from Benjamin's own comments on that author and from the close attention paid to their relationship in Arendt's introduction.
The introduction itself I left until last, undecided as to whether I would read it until the last page of the Theses on the Philosophy of History. It is the first work of Arendt's that I have bothered to read, but once again, a previously absent interest has been kindled, as I find she writes with equal authority and tenderness on the matters of literature, politics, biography, and history relevant to Benjamin's life and work.
The introduction itself I left until last, undecided as to whether I would read it until the last page of the Theses on the Philosophy of History. It is the first work of Arendt's that I have bothered to read, but once again, a previously absent interest has been kindled, as I find she writes with equal authority and tenderness on the matters of literature, politics, biography, and history relevant to Benjamin's life and work.
For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
There are hardly enough superlatives for this amazing collection of essays concerning Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, messianism and the aesthetic tension between the cultic and the exhibitional. I had read Unpacking My Library a half dozen times previously and it still forces me to catch my breath. The thoughts on Kafka explore the mystical as well as the shock of the modern. The shock of the urban and industrial is a recurring theme in these pieces. Likewise is the dearth of actual experience and the onslaught of involuntary memory. It was a strange juxtaposition that this very morning I put down Illuminations and was enjoying my breakfast. Before me in the recent Bookforum was an article by Geoff Dyer about August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/473219.August_Sander_1876_1964. Benjamin's idea of aura has likely morphed into something strange over the intervening 70 odd years.
There are hardly enough superlatives for this amazing collection of essays concerning Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, messianism and the aesthetic tension between the cultic and the exhibitional. I had read Unpacking My Library a half dozen times previously and it still forces me to catch my breath. The thoughts on Kafka explore the mystical as well as the shock of the modern. The shock of the urban and industrial is a recurring theme in these pieces. Likewise is the dearth of actual experience and the onslaught of involuntary memory. It was a strange juxtaposition that this very morning I put down Illuminations and was enjoying my breakfast. Before me in the recent Bookforum was an article by Geoff Dyer about August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/473219.August_Sander_1876_1964. Benjamin's idea of aura has likely morphed into something strange over the intervening 70 odd years.