"A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it.the distracted mass absorbs the work of art" (239). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ".from the honeycombs of memory he built a house for the swarm of his thoughts" (203). In such case translations are called for only because of the plurality of languages" (82). "Where a text is identical with truth or dogma, where it is supposed to be the 'true language' in all its literalness and without the mediation of meaning, this text is unconditionally translatable. There has been no more original, no more serious critic. "Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express" (72). A selection of works from one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth centuryas selected by Hannah Arendt and including a classic essay of her own about Walter Benjamin’s life and philosophy. A theme in this essay, as in others, is that the collector exists inside the collection the collection possesses the collector. "Writers are really people who write books.because they are dissatisfied with the books which they.do not like" (61). "Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories" (60). The best of the lot were his essay on Proust and the essay on art during the age of mass-production, the latter of which I will be returning to when I concentrate on William Gaddis's for my dissertation. Overall, his thoughts were stimulating, though they may not last. Out of all 10 essays, I felt that I was in a jungle of thoughts, only to happen upon shining treasure once in a while. This (or perhaps Harry Zohn's translation) could account for what I feel to be a lack of congruence in these essays. He did literary criticism but was not a literary critic he engaged in theological discourse, but was not a theologian, etc. Arendt sheds light on the crucial fact that Benjamin was nearly unclassifiable, especially in his lifetime. Its a meditation on history, a meditation on philosophy, a meditation on collecting and an autobiography as well. Hannah Arendt's 51-page introduction is one of the finest introductions I've ever read-scholarly, compassionate, engaging it is not to be skipped, though I suggest that it be read after the compendium of Benjamin's essays. This, then, was my first experience with the German polymath. Walter Benjamin is a name, a thinker that I've encountered over and over throughout my years of reading-yet, I've never read his work directly.
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