![]() It can seem aimless, an endless roll of thunder, until you stop to breathe for a moment, to linger on an old word or an image slightly aslant, and-suddenly-you take in a new illumination. You are set down in a dense and unfamiliar city, and have to work to get your bearings. experience of reading Benjamin feels a little like the reverse. ![]() The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.’. ![]() It is also possible that Benjamin had his eyes wide open at the beginning of our era and proved able to observe its salient features.Ī master of the essay, list, theoretical long-take, fragment, aphorism, speech, pedagogical manifesto, and even the book review, Benjamin commanded a variety of prose forms.īenjamin famously wrote that ‘knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. Reading such claims over eighty years later, we might be reminded that every generation foresees a crisis and the end of the world as we know it. You suspect he is being bombastic in order for him to come back later and tell you what modern literature’s saving grace is, but the moment of redemption does not arrive. Įcause it is delivered without panic, quietly, in graceful sentences, from within the culture of books and criticism, it is hard at first to accept the implications of what Benjamin is saying. … It provides a brief intellectual history of an essay and revivifies it. He newly published collection The Storyteller Essays, translated by Tess Lewis and edited by Samuel Titan, marks a unique achievement. ![]()
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