One of my favorite thinkers is Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish critical theorist who studied and wrote about art, politics, philosophy and history. He spent a fair amount of his time in Berlin and Paris in the early part of the 20th century and has written some of the most influential artistic theory there is. He killed himself on the verge of his escape from a nazified Europe thinking he wouldn’t make it out in time. He was a man who lived in his thoughts, for better or for worse, and sometimes lost himself to fantasy, not facing the political reality as it was. Tragically, he stayed too long in Paris.
He enjoyed the Paris Arcades, collections of indoor, windowed stores in Paris that anticipate the modern mall. The Arcades captivated him, and he spent a lot of his time there, writing and thinking about the historical-social significance of the Arcades and what they meant to the development of capitalism and how they subsequently influenced the people that inhabited them. His longest work, unfinished, was called the Arcades Project (I haven’t finished it either), and it is a voluminous (Bible like) random collection of quotes, stories, histories and artistic reflections that covers such topics as early films, land use planning in Paris, politics, art and so many other topics. And it is a testament to one of his great hobbies: quote collecting. He loved to collect quotes, various things he would see in the everyday. I relate to this pursuit and enjoy it in my own life, as quotes are like a mini window into the thoughts of others, an ossified statement of their reflections on and their engagement with the experience of the world.
We know about some of his works through Georges Bataille, author of The Story of the Eye, who was a librarian at the time, and who hid W Benjamin’s unfinished manuscript for the Arcades Project in a library in Paris on the eve of the German advance and just before W Benjamin’s flight from his beloved Paris.
Bearer of Pity 