These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. Would it not be presumptuous of me if, in order to appear convincingly objective and down-toearth, I enumerated for you the main sections or prize pieces of a library, if I presented you with their history or even their usefulness to a writer? I, for one, have in mind something less obscure, something more palpable than that what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. For such a man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood-it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation which these books arouse in a genuine collector. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. Benjamin died in 1940 having committed suicide at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape the Nazis. He spent much of his professional life in Paris, where he wrote this essay. In the 1930s he turned to Marxism, partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht and partly due to the rise of extreme right-wing politics in Europe. Having been educated in Switzerland he had a short career in the lead up to the Second World War, which saw him carve a niche as a literary critic. All in boxes, he takes the reader through elements of his book collection: the memories attached to them, the importance he placed on the act of 'collecting' and the process of accumulation, and how objects like books inhabit a space.īorn in Germany in 1892, Benjamin was known as a 'man of letters'. In this essay, written in 1931, Walter Benjamin narrates the process of unpacking his library. Welcome to The Long(ish) Read: a new AD feature which uncovers texts written by notable essayists which resonate with contemporary architecture, interior architecture, urbanism or landscape design.
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