On Walter Benjamin's, 'Unpacking My Library'

Benjamin seems to be writing as he unpacks, his books not yet on the shelves, "not yet touched by the mild boredom of order."

This phrase that's so wonderful, 'the mild boredom of order', seems to just come to him; I mean to say I can see it just coming to him in the midst of him doing something else, something other than writing, taking his books out of the boxes he'd stored them in, being a Jew in 1930s Europe, constantly moving from capital to capital, trying to find a place that was culturally and politically sympathetic.

Reading Benjamin's essay "Unpacking My Library", from his book, Illuminations--Essays and Reflections, this morning, a gift from a new friend, a bookstore owner, was to wake up knowing I needed something to read, something besides the 'news' which has pre-occupied  so many sides of myself the last few years; I needed something larger than just yesterday or the day before that, something that went farther back and also had the possibility of going forward, some sort of stimulant made of words that would cause me to feel I was doing something good with my time.

As Benjamin unpacks, case after case, it's no longer the books themselves he's unpacking, he's unpacking the feelings, one-by-one, the books bring out in him, "not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of the cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris..."

I have more books than I need, many of them books I've yet to read, often acquired at times like this time when I need news beyond what I've already seen or heard. I'm going spend some time today looking through my shelves for the book I haven't yet read, the book I need right now, the book that has the one ideal disordered future stored up inside of it that's made just for me.

'Silk purse with Macbook Pro', photographic composition by the author, June, 2018, all rights reserved.