“I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of the 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 en elegiac mood, but, rather, one of anticipation–which these books arouse in a genuine collector.”
…
“Now I am on the last half-emptied case and it is way past midnight. Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about–not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of the cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris; memories of Rosenthal’s sumptuous rooms in Munich, of the Danzig Stockturm where the late Hans Rhaue was domiciled, of Süssengut’s musty book cellar in North Berlin; memories of the rooms where these books had been housed, of my student’s den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of Iseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former location of only four or five of the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me.”
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”, Illuminations, Tr. by Harry Zohn
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Nice reminder of the art in the clutter of books around my home space.