June 22, 2006
"In the Footsteps of Walter Benjamin"
Found, of all places, in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Michael D. Jackson's travel essay about re-tracing Walter Benjamin's final footsteps on the border of France and Spain is quite a good read. Two excerpts, both taken from a little more than halfway through the text:
And so I began the hardest part of my journey. The wind was now so strong that at times I was almost knocked off my feet or could make little headway walking into it. I chose to hug the rockface rather than walk along the outer edge of the road, even though there were few places where I could safely step aside while cars passed. But as I approached the ridge, I could see that the road doubled back, presumably descending from that point on into Spain. I passed a sign warning of Paravent Violent, cut across the corner of the road, and was immediately in sight of the Douane—a narrow building around which the downhill road flowed like a stream. Its offices were devoid of furniture; there was no indication that it was still in use; and I felt a momentary pang of disappointment that I could simply walk past this point where the fate of so many desperate travelers had been decided by the caprice or greed of a frontier guard, a cable from Madrid, or even the hour of the day. Perhaps nothing defines the plight of the refugee more than this overwhelming sense that one's life is no longer in one's own hands, that one is totally dependent on the goodwill of others, and yet utterly ignorant of what the future holds. I therefore found it poignant to recall that one of Benjamin's last published essays had been a commentary on Bertold Brecht's great poem Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao Te Ching on Lao Tzu's Way into Exile, in which he pointed out that an act of pure friendship between a customs officer and the 70-year-old sage, going into exile on an ox, was the only reason that Lao Tzu's inimitable work survived, to be passed down through the centuries to us. It is thus a reminder that the one hope we have in this world is that compassion will triumph over indifference.
And then:
What affinity drew me to Benjamin?And then it occurred to me that this affinity had less to do with the inspiration I had drawn from Benjamin's ideas of allegory and narratively coherent experience (erfahrung), or from the notion that the form of our writing may imitate the "natural" or spontaneous forms in which the world appears to us; it came mostly from the way I have taken heart, for many years, from his example, and come to see that the maverick life of a thinker, arcane and obsolete though it is nowadays seen to be, is as legitimate as any other vocation. Although our backgrounds and upbringing were utterly unlike, and he died the year I was born, had I not, from the beginning, been attracted to the life of the mind, only to find that such an existence had little value in the country where I was raised? But in contrast to Benjamin, I did not aspire to intellectual greatness. This was not because I embraced the anti-intellectualism of my native culture, or, like Pierre Bourdieu, felt ashamed of thought; it was because I had always been convinced that thought and language were profoundly inadequate to the world, and could neither save nor redeem us. It may not have been Benjamin's intellectuality that made him so maladroit. But it did offer him a kind of magical bolthole where he could avoid taking action, and console himself that the world was safe and secure as long as he could make it appear so in what he thought and wrote.
Harvard University Press has done a great job of publishing English translations of Benjamin's writing. In April the press added two titles to its Benjamin list, Berlin Childhood around 1900 and On Hashish.