Collectors are people with a tactical instinct their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. Property and possession belong to the tactical sphere. I have made my most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient. Half the joy of thumbing through my albums springs from the memories of their general pursuit and specific discoveries - that unknown, third Whipping Boy album I found at that cramped shop along the south bank of the Liffey, the Denzil record finally purchased after the unheralded wunderkind’s poorly attended club show during a lightning storm in Tulsa, the live Lloyd Cole B-sides that made two hours’ digging in the basement of New Orleans’ Record Ron’s worth every dust-choked minute. While reading Benjamin’s book-induced reverie, I empathized not only within the freshness of my study’s own musty odors - I also began mentally substituting the word “books” for the word “records.” Music collectors likely would find this piece equally comforting. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter” (67). Benjamin adds that “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. In fact, once a private collection goes public, something is lost - a challenge familiar to those with experience in archives, where some contextual explanation necessarily precedes a researcher’s exploration. The public worth of a private collection, Benjamin says, is basically not much. Public objects are hoarded for purely private means, resulting in a private collection to which the clearest map is visible only to the individual collector. Paging Miss Marchmont ( “I love Memory to-night …”)! 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? (60) More than that, the chance, the fate, that suffuses the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. It’s all about memory, for Benjamin, this gazing at crates and shelves:Įvery passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. It’s a relief of reunion with not texts as much as objects and the memories they transmit, like beacons. “I am unpacking my library,” he opens, adding, “Yes, I am” - this second sentence not confirmation of fact but breathless celebration among those he knows will share in the revelry. A speech to fellow bibliophiles, these remarks celebrate the fastidious privacy of the (bourgeois) collecting habit. “Unpacking My Library” is a rich treat on both fronts, interesting ideas from an obviously interesting person. Benjamin is a figure I keep bumping into in graduate studies, and someday I’ll tackle his mammoth Arcades Project (for all I’ve ever really wanted to be in life is a flanêur), and I find him intriguing as a complex man and a down-to-earth theorist.
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