“We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it. And yet even this statement is imprecise and far too crude. For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection.”
More from Walter Benjamin
“Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.”
“For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in closure, feeling…”
“Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does…”
“The Latin word textum means 'web.'”