Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

by Walter Benjamin

very beautiful letters to the friend that have been published), except that the very notion of thus becoming a useful member of society would have repelled him. No doubt he agreed with Baudelaire, “Être un homme utile m’a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux.” In the introductory paragraphs to the essay on Elective Affinities,

one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So

literary style may in time wither away, only to give rise to immanent tendencies in

hardly recognized translation in this sense, but devoted their entire attention to criticism,

His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to tell his entire life. The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparable aura about the storyteller, in Leskov as in Hauff, in Poe as in Stevenson. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.

happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (freshness of the news, brevity, comprehensibility, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as does the make-up of the pages and the paper’s style. (Karl Kraus never tired of demonstrating the great extent to which the linguistic usage of newspapers paralyzed the imagination of their readers.) Another