Benjamin’s library was a personal monument, the same kind that we all construct of things we like or identify with, building our sense of taste. Its importance lay in its permanence—collections are made up of things that we own, that don’t go away unless we decide they should. “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects,” Benjamin wrote. “Not that they have come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” In other words, we often discover, and even rediscover, ourselves in what we keep around us. But that codependence or co-evolution of collection and person
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