Unpacking Walter Benjamin's Library

The first of three shorter essays

It’s been a while since I wrote, and for that, I apologize. I’ve been meaning to follow up my previous post with the promised addendum on imitation and sub-creation, but those thoughts need more time to cohere.

Instead, the next three posts will be short(ish) pieces in response to essays I’ve read over the last few months, since reading whole books has been harder — and writing minor treatises, as was my wont, all but impossible. Hopefully by the time I’m finished publishing these three pieces, something fuller-bodied will have finished fermenting down in ye olde cellar of the mind.

Walter Respects the Chemistry

I came across Walter Benjamin’s name years ago attached to a quote in the signature line of an email from one of my college professors: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Intriguing. Edgy. I remember looking Benjamin up at the time, thinking he looked depressed, and drifting on to whatever next thing snagged my then-sciuridous attention. But his name resurfaced recently while wandering the equivocal Amazonian wilds, when I found two of his essay collections, Illuminations and Reflections. I was immediately drawn to the first entry in the first of the two, “Unpacking My Library”.

Why?

Because this is what my living room looks like:

Might this bleak, embattled Benjamin be a kindred spirit? 

“I am unpacking my library,” he begins.

I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood — it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation — which these books arouse in a genuine collector. (Illuminations, p. 1)

So far, so relatable. I’ve steadily accumulated several hundred volumes since college; I’ve moved cross-country four times since, lugging a heavier burden each time. I have gone through the arduous ritual of removing the books from their crates and placing them on shelves, then shifting some of this way, some more of them that, until finally settling back into a chair, my back stiff, the drink in my hand even stiffer, thinking the job done… only to remember the box in the front seat of the car.

But am I a genuine collector? 

Prior to reading Benjamin, I’d have replied to that question with a dismissive shrug. “Is NYC denizen Douglas Murray ‘a true Scotsman’? Who cares? I have the books; what else do you need?” But now I’m not so sure that I am — nor sure that it’s a bad thing not to be.

Common Ground

There are, of course, numerous ways in which I am a collector, as Benjamin defines it. I laughed out loud when I came across these lines: “Of the customary modes of acquisition, the one most appropriate to a collector would be the borrowing of a book with its attendant non-returning.” (ibid, p. 4) And I couldn’t help but feel somewhat convicted, as the Evangelicals would say, by these lines: “The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books.” (ibid, p. 4) 

But the overlapping is deeper than these more trifling observations. My sensitivity to the organization of my books, for instance, is matched only by my habit of reorganizing them every few months. This is partly because I get bored seeing the same thing day in and day out, but also because, as I read the books, I’m struck by resonances between them that seem to justify placing some next to others. To the outside observer — my long-suffering housemates, say — the bimonthly redistribution probably looks frivolous at best — at worst, insane. I think it’s neither.

Reading constantly transforms my thoughts about the world and the past, and the systematic organization of those thoughts is correspondingly coruscant. And what is a bookshelf but a canvas on which visually to express one’s systematic thoughts? The day I decide to let my books rest in peace will be the day I log off the examined life. 

Knowing that any one distribution of my books is temporary and contingent on new discoveries keeps me from slipping too far into canonical thinking about tradition and the past. This is where Benjamin speaks to and for me most of all: the collector knows that what he does consciously to his books, everyone does unconsciously to the past and to their own identities.

The chance, the fate, that suffuses the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. 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? (ibid, p. 2) 

Yet here, precisely where I had found the deepest point of contact with Benjamin, is also where we part ways. For while we’re both aware of the fragility and contingency of a collection’s principle of order, our respective motives for collecting and ordering couldn’t be more different: 

to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles with the element of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. ... To renew the old world — that is the collector's deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things, and that is why a collector of older books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting than the acquirer of luxury editions. (ibid, p. 3)

For Benjamin, the collector — of books, of records, of stamps, of anything — seeks to recreate the past to which his treasures point. And not just the past disclosed by the book, mind you, but the book’s past itself. 

Habent sua fata libelli: these words may have been intended as a general statement about books. So books like The Divine Comedy, Spinoza’s Ethics, and The Origin of Species have their fates. A collector, however, interprets this Latin saying differently. For him, not only books but also copies of books have their fates. (ibid, p. 4)

Dates, place names, formats, previous owners, bindings, and the like: all these details must tell him something — not as dry isolated facts, but as a harmonious whole; from the quality and intensity of this harmony he must be able to recognize whether a book is for him or not. (ibid, p. 6)

And this re-creation, as far as I can tell from the essay, has no ulterior motive: it is its own reward. It is the establishment of a conscious relation between the past and the owner’s present, which is maintained through the sense of possession. 

A collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility. (ibid, p. 9) 

Now, I doubt that Benjamin has any illusions about his or any collection’s ever commanding anything like dogmatic finality. Like Eliot, he knows that

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
(East Coker, II)

Yet for both Eliot and Benjamin, dogmatic finality isn’t the goal: the very act of situating oneself in time, in relation to a vanished past, suffices. 

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
(Little Gidding, V)

Eliot’s poetic plea to preserve Europe’s historic physical and literary culture finds an echo in Benjamin’s advocacy of ownership as the soundest mode of contact with the past.¹ “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects,” he says of the collector, adding “not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” (Illuminations, p. 10) 

Benjamin’s “genuine collector,” therefore, finds meaning by living in and deriving meaning from the past he recaptures, in however fragmented form, through its physical remnants scattered in glorious disarray across his living room and study. In some ways, that these remnants should be books is, in the last analysis, irrelevant. “Unpacking My Library” turns out to be not so much about Benjamin’s library as the fact that he has a library at all. It’s not about books but collecting.

And I don’t give a rodent’s caudal posterior about collecting.

Persons and Things

It’s true that I borrow books and tend to forget that I borrowed them, that I own more books than I’ve read, and that I acquire them faster than I read them. For all that, I’m still not a collector, in Benjamin’s sense.

I always buy books with the intention of reading them eventually — and eventually I do read them. But there’s a season for everything under the sun, including reading. This goes back to the business of organizing my library. Knowing that this or that book was a response to, an influence on, or in any way connected to another one — that Turgenev was a target for Dostoevsky, that Li Po and Du Fu were inspirations for Basho, and so on — makes me want to have those other books on hand. But I don’t necessarily exhaust every rabbit hole before wriggling out and diving down another one; I maintain residences at the business ends of many rabbit holes, you might say. I furnish each residence with new books, which I read when next passing through.

I also don’t much care who owned the books before me, or what format and physical edition they come in. That knowledge may affect a book’s cachet after the fact — like the straight up Half-Blood Princely annotations in my copy of Mises’ Human Action — but it doesn’t factor into my pre-purchase deliberating. 

If there is any common factor in my attitude toward books, it’s that they strike me less as things — less as property, and therefore less as objects of ownership, as Benjamin would have them² — and more as people. 

Does that sound strange? Probably, and maybe it should. But hear me out. “Friendship,” Lewis famously says in The Four Loves, “is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’” But persons speak through written as well as properly spoken words — and continue to speak long after they’re dead. That’s the whole point of a book, isn’t it? Depressing as it may sound, I have found more friends among the dead than among the living — perhaps because I dislike bars, parties, talking to strangers, group activities, and, above all, those ghastly Theologies on Tap, Young Adult Nights, and other mixers for people who prefer ‘courting’ to ‘dating.’

And for what it’s worth, I’m not alone. Says Goethe, 

Books, we find, are like new acquaintances. To begin with, we are highly delighted if we find an area of general agreement, if we feel a friendly response concerning some important aspect of our life. It is only on closer acquaintance that differences begin to emerge, at which point the great thing is not immediately to recoil, as may happen at a more youthful age, but to cling very firmly to areas of agreement and fully to clarify our differences without on that account aiming at identity in our views. (Maxims and Reflections, No. 272) 

About five centuries earlier than Goethe, and half the globe away, Yoshida Kenkō echoed and enriched the German’s sentiment: “It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past.” (Essays in Idleness, No. 13) This notion of communing with an author through books is pervasive, and transcends cultural boundaries. “By the time Rachmaninov got to the fourth of the six volumes of Chekhov’s correspondence that he had with him while he toured America in the early 1930s, he was aghast that his ‘communion’ with Chekhov would soon cease.” (Chekhov: A Life In Letters, “Introduction”, p. xxxvii) 

When I scan my shelves, I don’t usually notice editions, bindings, and gilt covers — I prefer sturdy paperbacks to Folio Editions, because the former are far more readable than the oft-unwieldy latter. What I do notice are the names. My heart beats faster when I take down a book, even if only for a moment before bed, because I know that someone long since gone to dust has entrusted their heart, at least in part, to the pages I hold in my hand. A solitude enriched by books is anything but solitary: I don’t live in the books, like Benjamin’s genuine collector, but I do live through them.

At least, I try to. It’s about as hard to observe the categorical imperative with my books as it is to observe it with flesh and blood people. The temptation is perennial to regard people, real or written, as means rather than as ends.

It’s hard not to detect a certain underlying sense of self-critique in Benjamin’s essay. (Given the bleak expression on his face in the few photos I can find, that should come as no surprise.) If he’s right that to own an object is to live in it, then the Christian exaltation of poverty acquires new depth. 

The classic Aristotelian and Neoplatonic accounts of ownership would have it that possession elevates objects by allowing them to participate in our spiritual lives. The Christian objection is not to deny the possibility of “participation,” but to point out that all too often, it works in the opposite direction: we get lost in our possessions, estranged from our inner selves. Benjamin gives us a concrete image of what, precisely, that can do to us: to live in one’s possessions is not only to divide our souls, but to diminish them, like Voldemort and his Horcruxes. The renunciation of possessions is, paradoxically, an act of clinging, coherence, and self-possession. For “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose his soul?” 

Something to think about before I buy another book, I suppose.

1. That Benjamin gives such credit to ownership is a little surprising, given his close ties to German Marxism.

2. Truth be told, I find Benjamin’s notion of ownership rather baffling. He suggests that, because of their being owned, collected items find their fulfillment in being inherited. I don’t see how that follows at all. Perhaps it's the American in me, but the notion of existentially satisfying ownership seems incompatible with the notion of inheritance. And I’m not so sure it is my inner American: there’s always Chekhov's insightful quip that “heirs are never satisfied.” (A Life in Letters, p. 334, Letter to Alexey Suvorin, 23 March 1895) Those most often responsible for the destruction of a great tradition are nearly always its heirs.