an identical pen in his left hand. I take a sip of whiskey, and the Other does likewise with the other hand, we are countless men, our images forever receding and approaching in an infinite recession and progression. I am writing this with a Japanese Sailor Professional Gear pen with a Fine nib which corresponds to a European Extra Fine, about 0.5mm, and I think Walter Benjamin would have liked the Sailor Extra Fine nib, which draws, I would guess, an 0.25mm line – Benjamin whose famously miniscule hand could fit some hundreds of words on to a single sheet of hotel notepaper – Benjamin to whom the finest available nib was too broad, whereupon he would turn the pen around and use the back of the nib instead. I think of his notebooks in different formats and dimensions, crammed with writing – describing, annotating, cataloguing, speculating. I think of a sheet of buff paper found in his archive, headed with the emblem of Acqua Pellegrino, a blue-grey bottle against a red five-pointed star, on which he has written, or rather, this is an English translation of what he wrote: ‘What is Aura? The experience of an aura rests on the transposition of a form of reaction normal in human society to the relationship of nature to people. The one who is seen or believes himself to be seen (glances up) answers with a glance … When a person, an animal, or something inanimate returns our glance with its own, we are drawn initially into the distance; its glance is its dreaming … Aura is the appearance of a distance however close it may be. Words themselves have an aura … As much aura in the world as there is still dream in it.’
Above these words, to the right of the San Pellegrino star, Benjamin has written three lines at an upwards diagonal slant. In English, they make up eighteen syllables. A haiku, more or less? Knowing little German, unable in any case to decipher the tiny writing, I do not know if they are an accurate reflection of the original.
Eyes staring at one’s back
Meeting of glances
Glance up, answering a glance
L’aspirateur
Kilpatrick exited Passage des Panoramas into Rue Vivienne. Here, as in Passage des Panoramas, were stamp shops and coin shops, and he thought again of Walter Benjamin’s obsessive collecting – of stamps, picture postcards, books, children’s toys, among other things. Kilpatrick himself had been a stamp-collector – philatelist, rather – in his teens, and intended to devote a section of his Paris book to those many shops which catered for collectors of whatever hue. He had transcribed into his notebook a passage entitled ‘Stamp Shop’, from Benjamin’s One-Way Street , a text which Benjamin termed a notebook:
‘There are collectors who concern themselves only with postmarked stamps … The pursuer of postmarks must, like a detective, possess information on the most notorious post offices, like an archaeologist the art of reconstructing the torsos of the most foreign place-names, and like a cabbalist an inventory of dates for an entire century … Stamp albums are magical reference books; the numbers of monarchs and palaces, of animals and allegories and states, are recorded in them. Postal traffic depends on their harmony as the motion of the planets depends on the harmony of the celestial numbers … Stamps bristle with tiny numbers, minute letters, diminutive leaves and eyes. They are graphic cellular tissue.’
Kilpatrick walked along Rue Vivienne in a reverie, stopping here and there to look into a shop window. He saw himself at the age of fourteen or fifteen with a jeweller’s loupe screwed into his eye-socket, scrutinizing a stamp. He would compare its characteristics to the description in the philatelists’ bible, the Stanley Gibbons catalogue. He would mount it in his loose-leaf stamp album along with others of the set; underneath, in a calligraphic round-hand written with an Osmiroid italic pen, he would transcribe the relevant catalogue details. Like all
Above these words, to the right of the San Pellegrino star, Benjamin has written three lines at an upwards diagonal slant. In English, they make up eighteen syllables. A haiku, more or less? Knowing little German, unable in any case to decipher the tiny writing, I do not know if they are an accurate reflection of the original.
Eyes staring at one’s back
Meeting of glances
Glance up, answering a glance
L’aspirateur
Kilpatrick exited Passage des Panoramas into Rue Vivienne. Here, as in Passage des Panoramas, were stamp shops and coin shops, and he thought again of Walter Benjamin’s obsessive collecting – of stamps, picture postcards, books, children’s toys, among other things. Kilpatrick himself had been a stamp-collector – philatelist, rather – in his teens, and intended to devote a section of his Paris book to those many shops which catered for collectors of whatever hue. He had transcribed into his notebook a passage entitled ‘Stamp Shop’, from Benjamin’s One-Way Street , a text which Benjamin termed a notebook:
‘There are collectors who concern themselves only with postmarked stamps … The pursuer of postmarks must, like a detective, possess information on the most notorious post offices, like an archaeologist the art of reconstructing the torsos of the most foreign place-names, and like a cabbalist an inventory of dates for an entire century … Stamp albums are magical reference books; the numbers of monarchs and palaces, of animals and allegories and states, are recorded in them. Postal traffic depends on their harmony as the motion of the planets depends on the harmony of the celestial numbers … Stamps bristle with tiny numbers, minute letters, diminutive leaves and eyes. They are graphic cellular tissue.’
Kilpatrick walked along Rue Vivienne in a reverie, stopping here and there to look into a shop window. He saw himself at the age of fourteen or fifteen with a jeweller’s loupe screwed into his eye-socket, scrutinizing a stamp. He would compare its characteristics to the description in the philatelists’ bible, the Stanley Gibbons catalogue. He would mount it in his loose-leaf stamp album along with others of the set; underneath, in a calligraphic round-hand written with an Osmiroid italic pen, he would transcribe the relevant catalogue details. Like all
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