The pioneering explorer of memory worship history too much.

He also wrote too much.

He advised writers to, quote,

never stop writing because you have run out of ideas, unquote.

And often he acted on his own advice.

I confess that there are many pages in Benhamene that I do not understand in which the discourse...

Come on, dude. Okay, yeah, me too, but also I'm not going to say that. Well, the arrogance to be... I must confess I don't like Ben Amin and I also don't understand him. Yeah. The arrogance to be like, I don't understand, to admit that and the implication being that, oh, that's because he was a bad writer or confused and

was this his letter to the editor who asked him to write the preface and they just

publish that? Yeah, it seems like there's some kind of mix-up. I confess I don't understand

in which the discourse seems to be dictating itself and no direction is clear.

Like many esotericists, he abuses the privilege of obscurity.

One more paragraph.

It seems, well, yeah, I can say this maybe at the end.

And yet, Benjamian's writings are uncommonly rich with penetrating and prescient notions.

The impoverishment of experience in modern life, the primacy of memory as a mode of consciousness,

the aura of the work of art, and its eclipse in the age of mechanical, not to speak of electronic,

reproduction, the hope for a profane illumination, the eternal entanglement of barbarism

with civilizations, the critical utility of the messianic idea.

All these notions are just, justly celebrated, as are his luminous explanations of Goethe, Baudelaire, and Kafka, and Kraus.

Ben-Aemian's work is evidence of the light that religious sensibility may shine upon secular existence.

These are certainly very few critics who can match his power and suggestiveness, as you are proving right now.

His ideas are intuitions have a way of lingering productively, even when you quarrel with them.

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