Book collecting and bacchantes

Unpacking my library Illuminations Walter benjamin

Benjamin's essay about collecting books emphasized a collectors fetish with books that goes beyond the actual content of the book itself. Quirkily he seems to view books for their potential and latent qualities that could disappear if one reads it as it was intended. His viewpoint blends a child's wild-eyed wonder and a perverse of accumulation. I've never really considered books to be sold in this way, but he describes book auctions where people joust with each other over books that may or may not have value. His poverty gives him reason to feign books like he would a lover and finding them in bargain bins when no one roused attention to them in a competitive setting.

The introduction in the book talks about Benjamin moving and living in places he part belongs and also feels alien. He talks about book stores as if they were the king of a chessboard. There is the atmosphere of a strange heroic journey like don quixote except instead of being possessed by tales read he is just taken away by the book itself without having opened the cover. The book store is Benjamin's castle inn.

It is a curious essay to start the collection. It's like we are starting at the beginning of a childish wonderment. Benjamin has compiled these essays but since we have not read them yet they take on the guise of what we read in this essay about his library. So far they are just lusty paragraphs that might be of interest or just a heap of disappointment. It's as if we have just entered the door to a book shop stocked by Benjamin himself.

Bacchantes Imagines Philostratus

The painting philostratus has the old man describe is of a pack of wild women tearing apart someone's son and nature being present but behaving oddly such as milk oozing from rocks--from what source does this happen! The family grieving over the body is also painting in the same picture separated spatially in the picture.

But the cause of the man's death is in part because he would not join the revelry of the women. A fable inn a symbolic way depicting a man torn apart by wild desires he tries to ignore. In its nature it is both violent and sombre at the same time.