The storyteller Illuminations Walter benjamin [VII-XI]
As Benjamin gets closer to describing 'understanding' he begins to bring up the idea of death. At first he gets into the subject by suggesting that meaning is brought out by work of the mind. Stories are labored memories that become drenched in the psyche and blend the external with the internal.
Then he talks about death. I think the train of thought began talking about how workers would tell stories about their life and how a story was told concerning someone who died while working. This change I have to interject myself and claim benjamin is still uncomfortable talking about meaning and started to define a storyteller as a worker and then killed him off when the discomfort became too great.
This continues as he laments how houses do not serve as a place for dying as was the custom in the past. The house being an obvious allusion to his inner pysche that he is again distancing himself from as he imagines someone dying in each room.
Olympus Imagines Philostratus
Here we are in the mind of someone observing Olympus who symbolizes beauty but is a character who in himself is autistic and uncommunicative.
The passage seems to place him in some sort of desert but as we start to consider him water and particularly when we observe his head details of plant life surface.
The voice we read becomes envious of the reflecting nature of water and as an aside tells us we can better reflect
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