One-way street

The first time I heard the word was when I heard Faye Wong's song. There was a time when it played over and over again. And then I read Benjamin, and I read One-way Street, which is one of Benjamin's great books, a collection of images, scattered in bits and pieces throughout the book, but not scattered. As a sensitive person of an era, I am delicate and fragile, so I will inevitably have a sense of identity. He dug into the subtle corners of life and spoke of reason and thought. I loved this book as much as I loved Trepidation. But the translation of the Chinese version is hard to avoid, the notes are also very killjoy. If you can read the original, is the real enjoyment.

"Walter Benjamin (1892 -- 1940), a Jew. He was a rare genius of the 20th century, a true genius, "the last intellectual in Europe". Benjamin's life is a wandering drama. His Kafkaesque delicacy, sensitivity and vulnerability do not allow him to hide quietly in a fixed night, but drive him to experience shock all over Europe. Benjamin's loneliness is the loneliness in the background of noise and movement. This loneliness makes people despair and urges them to hope. Benjamin's writing always hovered between despair and hope, between the public and theology, and thus acquired some ambiguous ethical attitude. Ambiguity is one of Benjamin's characteristics. His identity, his profession, his themes, his writings, his beliefs, his space, his words, are all uncertain and difficult to categorize. What is truly certain is only his erudition, talent and acute dialectic integration, which left the 20th century with a huge figure and a space for reflection.

Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 in the Spanish border town where, three years earlier, the English writer George Orwell had fled to France after suffering the worst of the Spanish Civil War.

"The traditional tragic psychology thinks that depression is a kind of pleasure immersed in the pain, is a kind of low reflection, a kind of sweet sorrow, a kind of looking at their own sad feeling, is to dissolve any concrete reality of pain reference, but only addicted to the pain of the signifier itself is a pleasure. I don't want to contradict this statement, but rather, I'd like to offer my full praise for how poignant, how visceral, and even beautiful this theory can be. But when I unthinkingly consider using the word "melancholy" to summarize Benjamin's stylistic characteristics, I immediately measure the lightness of the word in my sensory scales.

To interpret melancholy as a positive sensibility absorbed in frustration overlooks the possible depth of the sinking into the abyss of helplessness that keeps any great melancholy from seeming shallow. Melancholy eyes may urgently call for a kind of dialectical understanding of tenderness. The poet who wrote the poem "Facing the sea, with spring blossoms" in anticipation of the "lightning of happiness" is the same one who chose to commit suicide by throwing himself on the rails. The poet who delivers the last beautiful speech, but "like a man who climbs a rickety mast in a sinking ship, there... Send out a distress signal ". If we contemplate only the "shock" effect that the man of letters undergoes in the arcades, if we contemplate only the great Gospel of the Messianic anachronism that is delivered to us by the art of mechanical reproduction, that is to say, if we fetishize only the soaring romance of Benjamin, then we accept only the flame of the philosopher's body, which is about to be swallowed by the darkness. We will forget the endless darkness that surrounds this candle."

In this day and age, it's a blessing to be able to sit down and read. A good book may not give you the pleasure of reading all the time, but it will be recalled in your mind at some point long after.