A turtle's pace

Walter Benjamin notes that in Baudelaire’s Paris a fleet of more than five hundred sedan chairs was still in use for elegant transport; that it was fashionable for flâneurs to purchase turtles and use them to set their pace; that a worker committed suicide in the home of the fantastically popular novelist Eugѐne Sue, leaving a note in which he hoped ‘dying would be easier for me if I died under the roof a man who stands up for us and loves us.’ The chief interest of this phase of the work is to watch an array of ‘individual details’ deployed and redeployed in the search for new forms of presentation and illumination.

… At a number of points in his final years Benjamin referred to the ‘now of knowability’. ‘Every now,’ he claimed, ‘is the now of a particular knowability.’ His most deeply felt philological conviction was that no document of the past – whether recent or remote – is equally comprehensible at all times. Every document, every work, every poem, has what he called a ‘historical index’, a secret rendezvous with the present. For Benjamin the point of historical study was not that the past shed continuous light on the present, or that the present cast a steady light on the past. Rather, at certain points in history works offer a ‘now of knowability’ (or a ‘now of readability’), a moment of fortuitous opportunity,