‘The text is a forest in which the reader is hunter.’- Walter Benjamin, born on this day 1892

A feeling I experienced regularly as I worked my way incrementally through the 1,000+ pages of quotations, citations and commentaries that make up Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, rationing my intake in my efforts to hunt down meaning within this ‘magic encyclopaedia’.1 As a writer who often uses the medium of found language, The Arcades Project has been fascinating, inspiring and frankly, sometimes more than a little hard-going. But three months and two packs of sticky tabs later, I find myself missing these daily excursions into the dense, diverse foliage of Boredom, Baudelaire, Fashion, Flâneurs and everything in between. The reading may be finished (for now) but the adventure of trying to unpick the text has only just begun.

A J Moore

15 July 2021

1 Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin, Translators Foreword, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002).