The Arcades Project - Operi

higher concreteness, redemption of periods of decline, revision of periodization,
presently stands at such a point, and its utilization in a reactionary or a revolu­
tionary sense is now being decided. In this regard, the writings of the Surrealists
and the new book by Heidegger' point to one and the same crisis in its two
possible solutions. [Sl,6]
Remy de Gourmont on the " Histoire de la societe fraw;aise pendant la Revolution
ct sous Ie Directoire": "It was the fundamental originality of the Goncourts to
create history with the very detritus of history." Remy de Gourmont Le IIm Livre
des masques (Paris, 1924), p. 259. [Sla,l]
"If one takes from history only the most general facts, tll0se which lend them­
selves to parallels and to theories, then it suffices, as Schopenlmuer said, to read
only the morning paper and Herodotus. All the rest intervening-the evident
and fatal repetition of the most distant and the most recent facts-becomes
tedious and useless!' Remy de Courmont, Le 11"" Livre des masques (Paris, 1924),
p. 259. The passage is not entirely clear. The wording would lead one to assume
that repetition in the course of history concerns the great facts as much as tlle
small. But the author himself probably has in mind only the former. Against this
it should be shown that, precisely in the minutiae of the "intervening;' the
eternally selfsame is manifest. [Sla,2]
The constmctions of history are comparable to military orders that discipline the
true life and confine it to barracks. On the other hand: the street insurgence of
the anecdote. The anecdote brings things near to us spatially, lets them enter our
life. It represents the strict antithesis to the sort of history which demands "empa­
thy;' which makes everything abstract. The same technique of nearness may be
practiced, calendrically, with respect to epochs. Let us inmgine that a man dies on
the very day he turns fifty, which is the day on which his son is born, to whom
the same thing happens, and so on. If one were to have the main commence at
the time of the birtll of Christ, the result would be that, in the tinle since we
began our chronological reckoning, not forty men have lived. Thus, the unage of
a historical course of time is totally transfonned as soon as one brings to bear on
it a standard adequate and comprehensible to human life. This pathos of near­
ness, the hatred of the abstract configuration of history in its "epochs," was at
work in the great skeptics like Anatole France. [Sla,3]
There has never been an epoch that did not feel itself to be "modern" in the sense
of eccentric, and did not believe itself to be standing directly before an abyss. The
desperately clear consciousness of being Ul the middle of a crisis is something
chronic in humanity. Every age unavoidably seems to itself a new age. The
"nl0deln;' however, is as varied in its meaning as the different aspects of one and
the same kaleidoscope. [Sla,4]
COll1ection between the colportage intention and the deepest theological inten­
tion. It mirrors it back darkly, displaces into the space of contemplation what