The Arcades Project - Operi

only holds good in the space of the just life. Namely: that the world is always the
same (that all events could have taken place in the same space). On a theoretical
plane, despite everything (despite the keen insight lurking within it), this is a tired
and withered truth. Nevertheless, it finds supreme confirmation in the existence
of the pious, to whom all things serve the greatest good, as here the space serves
all that has happened. So deeply is the theological element sunk in the realm of
colportage. One might even say that the deepest truths, far from having risen
above the animal torpor of human being, possess the mighty power of being able
to adapt to the dull and commonplace-indeed, of mirroring themselves, after
their fashion, in irresponsible dreams. [S 1 a,S]
No decline of the arcades, but sudden transformation. At one blow, they became
the hollow mold from which the image of "modernity" was cast. Here, the
century mirrored with satisfaction its most recent past. [Sla,6]
Every date from the sixteenth century trails purple after it. Those of the nineteenth
century are only now receiving their physiognomy. Especially from the
data of architecture and socialism. [Sla,7]
Every epoch appears to itself inescapably modem-but each one also has a right
to be taken thus. What is to be understood by "inescapably lTIodern;' however,
emerges very clearly in the following sentence: "Perhaps our descendants will
understand the second main period of history after Christ to have its inception in
the French Revolution and in the tum from the eighteenth to the nineteenth
century, while grasping the first main period in terms of the development of the
whole Christian world, including the Reformation." At another place, it is a
question of "a great period that cuts more deeply than any other into the history
of the world-a period without religious founders, without refoDners or lawgivers:'
Julius Meyer, GeJchichte der modernen FranZOJLsChen Malad (Leipzig, 1867),
pp. 22, 21. The author assumes that history is constantly expanding. But tins is,
in reality, a consequence of the fact that industry gives it its truly epochal character.
The feeling that an epochal upheaval had begun with the nineteenth century
was no special privilege of Hegel and Marx. [Sla,8]
The dreaming collective knows no history. Events pass before it as always identical
and always new. The sensation of the newest and most modern is, in fact, just
as much a dream formation of events as "the eternal return of the sanle." The
perception of space that corresponds to this perception of time is the interpenetrating
and superposed transparency of the world of the f1iineur. This feeling of
space, this feeling of time, presided at the birth of modem feuilletonism. 0 Dream
Collective 0 [S2,1]
"What drives us into contemplation of the past is the similarity between what has
been and our own life, which are somehow one being. Through grasping this