The Arcades Project - Operi

a good subject for wax. Boredom is always the external surface of uncon­
scious events. Therefore, it could appear to the great dandies as a mark of distinction. For
it is precisely the dandy who despises new clothing: whatever he wears must appear
slightly frayed. As opposed to a theory of dreams that would reveal to us "psyches," the
world that comes to seem pointless. What about it?
Arcades: houses, passages, having no outside. Like the dream.
Catalogue of muses : Luna,
Merode, Dulcinea , Libido, Baby Cadum, and Friederike
And boredom is the grating before which the courtesan teases death.
There are, at bottom, two sorts of philosophy and two ways of noting down
thoughts. One is to sow them in the snow-or, if you prefer, in the fire clay-of
pages; Satum is the reader to contemplate their increase, and indeed to harvest
their flower (the meaning) or their fruit (the verbal expression). The other way is
to bury them with dignity and erect as sepulcher above their grave the image, the
metaphor-cold and barren marble."
Most hidden aspect of the big cities: this historical object, the new metropolis, with its
uniform streets and endless rows of houses, has given material existence to those architec­
tures of which the ancients dreamed-the labyrinths. Man of the crowd. Impulse that
turns the big cities into a labyrinth. Fulfilled through tlle covered passageways of the
arcades.
Perspective : plush for silk . Plush the material of the age of Louis Philippe.
Self-photography and the unrolling of the lived life before the dying. Two kinds of
memory ( p roust) . Relationship of this kind of memory with the
dream.
Hegel: in itself-for itself-in and for itself. In the Phiinomenologie, these stages of
the dialectic become consciousness-self-consciousness-reason.
Gamut in the word passage.
"Rainshowers have given birth to many adventures." 22 Diminishing magical power of the
rain. Mackintosh.
What the big city of modern times has made of the ancient conception of the
labyrinth. It has raised it, through the names of streets, into the sphere of language,
raised it from out of the network of streets in which the city designated
within language .