"Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship" By Gershom Scholem

Going through a Cioran withdrawal, but I've pulled myself away to start something new. Still reading the intro but it promises to be a good read (another selection from NYRB), perhaps revealing the author (whom I know next to nothing about) as much as the object of his friendship: Benjamin.

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An excerpt from the Introduction (taking a slice which also includes another big name: Hannah Arendt, who apparently also wrote an important essay on Benjamin):

Arendt's denial of Benjamin's religious nature was not the only thing that must have incited Scholem. Her insistence on "bad luck" as the guiding force behind Benjamin's life must also have provoked him. Benjamin's idea of history as "one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage" becomes in Arendt's perspective Benjamin's projection of his own unluckiness, the "pile of debris" that fate kept throwing across his path. "Benjamin's suicide," she writes, "was an uncommon stroke of bad luck." Tying Benjamin's will to fortune's wheel, she contradicted Scholem's belief that Benjamin had made a fatal, but altogether voluntary, decision not to go to Palestine, attaching himself instead to the tainted soil of a secular, European environment.

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