Welcome to Litsy!

I've wanted to read this book since day I first heard about it. So you might understand how disappointed I am. I've bailed after about 40 pages. The reason is the writing style. It's just not a readable book. Either it's an academic, failing to write for a bigger audience, or he's someone who really hard tries to sound like an academic. Either way - Eilenberger fails. This is just so, so sad...

I have a much richer understanding of what it meant to live the life of a European intellectual between the wars, particularly a Jewish intellectual. Eiland details Benjamin's immersion in a café life of conversation, letters, the many journals devoted to narrow, esoteric interests. Truly, this was a singular time and I couldn‘t help longing for an opportunity to have that life. (But not the death - hopelessly fleeing the Gestapo in the Pyrenees).

“I have now grasped for the fifth or sixth time in my life what is meant by justification through faith. But I have the same trouble here as I have with infinitesimal calculus: as soon as I have mastered it for a few hours, it vanishes again for just as many years” -Walter Benjamin

30% through this book and I can‘t decide which towers higher-Benjamin‘s intellect or self-centeredness. For someone immersed in the humanities, he projects little humaneness to those around him, with occasional exceptions. This man truly would not be known to us today were it not for his wife Dora. Benjamin seems to think most work is a waste of his intellect but he has no problems running up expenses!

15% through Eiland‘s book on Walter Benjamin. Some parts move quickly and some sentences I‘ve read 5 times and still don‘t grasp what Benjamin is trying to convey, even with Eiland‘s elucidation.

Found the above quote on Benjamin‘s relationship with his parents humorous given this described a new college graduate in the early 1920s. I seem to recall similar complaints about the millennial generation this century!

“He both craved solitude and complained of loneliness; he often sought community, sometimes working to create it himself, but was just as often loath to commit himself to any group.“

I can relate to this. I've come to believe there is constant tension of these two desires within an introvert.

#intp
#introvert
#walterbenjamin

January reading plans already altered. Received Jean McNeil‘s Day for Night from #netgalley which is a fictional account of a filmmaker doing a film on the life of Walter Benjamin. I have had the tagged book in Kindle for years and never finished the thing. I think it will add to the enjoyment of the filmmaker novel if I set that aside and read this 700 page tome on Benjamin first.

Thankfully a lightweight sci-fi ended up as my #bookspin read!

“but why were the jews the scapegoats? because, adorno and horkheimer suggested, the image of the jew was the false projection of things that were unbearable about non-jewish society...‘no matter what the jews as such may be like, their image, as that of the defeated people, has the features to which totalitarian domination must be completely hostile: happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth...‘

Well...it was an interesting premise but not much follow through. Clunky and not very engaging writing.

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