Unpacking
Library
Walter Benjamin
1892–1940
a p enguin since 2008
Walter Benjamin
Unpacking My Library
Translated
by
J. A. Underwood
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One-Way Street and Other Writings first published in Penguin Classics 2009
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Unpacking My Library
I’m unpacking my library. Really. So it is not yet arranged on the shelves, not yet shrouded in the faint tedium of order. Nor am I yet in a position to stride along its ranks and take its salute in the presence of a friendly audience. You need fear none of that. I must ask you to imagine yourselves with me, amid the disorder of torn-open packing cases, breathing in the sawdust-laden air, the floor around me littered with scraps of paper, eyeing piles of books that have only now, after two years of darkness, been returned to the light of day; I want you, from the outset, to share a little of the mood (not a mournful mood by any means, rather one of anticipation) that they awaken in a true collector.
For such a one is speaking to you today, and by and large he speaks only of himself. It would be presumptuous, surely, to insist on an illusion of objectivity and functionalism by enumerating for you the chief pieces or principal sections of a library or expounding its origins or even explaining for your
benefit how it helps the writer? Certainly it is my intention, in what I am about to say, to pursue a more immediate, more tangible aim; my heart is set on giving you a sense of the collector’s relationship to his possessions, something of an understanding of collecting rather than of a collection. It is quite arbitrary that I do this by way of an examination of the various ways of acquiring books. Such a device or indeed any other is simply a dike raised against the spring tide of memories that comes rolling in towards any collector contemplating his things. Every sort of passion verges on chaos, I know, but what the collecting passion verges on is a chaos of memories.
However, I want to say more than this: chance, fate, which colour the past as I look back – these are simultaneously present to the senses in the familiar muddle of my books. For what are these possessions but a disorder in which, habit having made itself so much at home among them, that disorder can seem like its opposite. You will have heard of people who became invalids after losing their books and of others who, in acquiring books, have turned criminal. In these areas in particular, any kind of order is nothing but a state of uncertainty, a hovering above the abyss. ‘The only precise knowledge that exists,’ Anatole France once said, ‘is knowledge