German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 26, 1940) was a writer, a philosopher, a critic, a spiritual skeptic, and, most of all, a collector. Benjamin collected ideas, concepts, books, and small items of personal cosmic worth.   Benjamin's materialism, viewed in the context of Erich Fromm's "having" as a mode of existence seems to be very much materialistic: "To have, so it would seem, is a normal function of our life," Fromm wrote a decade after Benjamin died, "In order to live we must have things. Moreover, we must have things in order to enjoy them"  
And yet, reading Benjamin's love for things for the meaning they carry, and the very title itself, Illuminations, suggest that Benjamin viewed his belongings as a means of emotional and spiritual transcendence through memory. "Memory is consciousness" he tell us. When is having more than mere possession?

Illuminations is a collection of Benjamin's essays—critical and otherwise—chosen and edited by philosopher Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a scholar on institutionalized evil, tells us that collecting was "Benjamin's central passion" and that he had a destructive affinity for the past.

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among the piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness.
From "Unpacking my Library"

Unpacking my library in a room of my own.

Arendt tells us in her introduction (Benjamin was her brother-in-law and colleague) that everything was collected and gathered in Benjamin's life and work, and, more importantly, everything mattered. Everything mattered so much that Benjamin was never able to define or limit himself clearly:

His erudition was great, but he was no scholar; his subject matter comprised text and their interpretation, but he was no philologist; he was greatly attracted not by religion but by theology and the theological type of interpretation for which the text itself is sacred, but he was no theologian. He was a born writer, but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotations.

Finding meaning inversely proportional to a thing's size must have made for excruciatingly intense living. Importance through time becomes a memory.

Memory was central to Benjamin's writing; he believed through memory, we pull consciousness. But memory depends on space, place, and time. With such contextualization, it can stay intact.   Read more on the physical contextualization of memory in my article "The Alienation We Feel When We Return Home" or Gaston Bachelard's wonderful Poetics of Space.

This applies to art as well as memory. In Benjamin's seminal essay about the reproduction and intrinsic meaning of art, he writes, "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be."

In principle, a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new.
From "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

According to Benjamin, if art is precisely reproduced, it becomes new. Likewise, if it is moved from the place it was made - if the dialogue with space it has in situ is no more - it becomes new.

Contemplation of Barbara Hepworth's "Two Turning Forms" moved to London for exhibition. Typically housed in Yorkshire. Made in the Artist's studio, St. Ives. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Benjamin's feelings of space, memory, and artistic creation culminated in his master oeuvre: "a work consisting entirely of quotations," which, according to Arendt, was Benjamin's dream.   In her timeless essays on the power, ethics and visual code of photography, Susan Sontag includes a last chapter dedicated to Benjamin's dream. An assemblage of quotations on photography: like Man Ray’s “I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot photograph” and Nietzsche’s “To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it as necessarily wrongly.”

For years, a lifetime, Benjamin collected boxes and files of quotes, each annotated and indexed, which he kept, along with his books, in his Paris apartment. What a sight!

I believe there is something in all of us that collects and makes particular things unique through caring. Books especially bestow an uplift. More than having read them, it is the act of owning them. They are there, untouched, unsullied, a promised accomplishment, a road towards a dream, a full realization of our human potential.   The fantasy life and promise of books—physical, material beings and the power from their ownership—abounds in fiction itself. Books were expensive, no doubt, and owning them meant wealth as well as an education beyond one's native language. But that was not all.    
Whether it be George Eliot's Casaubon and his pursuit of "A Key to All Mythologies," Elias Canetti's monkish character in Auto da Fe who is blinded and inflamed by his total devotion to books, or Benjamin's real-life hope for a book of all quotations and his massive collection of books and quotes towards that end, there is a dream that we form and cling to, and that dream lives quite strongly in books. More than it does in other collections. At times—as happened with each of these examples—we forget that dream isn't life itself.

A collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.
From "Unpacking my Library"

Benjamin had already fled when the Nazis marched into Paris, but his apartment—and all his quotations and books—remained.

When these items—all physical, embodied things—were threatened, legend and lore would have us believe Benjamin took his own life. Others say he was crossing the border into Spain, and due to administrative error and grave health, he could not find safety. Whatever the cause, Benjamin overdosed on morphine tablets and died aged 48.

There is a passage in Elie Wiesel's Night, the horrifying story of his incarceration in Auschwitz, that might illuminate Benjamin's mentality. Wiesel wrote of the moment hope failed: "Our beloved objects we carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and with them, finally, our illusions."

 Walter Benjamin's library card for the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, 1940.

Compare Benjamin's writings on artistic reproduction to Susan Sontag's study of photographs and human empathy. For a deeper look into how we bind ourselves to objects, look at my compilations of meaning: Things We Cannot Abandon, Precious Things We Keep Nearby, and Things Grown Piece by Piece. And Lynne Sharon Schwartz' intimate map of the mind and soul of a life-long reader.

Benjamin believed art—and therefore humankind—must be anchored to time, space, culture, ritual, and environment. What does this mean in our digital world? Do I exist here on this Site?

Do you?