Uncover

Lines from Susan Sontag's "Under the Sign of Saturn" collected in Under the Sign of Saturn gather together in a paragraph about the collapsing of time (which is not the same as “time collapsed”):

Benjamin regards everything he chooses to recall in his past as prophetic of the future, because the work of memory (reading oneself backward, he called it) collapses time. There is no chronological ordering of his reminiscences, for which he disavows the name of autobiography, because time is irrelevant. ("Autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life," he writes in Berlin Chronicle. "Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities.") Benjamin, the translator of Proust, wrote fragments of an opus that could be called A la recherche des espace perdus Memory, the staging of the past, turns the flow of events into tableaux. Benjamin is not trying to recover his past but to understand it: to condense it into its spatial forms, its premonitory structures.

Sontag's "perdus" when translated into English one could call the lost the unknown gives spaces in which to get lost à la Benjamim.

And so for day 26
09.01.2007