some fragments of an introduction...

"a remembered event is infinite, because it is merely a key to everything that happened before and after it."
w. benjamin

"he could find himself in the only environment in which he could live and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say, entirely outside of time"
m. proust

"the fairy in whose presence we are granted a wish is there for each of us. but few of us know how to remember the wish we have made; and so, few of us recognize its fulfillment later in our lives"
w. benjamin

"proust listens attentively for the echo of the past; benjamin listens for the first notes of a future which has meanwhile become the past"
peter szondi

"technology is the mastery not of nature but of the relationship between nature and man"
w. benjamin

bits from translator's forward and introduction to walter benjamin's berlin childhood around 1900, belknap press, harvard, 2006