Walter Benjamin: Berlin Childhood Around 1900

It was a prophetic corner. For just as there are plants that are said to confer the power to see into the future, so there are place that possess such a virtue. For the most part, they aredeserted places - treetops leaning against walls, blind alleys or front gardens where no one ever stops. In such places, it seems as if all that lies in store for us has become the past.

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.

The empty grave and the heart weighed in the balance - two enigmas to which life still owes me the solution.