In Praise of the Republic of Letters

I'm a modern everyman. I make use of books to find for myself a dwelling place, if only a temporary one, within the pastiche of narratives and experiences, facts and fantasies. I leaf through the books, do not drink, and do not drive?I smoke and fly, through the tunnel under the city castle and over the main square, hovering for a second under the old plane tree before disappearing among the arcades of cajoling shop windows. For me, the geography of towns, harbors, streets, and squares overlaps with literary topography. The poems and novels I read are chapters in a story about a particular place with which any place can identify. The tension between the fearful anxiety and the thrilling exploration that propels me on my wanderings around my imagined city delineates the modern mentality in which inescapable loyalty to a home place challenges one's need to freely choose identity. I'm not an exception. I remain attached to my birth town, family house, and my reading-corner armchair. I lend an ear to poets and writers as I weave a literary cosmopolis and freely choose my home. I draw from many narrative stocks as I deny the authority of chronological time the better to respond to the melancholic gaze of a deer that flashes by through the morphine-laden verses of Georg Trakl; I trace the vestiges of a personal drama in the wet flowers on the facades of bourgeois palaces under the slopes of Kapuzinerberg; and I am unmistakably, although temporarily, at home in Salzburg! 3

Aesthetics · Art · Drama · Literature · Narrative · Poetry · Praise · Visual arts · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation