Mash up of nachträglichkeit: Borges versus Benjamin and Hoffman

And all at once, these images fuse with the past until they portray an event that has actually happened, or even one that is yet to come. The hands giving us our change at a ticket window perhaps repeat those that one day were nailed to the cross by some soldiers. Whereby a picture is conjured up within the depths of his being. Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history  – just as one may lose a magic number made up of customary digits, just as one loses for ever an image in a kaleidoscope. As if they find their true abode with that artist’s soul.  Indeed, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past. And the artist has unique and secret power. The artist. The chronicler. The artist. The chronicler recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small acts in accordance with the following truth:  we may see them and be unaware of it. So that figures hitherto imperceptible and disembodied, mere shreds of mist drifting in empty free space, first take shape and then come to life.  We have lost those features. Which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each of its lived moments becomes a Jew’s profile, perhaps that of Christ in the subway.