The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin Read Free Book Online Page A

which he’d gone on in order to escape the memory of a wild and, as they say, unworthy, indeed, shameful young love – Olympia – whose name he had just absent-mindedly scrawled into the sand.
    â€˜I’m thinking of my street. Or of you, if you will – they’re one and the same. The street where a word of yours became more vivid than any other I have heard before or since. It is just as you once told me in Travemünde: that in the end, every journey and every adventure must revolve around a woman, or at least a woman’s name. For such is the grip required by the red thread of experience, in order to pass from one hand to the next. You were right. But as I walked up that hot street, I could not yet fathom quite how strange it was – and why – that for the past few seconds my footsteps appeared to call out to me like a voice from the reverberant, deserted alleyway. The surrounding buildings had little in common with the ones that made this southern Italian town famous. Not old enough to be weathered and not new enough to be inviting, this was an assembly of whims from the purgatory of architecture. Closed shutters underscored the obduracy of the grey facades, and the glory of the South seemed to have withdrawn into the shadows that mounted under the earthquake supports and arches of theside streets. Every step that I took led me further away from all the things that I had come to see; I left behind the pinacoteca and the cathedral, and I would have scarcely had the strength to change direction even if the sight of red wooden arms – apparently candelabras which, as I only just noticed, appeared to grow in regular intervals out of the walls on either side of the street – had not given me cause for new reverie. I say reverie precisely because I could not fathom, and did not even attempt to explain how traces of such archaic lighting forms could have survived in this mountain town, which – though it is poor – is nonetheless electrified and irrigated. That is why it seemed perfectly reasonable to me, a few steps farther, to stumble across shawls, drapes, scarves and rugs that had seemingly just been washed. A few crumpled paper lanterns, which hung from the dingy windows of the surrounding houses, completed the image of wretched, paltry housekeeping. I would have liked to ask someone how to get back to town by a different route. I was fed up with this street, not least because it was so devoid of people. Precisely because of that, I had to abandon my intention and – nigh on humiliated – go back the way I had come, as though under the yoke. Determined to make up for lost time, and to atone for what appeared to me as a defeat, I decided to forgo lunch, and – more bitterly – any midday rest, so that after a short walk up some steep steps, I found myself on the square before the cathedral.
    â€˜If previously the absence of people had been oppressive, now it seemed a liberating solitude. My spirit was lifted instantaneously. Nothing would have been more unwelcome than being spoken to or even noticed. All at once I was returned into the hands of my traveller’s fate – that of the lone adventurer – and once more I recalled the moment when I first became conscious of it, standing, racked by pain, above the Marina Grande, notfar from Ravello. This time too I was surrounded by mountains. But in place of the stony cliffs with which Ravello cascades into the sea, it was the marbled flanks of the cathedral, and above its snowy slopes countless stone saints seemed to descend on a pilgrimage down to us humans. As I followed the procession with my eyes, I saw that the foundation of the building lay exposed: a passage had been excavated, and several sharp steps led underground to a brass door that stood slightly ajar. Why I sneaked in through this subterranean side entrance, I do not know. Perhaps it was only the fear that sometimes befalls us when we