#walter.benjamin

Around 1840 it was ..fashionable to take turtles for a walk.. ..The flaneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace.. ..If they had had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace. But this attitude did not prevail.

his real life-and this is the stuff that stories are made of-first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end-unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it-suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story. ..Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, it is natural history to which his stories refer back.