Reading Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” really made me think about what it means to truly own something versus just having it. Benjamin opens his essay by quite literally unpacking his book collection, and right away he admits he’s not going to give us some organized tour through his shelves. Instead, he invites us into “the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper” (59). There’s something really honest and kind of refreshing about this. It’s like he’s not pretending his collection is some perfectly curated thing.
What really interested me was Benjamin’s idea that collecting is fundamentally irrational. He writes about how “every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories” (60). This isn’t about building a useful library or even necessarily reading all the books. It’s about the memories attached to each one. Where you found it, who owned it before, the thrill of finally tracking down that one edition you’d been searching for. As someone who still has books from middle school that I’ll probably never reread in my life time, I get this. They’re not just objects, they’re like physical markers of different moments in my life.
The tension Benjamin describes between order and disorder in collecting really resonated with me. Collectors want to organize and catalog everything, but the actual experience of collecting is messy and emotional and sometimes totally random. You don’t always acquire books in a logical order. Sometimes you just stumble upon something that feels right in the moment.
What I found kind of profound was his point about renewal through collecting. He argues that acquiring an old book is like giving it a new life, pulling it out of obscurity and making it part of your world. In our age of digital everything and minimalism, there’s something almost rebellious about accumulating physical books and caring deeply about which edition you have or where it came from. Benjamin’s essay makes me wonder if we’ve lost something by treating books as just functional objects.
So many great points here! “Reading Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” really made me think about what it means to truly own something versus just having it.” And “The tension Benjamin describes between order and disorder in collecting really resonated with me.” I hope you will lead us in conversation about this essay and how it matters to us, and our study, now.
Hi Delinda,
After this weeks readings, I also was left thinking about the chaos of a collection and how amongst all the chaos is memories that serve as parameters. It brought me back to the perception of everyone’s collection, and how what may seem messy and unorganized to the outside eye is really bordered by the owner’s memories. This also goes back to the importance of deep diving the “whys” of an archive as it holds a narrative within itself.