Status Updates From Illuminations: Essays and R...

The difference between storytelling and communicating information is that storytelling is meant to be a more intimate telling of one's own experiences and creative thinking, whereas mere information is nothing but a raw conveying of meaning and/or description.

Storytelling is a lost art in terms of how people should communicate their experiences. Part of this is due to the fact that anyone can tell their story, and some people believe their experiences are unworthy of being told. No matter how boring or even traumatic one's own experiences might be, every person is a world onto itself in terms of experiences.

There is no such thing as a perfect or total translation of a work. The rift time and cultures creates makes it so that the original meaning of any writing becomes lost and is never found again in perfect form.

What the translator must do to compensate for this is to generate a whole new meaning out of the writings for their time that does justice to what remains of the original meaning and speaks to their present.

The goal of any good translator is to not merely translate what is being said, but to retain the substance and content of what is being communicated by the original work. In order to do this, it requires an intimate understanding of the original work.

It also requires the translator to take words that can't be put properly into the new language and describe them with the power of analogy and symbolism.

"But, Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended." — Walter Benjamin. Unpacking My Library.

"But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. I do know that time is running out for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio." - Benjamin

A writer only writes because they are disaffiliated with the literature of the present. The present writings fail to communicate their passions and drives in the ways that are their standard, so they take up the mantle of manifesting such writing or things because no one has yet to do it or do it correctly.

If philosophy is like having a scream, to follow Deleuze's example, then the writer makes themself a mouth.

What a good collector does is take lost memories and things that have been left to rot by the never-ending march of linear time and give them new life or purpose in order to redeem what has been collected.

To take an object, especially one that has been left to dust, and interact with it in ways that express wonder and love creates something beautiful that becomes the collector's creed.

"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories." – Walter Benjamin. Unpacking My Library.

According to Benjamin, the collector becomes a dialectician between the order and chaos: the order of arranging their passion in their own structured image and the chaos of allowing themselves to be consumed fiercely by what they love.