All this would be true, the “immortelle parole” would be lost, suffocated forever in the tumult of languages, “if poetry did not exist; the poem that philosophically makes good the defect of languages is their superior complement.”) All if which says only, though in a slightly more complex way, what I suggested earlier, which is that we are dealing here with something that may not be unique, but is certainly extremely rare – the gift of thinking poetically.
And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the “tought fragments” it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the entire bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and carry them to the surface, this thinking plunges into the depths of the past, but not in order to restore it to what it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization – that in the depths of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things suffer a sea-change and survive in new, crystallized forms and shapes, which remain immune to the elements as though they waited only for the pearl diver who would one day come down to them and carry them up into the world of the living as “thought fragments,” as something “rich and strange”, and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.
Reflections, Walter Benjamin por Hannah Arendt, The New Yorker, oct 19 1968
