The travel writings that start this book are excellent and worth the read. I’m not sure if Benjamin was an influence on the Situationalist concept of psychogeography that arose in the decades after his death, but the impressions he records of Berlin, Moscow, Marseilles, and indeed the fragments pulled here from his vast project on the arcades of Paris combine a keen eye and profound political insight. So much travel writing is better fit for a Lonely Planet article than a place on a bookshelf for literature - Benjamin seeks to understand and catalogue a place with his writing about cities, and as with all good writing, encourages speculation beyond the confines of the work itself, and makes us think about our own cities.

The latter half of the book is filled with a lot of pseudophilosophy that I found it harder to connect with. It seems like a lot of these writings may have been pulled of journals and diaries. Anyone who writes knows that the stuff you write in your private notebooks might be inscrutable to others - while writing to yourself, you use a kind of shorthand, tracing invisible, sketchy lines between ideas that seem clear to you, but would look like a tangled mess to anyone who doesn’t understand the internal logic. I often felt like these pieces were Benjamin talking to himself - long, dense sentences filled with ideas and details that needed to be unpacked and slowed down if I was to get any clarity from them. Maybe I’m just not the intended audience, or maybe I just don’t have the intellectual background, but I feel like Benjamin is a much more interesting writer when he’s aiming at more down to earth topics. ( )

We can
remark in passing that there is no better starting point for thought than laughter. In particular, thought usually has a
better chance when one is shaken by laughter than when one’s mind is shaken and upset. The only extravagance of
the epic theatre is its amount of laughter.

This is a much more disparate collection than Illuminations. Surely this is to be expected The isfting and editing. The indecision. Reflections' opening section A Berlin Chronicle is a cartographic autobiography. It is a spatial narrative in the weirdest sense. There is a disorientation present. I also liked the Conversations With Brecht and the Author as Producer though my attentions waned upon approaching the lengthy piece on Karl Kraus. The concluding fragments appear rich with insight but frankly I was spent by that time. ( )

There are certain essays in here ("Critique of Violence," for example) that are solid fives. Demetz's introduction, with some modification/caveats, and whether for good or ill, pinpoints a large part of what draws me to Benjamin: "his philosophy, sustained by utter loneliness, rather than by the concerns of the masses, particularly attracts those intellectuals who restlessly search for a better world and yet shy away from the grubbbier commitments of a practical kind." ( )

his is much tougher than Illuminations. Especially "Critique of Violence" about the establishment of law. Especially the essays that evolve to the messiah.

"I tell myself it had to be in Paris, where the walls and quays, the places to pause, the collections and the rubbish, the railings and the squares, the arcades and the kiosks, teach a language so singular that our relations to people attain, in the solitude accompanying us in our immersion in that world of things, the depths of a sleep in which the dream image waits to show the people their true faces. I wish to write of this afternoon because it made so apparent what kind of regimen cities keep over imagination, and why the city, where people make the most ruthless demands on one another, and where appointments and telephone calls, sessions and visits, flirtations and the struggle for existence grant the individual not a single moment of contemplation, indemnifies itself in memory, and why the veil it has covertly woven out of our lives shows the images of people less than those of the sites of our encounters with others or ourselves."