Volume 25, Number 15 · October 12, 1978
The Last Intellectual
By Susan Sontag
Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
by Walter Benjamin, edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 348 pp., $12.95
In most of the portrait photographs he is looking down, his right hand to his face. The earliest one I know shows him in 1927—he is thirty-five—with dark curly hair over a high forehead, mustache above a full lower lip: youthful, almost handsome. With his head lowered, his jacketed shoulders seem to start behind his ears; his thumb leans against his jaw; the rest of the hand, cigarette between bent index and third fingers, covers his chin; the downward look through his glasses—the soft, day-dreamer's gaze of the myopic—seems to float off to the lower left of the photograph.
Review, 6862 words
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