Walter Benjamin, Diary Entries (1938)
“March 6. (...) Last night my dream recorded this. I found myself standing in front of a map and, simultaneously, standing in the landscape which it depicted. The landscape was terrifyingly dreary and bare; I couldn't have said whether its desolation was that of a rocky wasteland or that of an empty gray ground populated only // by capital letters. These letters writhed and curved on their terrain as if following mountain ranges; the words they formed were approximately equidistant from one another. I knew or learned that I was in the labyrinth of my auditory canal. But the map was, at the same time, a map of hell”.
Walter Benjamin, Diary Entries (1938), translated by Gerhard Richter, Michael W. Jennings, in: idem, Selected Writings, vol. 3, ed. Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings, Belknap Press, Cambridge & London 2002, p. 335–336.
