Two grains of wheat
Walter Benjamin combined awkwardness in practical matters with perceptual acuity in
intellectual analysis. He analyzed everything with precision. In a letter to Siegfried Kracauer
in 1928, Benjamin describes his inability to deal with anything else when focused on
his works, or on a particular intellectual problem.1 His examination liberates the thing
or encoded object from its meaning to become an item of contemplation and reverie.2
