Empty, brightly lit streets as we enter cities at night. They surround us in fan-shaped formation, travel out and away from us like rays of mandorla. And the glance into a room will always find a family at a meal or else occupied with some obscure niggling thing at a table under a hanging lamp, its white glass globe set into a metal frame. Such eidola are the germ cells of Kafka's work. And this experience remains an inalienable possession of his generation, his only - and therefore our, because only for it do the horror-furnishings of incipient high capitalism fill the screens of its most luminous childhood experience. -Unexpectly, the street emerges here such as we never otherwise experience it, as was, a built-up thoroughfare.
Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project
