Hope in the past

“[t]he future is precisely what Benjamin seeks in the past. Almost every place that his memory wishes to rediscover bears "the features of what is to come," as he puts it at one point in A Berlin Childhood (p. 60). And it is no accident that his memory encounters a manifestation of childhood "in the office of the seer who foretells the future" (p. 57). Proust listens attentively for the echo of the past; Benjamin listens for the first notes of a future which has meanwhile become the past. Unlike Proust, Benjamin does not want to free himself from temporality; he does not wish to see things in their ahistorical essence. He strives instead for historical experience and knowledge. Nevertheless, he is sent back into the past, a past, however, which is open, not completed, and which promises the future. Benjamin's tense is not the perfect, but the future perfect in the fullness of its paradox: being future and past at the same time.” (499)

Szondi, Peter and Harvey Mendelsohn. "Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin", in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Spring, 1978), pp. 491-506. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343071 accessed Sep 29th, 2009.