Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit Page B

shards. I’d never been anywhere remotely nearby, but it all looked strangely familiar, the terraced vineyards like a leaner, steeper version of Sonoma or Napa, the hillsides above like the coast north of San Francisco where I hike all the time, even down to the live oaks, rattlesnake grass, and fennel growing in the hills. After we climbed above the vineyards, we walked for a long time on a road, alone, except for the insects.
    There were huge grasshoppers with the wingspans of dragonflies when they took to the air, and small ones whose scarlet wings made them look like butterflies, though they vanished into drabness again when they landed. And there were many species of butterflies, small white ones, a yellow one that folded its wings to look like a green leaf, and a pair of swallowtails that chased and courted each other in the breeze. My companion remarked that butterflies have four basic wing motions that occur in so random a sequence that predators cannot predict where they will be; their erraticness makes them elusive. I answered that this sounded like Benjamin, who in his work was a historian, a theorist, a lyrical writer, creating writing as uncategorizable as it is influential. Though his most famous essay is“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he devoted himself at far greater length to elucidating the meaning of Paris, labyrinths, cities, walks—a series of ideas that spiral around, double back, open into each other, metamorphose, and make endless connections, a map of the world drawn as much by poetic intuition as by rational analysis.
    On his walk to Spain, he carried a heavy briefcase containing, he told his companions, a new manuscript more important than his life; and it was part of what made the walk so arduous for him that he had to stop one minute out of ten to catch his breath. There is a steep ascent up to the plateau between Banyuls and the slopes east of Cerberes, during which the route is due south. It then rises to loop around the ridgeline, which is also the international border. Finally, the route heads due east again along the south-facing slopes above Port Bou. The route looks like a giant inverted question mark, like the ones at the beginning of questions in Spanish. There’s a Paul Auster novel,
City of Glass
, that Benjamin would have loved, in which one character takes walks across a city whose routes trace the outlines of letters of the alphabet and another character has to figure out what the walks spell; but he probably never knew that his last walk was in the form of a question.
    Benjamin succeeded in leading a largely uneventful life until history at its most virulent intervened. Mostly he read, wrote, talked, and walked, activities that blurred together in his thinking, where the city was a magnificent labyrinthine mystery to be read by walking, a musing, meandering kind of walking. Though he had grown up in Germany when climbing mountains was so established a part of sentimental-romantic culture that he was photographed with an alpine background and alpenstock as a child, he was devotedly, unathletically urban in adulthood, nearsighted, with heart trouble, wandering his Paris labyrinths slowly. He was supremely unequipped for what even the foothill walk from France to Spain would require of him, though he was fortunate in his guide.
    Lisa Fittko is one of the countless heroes who rise to confront disaster. Active against the Nazis, she had fled Germany years before and was living in Paris when the French government began sending foreigners, regardless of affiliation, into camps. As France surrendered and the Nazis moved south, Fittko, like Benjamin,like myriad Jews, foreigners, and resisters, fled south, looking for a way out of the noose. Fittko came to the southeast corner of France alone to look for escape routes and was given enormous assistance by the socialist mayor of Banyuls and, during the months she lived there, the townspeople. The mayor, Monsieur