“More quickly than Moscow itself, one learns to see Berlin through Moscow…What is true of the image of the city and its people applies also to the intellectual situation: a new optics is the most undoubted gain from a stay in Russia.”
–Walter Benjamin, “Moscow.” Trans. Edmund Jephcott
“…the outsiders will dispense with pageantry not from any puritanical dislike of beauty. On the contrary, it will be one of their aims to increase private beauty; the beauty of spring, summer, autumn; the beauty of flowers, silks, clothes; the beauty which brims not only every field and wood but every barrow in Oxford Street; the scattered beauty which needs only to be combined by artists in order to become visible to all.”
–Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
Dear Mr. Scrapbook 
Pingback: making private of history | Dear Mr. Scrapbook