He glimpses purloined letter where others stare at wallpaper.

Like a dowser, he senses the significant deeps underneath the long-trodden surface.

the truly great scholar becomes as one with his material, however abstruse, however, recondite

[...] At numerous points in the political awfulness of the nineteen-thirties, Communism, even Stalinism, seemed to offer the only effective resistance to the triumphant tide of Fascism and Nazism. Scholem had no access to Benjamin's posthumously published Moscow diary. In it he would have found clear evidence of Benjamin's skepticism, of his aversion to the actual climate of Soviet society. Yet that aversion did not negate the suggestive strength of Marx's analyses of nineteenth-century capitalis or the instigations to an economic-materialist understanding of the creation and dissemination of intellectual and artistic works which we find in Marxist aesthetics. [...]