According to Benjamin, the transition from dream to wakefulness was marked by the comb, which opens a path into the tangle of hair that is ruffled during the night. “Combing: the comb in the morning is the first thing that drives dreams from the hair.⁶⁴⁷ Combing is a mother’s job,” he told Fränkel, who was assisting him in a mescaline experiment. The resistance offered to the comb is from hair that is “indéfrisable,” such as hairdressers display in their windows in the arcades.⁶⁴⁸ It is important to approach with care, for “with care, not without it, we extricate ourselves from the realm of dream.” And thus the comb to which Benjamin refers will be the attribute of the Sirens, the Pecten Veneris (Venus’s comb), and kteís (which means both “comb” and “vulva”); the comb that appeared in the mysteries of Themis. Due to its feminine quality, a comb disentangles and harbors dreams. The device used by Benjamin is that of a Ulysses who not only listens to the Sirens but uses their ceremonial object as a weapon, taking it as a guide to emerge from the dream, though without rejecting it, in a pact of complicity. Literature is that slow, cautious, careful progress of the comb: “in the comb there is a consolation, rendering what has happened as if it hadn’t happened.”⁶⁴⁹

Like a true gnostic, accustomed to persecution and disguise, Benjamin sought to hide beneath the cloak of the dialectic materialist and let himself be pursued for this, so that he could survive, unharmed, as a gnostic. But every police instinct is trained first of all to recognize the foetor gnosticus, there’s always a zealot ready to pick him out, in his office at the Soviet Encyclopedia. Benjamin suffered continual harassment in Moscow. Stretched out on his bed, in a dingy bedroom, he munches marzipan and reads Proust, protected from his unassailable, grieving childhood.

In 1879, Marianne North donated 832 oil paintings of flowers and plants she had come across in Brazil, New Zealand, Borneo, Chile, India, California, Australia, Singapore, Jamaica, Tenerife, and elsewhere to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. They were hung at a minimal distance to each other, as in a picture by Teniers, or a giant stamp album. Large and intricate friezes framed the windows of the high gallery that ran around the two rooms (in days of poor weather a scant light shone on the scenes of tropical splendor); the walls were paneled with 246 types of wood that she had collected during her travels. Some areas were inlaid with flower designs. Four of the plants she had painted would now contain her name: Northea seychellana, Nepenthes northiana, Kniphofia northiae, Crinum northianum. Only one of her wishes remained unmet: in those rooms, which were like an island of mirrors in the middle of the park, she had asked that tea be served. But the botanical authorities would not agree. “No refreshments in Kew Gardens …” Marianne North called the two volumes of her memoirs Recollections of a Happy Life.