“Destruction’s bloody retinue” (351) is the court of allegory. [J65a,4]
If it is imagination that presents correspondences to the memory, it is thinking that consecrates allegory to it. Memory brings about the convergence of imagination and thinking. [J66,3]
The experience of allegory, which holds fast to ruins, is properly the experience of eternal transience. [J67,4]
(all citations from Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, M.A. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).