If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a burning funeral pyre, then the commentator stands before it like a chemist, the critic like an alchemist. Whereas, for the former, wood and ash remain the sole objects of his analysis, for the latter only the flame itself preserves an enigma: that of what is alive. Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been experienced. — Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Michael W Jennings and Marcus Bullock, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 298.