“When we turned around to make our way back up the steps of the monument I was again taken aback. At the head of the stairs we saw what appeared to be the same rectangle of light as we had seen when we had first entered and looked down at the sea, only now, gazing up to that entrance from the inside it was of course not the sea but the clear blue sky. Inside our fosa común, this monument to the nameless, we were walking back from the sea into the sky. Later in the actual cemetery we searched for some sign of Benjamin and found a rock about waist high set on the ground. It was untouched by the mason’s chisel except for a plaque with yet another quotation from Benjamin’s writings. His texts seem to be full of pithy statements apt for gravestones and monuments, and there is no shortage of writers who, desirous of some spectral profundity, paste in a slice or two. Poor Benjamin. To have his pearls thus cast. This one read: ‘There is no document of civilization that is not a document of barbarism.’” Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 33.