It is sufficient to displace this cup or this bush or this stone just a little, and thus everything. What Lerner doesn’t say is that Benjamin said that he heard the story from Gershom Scholem, and that, before writing it down himself, he had recounted it to Ernst Bloch, who transcribed a variation of it (‘just a little different’) in Spuren:Ī rabbi, a real cabbalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything or to begin a completely new world. In his acknowledgements at the back of the book, Lerner says that he came across it in Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community, although it is, he writes, ‘typically attributed to Walter Benjamin’. Like any good Hassidic story, this one has a convoluted genealogy. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Just as our room is now so it will be in the world to come where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Ben Lerner’s recent second novel, 10:04, carries the following epigraph:
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