As a young boy, Walter Benjamin liked to play in the wardrobe of his family's home. In the closet's back corner, piles of socks were mated and stored in "traditional fashion," each pair rolled up and turned inside out to form a soft ball. "For me," he wrote in Berlin Childhood around 1900, "nothing surpassed the pleasure of thrusting my hand as deeply as possible into [the sock's] interior" in search of "the little present"-the sock hidden within itself. His probing fingers would then tease out the sock until "'the pocket' in which it had lain was no longer there." Like a magician astonished by his own trick, Benjamin would repeat this unpock-eting ritual obsessively, enthralled by the simultaneity of disappearance and reveal. "It taught me that form and content, veil and what is veiled, are the same."
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