`Great Sensitivity to Open Doors'

On each of the five evenings I spent back in Cleveland, visiting my brother and his family, we sat in the back yard around a fire and talked. With an axe, my brother and I splintered a heavy old wooden desk that had belonged to our father, and used that for fuel. My oldest son flew in from New York and joined the campfire ritual, which usually took the form of discursive storytelling, guided by the vagaries of memory. Only siblings, I suspect, attuned to private quirks of temperament and a shared past, could carry on as we did for hours each night. Surrounded by trees and blackness, seated in a pulsing circle of fire, nothing was sacred. Relaxed, unguarded, I could say anything I wished.

I was reading Walter Benjamin's On Hashish, an account of the critic's experiences with drugs in the 1920s and 1930s. In one recollection, dated Dec. 18, 1927, I found descriptions that corresponded to my sensations during those nightly campfire sessions. Honestly, we were fueled only by memory, and caffeine from much earlier in the day:

"Connection; distinction. In smiling, one feels oneself growing small wings. Smiling and fluttering are related. You feel distinguished because, among other things, it seems to you that fundamentally you enter into nothing too deeply; that, no matter how deeply you penetrate, you are always moving on the threshold. A sort of toe dance of reason."

And this:

"Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of rapture. Great sensitivity to open doors, loud talk, music."