Clark quotes This is a book for moving about in, lightly and irresponsibly and, above all, fast. Benjamin seems to have dreamed of a final, rapid-fire, cinematic delivery, accelerating to the speed of exchange—fact after fact, image after image, with relations between them somehow revealed by the glitter and breathlessness of the juxtapositions. Maybe this was one of the fantasies of the book—the book to beat capital at its own game—which drove the convolutes mad. But it is open to us to re-create such a book, in bits and pieces. Not always skittering across the surface, obviously (sentence after sentence is meant to stop the reader dead), but changing pace all the time, gloating over local detail, reading from back to front. Gloating is important—or giggling like a badaud at the sheer parade of unlikely items.

...

The arcades are thoroughgoing failures and abiding triumphs. They were old-fashioned almost as soon as they declared themselves the latest thing. Their use of iron and glass was premature, naive, a mixture of the pompous and fantastic. They were stuffy, dingy and monotonous; dead dioramas; perspectives étouffées; phantasmagoria of the dull, the flat and the cluttered. 'The light that fell from above, through the panes ... was dirty and sad.' ... The arcades allowed a whole century to be housebound and at loose ends in the company of strangers. They were waiting rooms, caves containing fossils of the primitive consumer, mirror worlds in which out-of-date gadgets exchanged winks, front rooms on endless Sunday afternoons with dust motes circulating in the half-light. ... They were a dream and a travesty of dreaming – in the golden age of capital, all worthwhile utopias were both at the same time. Or perhaps we should say that they were pieces of nonsense architecture, in which the city negated and celebrated its new potential, rather in the way that those other distinctive 19th-century creations, nonsense verse and nonsense novels (Alice or Edward Lear or Grandville's Un Autre Monde), negated and exalted mind, logic, innocence and naivety. What the arcades released, above all, was the possibility – a botched and absurd possibility, but for all that intoxicating—of a city turned inside out. ... We linger, we drift, we fantasise. 'Existence in these spaces flows ... without accent like the events in dreams. Flânerie is the rhythm of this slumber.' The proper inhabitant of the arcade is the stroller. For only the stroller is wordless and thoughtless enough to become the means by which the arcades dream their dream—of intimacy, equality, homelessness, return to a deep prehistory. 'For the flâneur, every street is precipitous. It leads downward—into a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not private, not his own.'