The messianic urge...

Alex Ross im New Yorker:

The messianic urge set off sparks of mystical hope that were fundamentally foreign to Adorno. Tellingly, when Benjamin addressed the subject of astrology, he was more sympathetic than censorious, seeing it as evidence of a largely extinct identification with nature: »Modern man can be touched by a pale shadow of this on southern moonlit nights in which he feels, alive within himself, mimetic forces that he had thought long since dead.«
Und:
I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s »The Waves«: »One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.«