Lillah Jedmoon's Gelastic Zibaldone #11
In September of 1940, as Walter Benjamin was looking for a way to escape Europe after the Nazi invasion of France, Soma Morgenstern had lunch with him in Marseilles (quoted in Howard Eiland's Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life):
Hardly had we studied the menu and ordered something to drink than Walter Benjamin several times glanced at me insistently through his eyeglasses, as though he expected from me some obligatory but now overdue remark.... Finally, rather keyed up, he asked me: "Haven't you noticed anything" "We haven't eaten yet," I said, "What am I supposed to notice?" He handed me the menu and waited. I surveyed the list of dishes once again, but nothing caught my eye. At that point he lost all patience. "Haven't you noticed the name of the restaurant?" I glanced at the menu and saw the innkeeper was named Arnoux. I communicated this finding to him. "Well," he went on, "doesn't that name mean anything to you?" I felt I had flunked; I was not equal to this exam. "Don't you remember who Arnoux is? [Madame] Arnoux is the name of Frédéric's beloved in L'Education sentimentale!" It was not until after the soup that he recovered from the disappointment I had caused him, and the subject of our lunchtime conversation that day was naturally Flaubert.
John MacArthur on Edward Said: “The last extended conversation I had with him was in his apartment on Riverside Drive: we talked not about Middle Eastern politics, but about Stendahl’s Charterhouse of Parma and its wily and seductive female protagonist, Gina Sanseverina. “Ah, Gina,” he said with appreciation and feeling, as if he had known her personally.”