To read what was never written - Walter Benjamin

Historical method is a philological method, a method that has as its foundation the book of life. 'To read what was never written,' is what Hofmannsthal calls it. The reader referred here is the true historian. (Theses on the Philosophy of History)

[It is in this moment that the past is saved, not in being returned to what it once existed but, instead, precisely in being transformed into something that never was: in being read, in the words of Hofmannsthal, as what was never written - Daniel Heller-Roazen]

Robert Walser by Walter Benjamin

on mood of 'convalescent' - p. 112-3 in 'Microscripts'