Benjamin projected himself on all his great themes, and his temperament determined what he chose to write. It was this temperament that he saw in themes, such as the baroque works of the 17th century (which dramatized different facets of Saturnine acedia "), and in the writers on whose work he wrote with the greatest brilliance: Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Karl Kraus. Contrary to interpreting the work of a writer for his life, he made selective use of life in his deepest meditations on texts: information that revealed the melancholic, the lonely. (Thus, he describes the "solitude of Proust, which makes the world shrinks within its vortex "; he explains how Kafka, like Klee, was" essentially lonely "; he quotes Robert Walser's horror of" triumph in life "). It is not possible to use life to interpret the work But if you can use the work to interpret life.