[Unintelligible: first line completely obscured by water stain] …that each object may just as well suggest the seed, or nucleus, of a collection to which it might eventually or may never or does not belong, or might once have belonged but no longer belongs; yet it contains within it–in its very shape, its very materiality, its infinite re-legibility [su infinita Umverständlichkeit]–a projection of all the collections to which it could, may or may never, will or will not belong. It is the duty of the collector, then (and perhaps to an even greater degree the scavenger), to shelter the object–to salvage it–from both its past and future contexts, to preserve or prehend it as both useless and timeless, as utterly without value, hence saturated with inordinate [unintelligible]. This absence of value, this purity, must remain its only, its greatest power, the wellspring of its status as an object at once typical and unclassifiable… (I, 4a)