It is the fragment ‘Central Park’ that most clearly reveals the consequences of Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire for his concept of history: the modern completely transforms the possibilities for the experience of history. On the one hand, it de-historicizes experience, wresting it away from the temporal continuities of tradition. On the other hand, a messianic structure—an opening of history to something outside of time—reasserts itself within the still life [nature mort] of modernity’s restless sameness. This is Benjamin’s famous ‘dialectics at a standstill’ (Tiedemann, 1982). It transforms the historical naturalism of the baroque, analyzed in the Origin of the German Mourning-Play (Section 4, above), in a futural direction. In particular, it involves a prioritization of the interruptive stasis of the image over the continuity of temporal succession. In fact, Benjamin maintained: “The concept of historical time forms an antithesis to the idea of a temporal continuum” (SW 4, 407).]  