In Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter’ essay, modernité famously denotes ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’. It is associated with transitoriness as the generalized social instantiation of the temporality of the modern, in the capitalist metropolis. In contrast to transitoriness as such, however, Benjamin was first and foremost (politically and philosophically) interested in ‘the new’, in its ‘advent’ or historical becoming, and in its quality as newness or novelty (the newness of the new), in a way that was conceptually distinct from the conventional opposition of the ‘modern’ to the ‘ancient’—which Baudelaire notoriously retained. As a result, Benjamin was consequently also interested in what the German sociologist Max Weber would have called its ‘routinization’ (although Benjamin did not use this vocabulary): the routinization accompanying the generalization of the new as a mode of experience—in fashion and boredom, in particular—and the formal structure of sameness involved in its repetition. It is here that transitoriness enters the picture—as  a result of the generalization of novelty. Baudelaire self-consciously embraced modernity with ‘heroic effort’, attempting, like the painter of modern life, to ‘extract its epic aspects’ and ‘distill the eternal from the transitory’; Benjamin, on the other hand, sought to understand it in order to find a way out of what he called its ‘hell’. He picked up on the relationship of the transitory to the eternal in Baudelaire’s account of modernity, but first, he de-classicized the notion of the ‘eternal’, refiguring it philosophically, and second, he rendered the relationship itself strictly dialectical: in the modern, it is transitoriness itself that is eternalized.