Whenever a Cabaret appears, we cheerfully go along to see it—then, one moment something strikes a wrong note, the next moment something else has changed and doubled back in its tracks. Benjamin’s first essay in this form affords us the same experience.footnote1 There is no lack of playful similes in it, although there well might be. Nor do the more serious similes always hit the mark; instead they move along the street that passes by here. Yet other parts are either too idiosyncratic or unnecessarily reminiscent of the old and familiar; unnecessarily, that is, in this One-Way Street which can stand as the very type of surrealistic thought. The self that it projects is very close to ours, but keeps changing. Indeed we have here a large number of selves: almost every sentence is a new start which prepares different things in a different way. The book deploys extremely modern means with an archaic grace to render what are often recondite or forgotten materials. Its form is that of a street, a sequence of houses and shops whose windows are full of bright ideas.