On Hashish (Harvard), translated by Howard Eiland and others, collects all of Walter Benjamin’s writings on hashish, drawing on his participation in a series of drug experiments that took place between 1927 and 1934 in Berlin, Marseilles and Ibiza. Very little of this material was published during Benjamin’s lifetime, although he had been planning what he described as a “truly exceptional study” on the subject. The first half of this book contains transcriptions of the “drug protocols” themselves: the notes made by Benjamin and his fellow participants (Ernst Bloch, philosopher; Jean Selz, writer; Fritz Fränkel, physician; and others) while under the influence of hashish. The remainder of the book consists of essays on the drug’s effects, and relevant extracts from Benjamin’s other work: letters, notebooks and sections of The Arcades Project, the book considered to be his masterpiece. Benjamin saw these investigations as part of the literary tradition of drug experimentation, a lineage that includes Baudelaire, Herman Hesse and (later) Aldous Huxley. Benjamin’s notes reveal unexpected traces of poetry that invite the reader to take a closer look at the world around us: morning combing perceived as an act that “drives out dreams from the hair”; an observation that “the object of our attention suddenly fades at the touch of language”; a reflection that the creative act is a source of joy because it offers “the certainty of unrolling an artfully wound skein,” prompting Benjamin to ask, “isn’t that the joy of all productivity, at least in prose?”