I once stood on the border between Spain and France, at the place where Walter Benjamin ended his life. A narrow passage between mountains and sea, a place that feels too quiet for a philosopher to die in. But maybe the silence was the point.
People talk about Benjamin’s idea of aura. They usually mean the aura of a painting, the uniqueness of an object, the sense of presence that disappears when everything becomes a copy. But standing in Portbou, it struck me that Benjamin was not only describing art.
He was describing us.
You see it everywhere, especially in cities. Faces softened by screens.
Voices flattened by opinions they did not earn. Identities borrowed like movie posters. You meet a man who talks like a podcast. A woman who thinks in slogans.
A teenager who behaves like a TikTok remix of someone else’s personality.
All surface.
No depth.
No presence that belongs to them.
Benjamin saw the beginning of this long before the internet. He died before smartphones, before algorithms, before social media turned human beings into cardboard celebrities, but he already understood the direction the world was moving. Mechanical reproduction was not only about art. It was a warning about the human soul.
Here is the strange part.
Old people still have aura.
When I meet someone in their eighties or nineties, there is a presence. A weight.
A density that younger people rarely emit now. They grew up in a time when the self had to be carved by experience, not copied from a template. Their eyes carry entire decades. Their gestures come from real encounters with life, not performance.
Modern people, by contrast, feel like thin versions of themselves. Compressed.
Optimized. Reduced for easy consumption.
Benjamin fought against this flattening with everything he had.That is why his writing is rough, fragmented, unfinished. He refused to become smooth.
He refused to become a product. He held on to his own aura until the end.
His suicide does not feel like surrender. It feels like a man who would not let the dark machinery of his day decide how his life ends.
Standing at that border, I understood something simple and hard. Aura disappears when we stop being present. When we stop paying attention. When we trade experience for distraction. When we let the world tell us who we are instead of discovering it ourselves.
People today move fast, but their presence is thin. They know everything and understand nothing. They perform, but they do not emit anything real.
Benjamin would say that aura requires distance, and modern life gives you nothing but instant noise.
Maybe the real task today is to recover a presence the world keeps trying to erase.
To be a person with depth in a time that rewards surfaces. To carry an inner weight that is not mass-produced.
Because aura is not magic. It is simply the result of a life actually lived, not copied.
Benjamin died on that border, but the question he left behind crossed it:
What will you become?
A copy, or yourself?