The shirt in Walter Benjamin’s Franz Kafka essay and the scarf in Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well"

In preparing to discuss objects in Taylor Swift's "All Too Well (Ten-Minute Version)", I remembered a story I learned from Walter Benjamin's 1934 Franz Kafka essay. In a Chassidic village, the men gather in an inn; in the corner sits a newly arrived beggar. When everyone says what they wish for, the villagers want a workbench or a son-in-law, but the beggar says he wishes he was a king who escaped a war in his nightshirt and eventually found himself in this village. "What good would that do you?" – "I'd have a shirt." – Objects (that imagined shirt; the scarf in "All Too Well") transport stories from kingdoms to villages and back. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 March 2024)