Far from his library, Warburg worked in notebooks, filling them with often indecipherable pencil scrawls – threads unravelling and cascading down the page. Psychotic episodes alternated with lucid spells. The philosopher Ernst Cassirer visited him and they discussed the library, of which Cassirer had become a willing ‘prisoner’, as well as Kepler and the ellipse. Other interlocutors included the moths that flew into Warburg’s room at night. In letters he described them as his Seelentierchen, his little soul animals.
Chloe Aridjis, « At the HKW: Aby Warburg », London Review of Books (5 November 2020)
