“His face is turned toward the past, and where we see a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls them at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and reconstruct what has been smashed apart, but a storm is blowing from Paradise and it catches the angel’s wings with such violence that he can never close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the wreckage in front of him piles up to the sky. This storm is what we call progress.”
Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte
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Watching Frogs Boil
CatholicGirl
James M. Emmerling
rita shibr
Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall
Robert Crook
Salon.com
Comments
I wasn't familiar with either -- Benjamin or this particular Klee. Interesting inversion of Klee -- and the quote really drives it home.
(at the least, certainly reified)
History, called it “the slaughterbench”…
“ a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”?
Catastrophe=
Greek katastrophḗ an overturning, akin to katastréphein to overturn.
Backtwisting, turning……..
progress temporally is indeed
to be considered
"a storm blowing from Paradise ...
and it catches the angel’s wings with such violence
that he can never close them.
This storm irresistibly propels him
into the future to which his back is turned"
Recall that angel.
Send in one with two faces, or four.
TY.