A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as
though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are
spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned
toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one
single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of
his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole
what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has
got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no
longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to
which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
-Walter Benjamin
