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Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"Sunshine was he
In the winter day; And in the midsummer Coolness and shade." |
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Walter Benjamin did not write this comment, but he did write the following in "On the Concept of History" which inspired my commentary. "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." The complete text of "On the Concept of History" Excerpt from "Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian" by O. K. Werckmeister: Critical Inquiry Winter 1996 Volume 22, Number 2 |
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"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus'" |