NP but Walter Benjamin's Theses on History

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed Dec 11 21:51:23 UTC 2019


Besides Rilke, I am reminded of Against the Day, all compressed. 

Sent from my iPad

> On Dec 11, 2019, at 4:44 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> 
> The passage deserves to be quoted in full:
> 
> "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."
> 
> https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html
> 
> "... the spilled, the broken world."
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l


More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list