SLPAD - 118 tangent: Angel of History

[Michael Bailey]

Nice brief personal account with the relevant passage in italics

https://imagejournal.org/2019/04/16/the-angel-of-history/


What better place for that angel to preside over than a dump or junkyard?

(*“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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got
caught in his wings with such 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.” )*