Klee has a work titled *New Angel*. It depicts an angel seemingly transforming into speech, reacting to something it has been observing intently. Its eyes are wide, its mouth is agape, and its wings are spread wide. This is how the angel of history must look. He turns his face toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees only a single catastrophe, which ceaselessly piles wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. He would like, perhaps, to linger—to awaken the dead and piece together what has been shattered. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in his wings with such force that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
What we call progress is this very storm. — Walter Benjamin on Paul Klee’s *Angelus Novus*
