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                                                                                                                The Angel of History