Walter Benjamin: “Thesis of the Philosophy of History”.

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking at 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 perveive 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 and dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has got caught in its wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irrestibly propels him to the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skywards. This storm is what we call progress.

In the ninth thesis, Walter Benjamin rejects the past as the continuum of progress in the future. The painting of the angel which metophorically represents history is looking to the past and hopes of lingering there. However, the chain of past catastrophic events which he hopes to fix is now propelling him to move into the future. The angel is hopeless and cannot make whole the fragments of history. The task of the Angel is to establish a redemptive relation to the fragments. Progress beckons the angel, who must move ahead into the future to keep abreast of the changing times.

This passage is relevant in our lives as well. Instead of living in the past, we must pick the pieces of our lives and move on. Perfection is not a state but a dream, and our human frailties have made us captives of the past and detest change. In this passage Benjamin is speaking about moving ahead in life, despite all the mistakes committed and problems that we face. To quote Buddha, “Change is the only constant thing in life”.