A Storm Called Progress

The Walter Benjamin edition

Photo by Shashank Sahay on Unsplash

As always, any arguments with the following quotes can be addressed to the author care of Cementerio de Portbou, Portbou, Spain.
If any of the quotes require further study or reading to render them understandable, I would recommend further study or reading as a possible way forward.

“Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.”
― Walter Benjamin

“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 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. This 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 only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
― Walter Benjamin

“To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.”
― Walter Benjamin

“You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

“I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.”
― Walter Benjamin, Aesthetics and Politics

“Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.”
― Walter Benjamin

“This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“History is made up of fragments and absences. What is left out is as significant as what is included.”
― Walter Benjamin

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin

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