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.
"Our extraordinary ability to adapt, to get on with it, to not dwell in the past, was enormously useful in our evolutionary history. But it is making it difficult for us to keep our attention focused on how much is being lost — and thus difficult for us to rally around efforts to stem those losses.
And so, little by little, a hotter, more chaotic, and more dangerous world is becoming normal to us, as we sleepwalk toward more tragedies."
links: The scariest thing about global warming (and Covid-19)
WAlter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
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