"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. 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