What Has Been Forgotten Is Never Something

History Breaks Down Into Images, Not Into Stories.

The Good Tidings Which The Historian Of The Past Brings With Throbbing Heart May Be Lost In A Void The Very Moment He Opens His Mouth.

Language Has Unmistakably Made Plain That Memory Is Not An Instrument For Exploring The Past But Its Theater. It Is The Medium Of Past Experience, Just As The Earth Is The Medium In Which Dead Cities Lie Buried.

Man Is The Namer; By This We Recognize That Through Him Pure Language Speaks. All Nature, Insofar As It Communicates Itself, Communicates Itself In Language, And So Finally In Man. Hence, He Is The Lord Of Nature And Can Give Names To Things. Only Through The Linguistic Being Of Things Can He Get Beyond Himself And Attain Knowledge Of Them-in The Name. God's Creation Is Completed When Things Receive Their Names From Man, From Whom In Name Language Alone Speaks.

This Is How One Pictures The Angel Of History. His Face Is Turned Toward The Past. Where We Perceived 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 From Paradise; It Has Got Caught In His Wings With Such Violence That The Angel Can No Longer Close Them. This Storm Irresistably Propels Him Into The Future To Which His Back Is Turned, While The Pile Of Debris Before Him Grows Skyward. The Storm Is What We Call Progress.