EXTREME WEATHER WARNINGS
Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who are entitled to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honorable sense … for their fate is hard, their hopes are uncertain, it is quite a feat to devise some comfort for them—but to what avail! We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today! We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for ‘realities’ we do not believe that they will last. The ice that still supports people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing, we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin realities.Friedrich Nietzsche. (1974). The Gay Science.
New York City: Vintage, cited in Dylan Trigg (2006). The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang.
2. Storm Warning
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 (1969) ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books.. p. 257
