I Would Like To Metamorphose Into A

Not To Find One’s Way Around A City Does Not Mean Much. But To Lose One’s Way In A City, As One Loses One’s Way In A Forest, Requires Some Schooling.

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.

No Poem Is Intended For The Reader, No Picture For The Beholder, No Symphony For The Listener.

The Adjustment Of Reality To The Masses And Of The Masses To Reality Is A Process Of Unlimited Scope, As Much For Thinking As For Perception.

In The End, We Get Older, We Kill Everyone Who Loves Us Through The Worries We Give Them, Through The Troubled Tenderness We Inspire In Them, And The Fears We Ceaselessly Cause.