Art Teaches Us To See

Uncleanness Is So Much The Attribute Of Officials That One Could Almost Regard Them As Enormous Parasites...in The Same Way The Fathers In Kafka's Strange Families Batten On Their Sons, Lying On Top Of Them Like Giant Parasites. They Not Only Prey Upon Their Strength, But Gnaw Away At The Sons' Right To Exist. The Fathers Punish, But They Are At The Same Time The Accusers. The Sin Of Which They Accuse Their Sons Seems To Be A Kind Of Original Sin.

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.

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.

He Who Seeks To Approach His Own Buried Past Must Conduct Himself Like A Man Digging... This Confers The Tone And Bearing Of Genuine Reminiscences. He Must Not Be Afraid To Return Again And Again To The Same Matter; To Scatter It As One Scatters Earth, To Turn It Over As One Turns Over Soil.

[photography] Has Become More And More Subtle, More And More Modern, And The Result Is That It Is Now Incapable Of Photographing A Tenement Or A Rubbish Heap Without Transfiguring It. Not To Mention A River Dam Or Electric Cable Factory: In Front Of These, Photography Can Now Only Say, How Beautiful!