> > Should improve the overall intellectual average
>
> And the poetic.
I only read a few paragraphs or maybe an essay by Benjamin. My instructor kept pronouncing his name Ben-ha-mean with such insistence that I felt like an idiot. The students quickly learned to copy the instructor or avoid talking at all.
I really only remember the Angel of History reference which i refound in wiki. I think about this angel quite a bit. Why did you have to bring up something interesting? I stopped reading Kafka years ago because his writing was both like as someone once said an axe breaking the surface and an attempt to throw a ladder down into the basement of frozen
earth. I read some recently. I would need lots more therapy or drugs in order to truly withstand it.
The Benjamin:
"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."
You have probably read this.
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