One more comment: this substack is one of the few things I value on the internet. Thank you for your excellent writing and ever-illuminating reflections.
I never did quite figure out the Angel of History and the wind direction. The best we get are personal letters; an old-fashioned crossing of an ocean, and that has to include time. Newspapers are gone, and 'news' seems to be mostly people advertising something. The names for me rarely mean much to be remembered.
Change might be coming. I have a friend who is a long time computer expert. He worked long ago in one of 'Her Majesty's rabbit holes', as he put it. Nowadays he deals with daily incoming requests from clients who have random problems in the entrails of their digital systems. It is usually, as again he puts it, 'archaeology'. I take this to mean history without documentation.
PS A longtime ago I wrote a line about a Broch on the West Coast of Scotland. (Brochs were ingenious dry-stone towers, which judging by the archaeology probably derived from a single source of design.) "The brothers who set this stonework right are long way downwind tonight"
One more comment: this substack is one of the few things I value on the internet. Thank you for your excellent writing and ever-illuminating reflections.
Thank you so much, Cecelia!
I never did quite figure out the Angel of History and the wind direction. The best we get are personal letters; an old-fashioned crossing of an ocean, and that has to include time. Newspapers are gone, and 'news' seems to be mostly people advertising something. The names for me rarely mean much to be remembered.
Change might be coming. I have a friend who is a long time computer expert. He worked long ago in one of 'Her Majesty's rabbit holes', as he put it. Nowadays he deals with daily incoming requests from clients who have random problems in the entrails of their digital systems. It is usually, as again he puts it, 'archaeology'. I take this to mean history without documentation.
PS A longtime ago I wrote a line about a Broch on the West Coast of Scotland. (Brochs were ingenious dry-stone towers, which judging by the archaeology probably derived from a single source of design.) "The brothers who set this stonework right are long way downwind tonight"
"Humanity preferred history to life..." Norman O Brown from The Enchantments of Mammon