Benjamin used the Swiss painter Paul Klee's watercolor "Angelus Novus" to puncture the myth of historical progress. In his writing, the angel in the painting has its back to the future and faces the past: "Where we see a chain of events, he sees onlya single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But astormblows in from Paradise, catching in his wings; it is so violent that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistiblypropels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we callprogress." | Chen Yaorong, reading Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," with a discussion of "Echoes of the Rainbow"

Returning home is the point where roots go downward and growth reaches toward the sun.In this process, I choose to turn my back on the future and pick up those who have become broken bricks and shattered tiles; I try to recover the ways people once related to one another and to nature, and at the same time, to find for myself - once a kite with a broken string - a corner where I can land safely. Though the hurricane comes as waves of doubt, and turbulence is unavoidable; but if you fall, just get back up again.

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