If humans cannot in any way experience the transmission of culture, then they are left like the angel, to helplessly watch the past accumulate while the continuum of linear time, the storm of progress, prevents them from finding the space of the present that would allow them to appropriate their own historicity, to deactivate the continual and automatic falling of their own potentiality into a small range of actualities that are delineated by the legal categories of will and necessity.

Adam Hillyer, The Disappearance of Literature