The future, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living a messianic power to disrupt the present

The future, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Benjamin was not wholly sceptical of the future, as Fredric Jameson points out in this monumental study. On the contrary, he discerned in it a messianic power to disrupt the present

the future is safe from those who envisage it as no more than the present stretching all the way to infinity.On this view, the future has already arrived, and its name is the present.