Elizabeth Davies, 48, was accused of "humiliating" children aged between three and six by using the aerosol spray on them on nursery class.I will not mention the incident that involved my daughter not too long ago. I will skip all of that and go directly to this curiosity: "[T]here is a waft coming in from paradise." Is this not a reference to a famous line in Walter Benjamin's The Angel of History? A quick return to that line is in order:Miss Davies faces being struck for using the air freshener on pupils at her inner-city school with a large Asian catchment.
The hearing was told she accused Bangladeshi children of smelling of onions or curry — and would say "there is a waft coming in from paradise" before blasting the air freshener.
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 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 in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a 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.The storm in The Angel of History comes from the very same place as the waft in the teacher's curious announcement—paradise. But Benjamin's storm pushes progress into the future, whereas the teacher's waft is blown right back to paradise by a blast of air freshener.
