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| BAUDELAIRE |
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Charles Baudelaire
"To be a useful man has always seemed to me ghastly."
"Need I add that hashish, like all solitary pleasures, renders the individual useless to his fellow man, that it and society superfluous to the individual, continually leads him to admire himself and precipitates him day by day toward the very brink of the luminous abyss in which he admires his Narcissan face?"
"For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions."
"The poet enjoys an incomparable privilege: in his own way he's able to be himself or someone else. Like those wandering souls in search of a body, he enters anyone's personality whenever he wants to. For him alone all is vacant; and if certain places seem closed, it's because in his eyes they aren't worth the trouble to visit."
"Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist that desire tears apart!
I burn with the desire to paint her who appeared to me so rarely and who so quickly fled, like a beautiful regretted thing the voyager leaves behind as he is carried away into the night. How long it is now, since she disappeared!
She is beautiful and more than beautiful; she is surprising. Darkness in her abounds, and all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery dimly glistens, and like a lightning flash, her glance illuminates: it is an explosion in the dark."
"Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams."
"He is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call 'modernity', for want of a better term to express the idea in question. The aim for him is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory."
"The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it."
"Had I not been afraid of humiliating myself before such a large crowd, I would have gladly fallen at the feet of the generous gambler to thank him for his unheard of munificence. But after I had left him, my incurable distrust roused up in my breast a little at a time; I didn't dare believe in such prodigious luck. And when I went to bed, I said my prayers, out of idiotic habit, repeating half-asleep: 'My God! Lord God! Make the devil keep his word!'"
"I looked him squarely in the eyes and I was appalled to see that his eyes shone with unquestionable candor. I then saw clearly that his aim had been to do a good deed while at the same time making a good deal; to earn forty cents and the heart of God; to win paradise economically; in short, to pick up gratis the certificate of a charitable man. I could have almost forgiven him the desire for the criminal enjoyment of which a moment before I assumed him capable; I would have found something bizarre, singular in his amusing himself by compromising the poor; but I will never forgive him the ineptitude of his calculation. To be mean is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that one is; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil out of stupidity."
"And if some bore comes to disturb me while my eyes are resting on this delicious dial, if some uncivil and intolerant genie, some Demon of mischance comes to ask me, 'What are you looking at with such care? What do you see in the eye of that animal [cat]? Can you tell the time there, you prodigal, you slothful mortal?' I would reply without hesitation, 'Yes, I can tell the time. It is Eternity!"
"They are alike, prim scholar and perfervid lover:
When comes the season of decay, they both decide
Upon sweet, husky cats to be the household pride;
Cats choose, like them, to sit, and like them, to shudder.
Like partisans of carnal dalliance and science,
They search for silence and the shadowings of dread;
Hell well might harness them as horses for the dead,
If it could bend their native proudness in compliance.
In reverie they emulate the noble mood
Of giant sphinxes stretched in depths of solitude
Who seem to slumber in a never-ending dream;
Within their fertile loins a sparkling magic lies;
Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam,
Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes."
"I sing of catastrophic dogs, of those who wander, alone, in the sinuous ravines of huge cities, and of those who tell abandoned people, with winks and witty eyes, 'Take me along, and out of our two miseries perhaps we'll create a kind of happiness!"
"Observer, idler, philosopher, call him what you will, but, in order to define such an artist, you will surely in the end be brought to giving him an attributive adjective that you could not apply to a painter of things eternal, or at least things of a more permanent nature, of heroic or religious subjects. Sometimes he may be a poet; more often he comes close to the novelist or the moralist; he is the painter of the fleeting moment and of all that it suggests of the eternal."
"But that other type of dream! the absurd and unpredictable dream, which has no bearing on, or connection to, the character, life, and passions of the dreamer! This dream, which I shall term hieroglyphic, evidently represents the supernatural side of life, and it is precisely because of its absurdity that the ancients thought it of divine origin. As this dream cannot be explained by any known cause, they attributed it to a cause external to man; and today, without mentioning oneiromancers, there is still a philosophic school which sees some sort of criticism or counsel in dreams of this nature, a symbolic and moral representation engendered in the very mind of the sleeping man. Such a dream is a dictionary to be studied, a language to which only the wise hold the key."
"Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, fortify me, sustain me, remove me from untruth and the world's corrupting fumes. And you, Lord my God! Grant me the grace to produce a few beautiful verses to prove to myself that I am not the lowest of me, and that I am not inferior to those I despise!"
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