Status Updates From Paris Spleen and Wine and H...

“Or what comes to mind is a ballerina's strange attire, whose dark, translucent gauze hints at a dazzling skirt's muted splen-dour, as a delicious past pierces the murky present; and gold and silver stars glittering on that skirt are imagination's fires, catching only when Night dons deep mourning.”

Night dawns, deep morning

first sexy poem of spleen, #17. A Hemisphere in a Head of Hair

Favorite poem so far: #12, Crowds

Reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s, An Unwritten Novel: a narrator fantasizing about the life of a fellow passenger on a train, stringing out a story solely based on their own ego and assumptions, eventually smashed

“..that sainted prostitution of the soul which gives itself whole, poetry and charity, to the unforeseen revealed, to the unknown materialized.”

“Multitude, solitude: equivalent terms for the active and prolific poet. The man unable to people his solitude does not know how to be alone in a crowd.”

“He who easily embraces the crowd knows feverish joys, for ever denied the egoist, entombed in his vault, and denied the idler, walled in like a mollusc. He purloins every profession, makes his own every delight, every misfortune he encounters.”

Favorite poem so far, #12, Crowds

Reminded me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s An Unwritten Novel, about how readily we shift our perspective to fantasize how another might live, to great error and self serving.

As always: Baudelaire is a combination of relatable, wondrous, and extra egotistic

‘So, at last, I am allowed to sink into a bath of shadows! First, lock the door. I sense that these two turns of the key will deepen my solitude and reinforce the barricades which keep me apart from the world.’

“Who has not, in bouts of ambition, dreamt this miracle, a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple and choppy enough to accommodate the lyrical movement of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the bump and lurch of con-sciousness?”

so good, so visceral, i’m so happy to pick up Baudelaire again!