3 Charles Baudelaire Quotes on Existential

Charles Baudelaire quotes on existential

5. Helas! tout est abime, - action, desir, reve, Parole!

31. L'ame est une chose si impalpable, si souvent inutile et quelquefois si genante, que je n'eprouvai, quant a cette perte, qu'un peu moins d'emotion que si j'avais egare, dans une promenade, ma carte de visite.

71. The poet, says Baudelaire, is a decipherer, a Kabbalist of reality, a decoder. Ordinary life, if it is not a message in code, a system of symbols for something else, is unacceptable. It must be a cryptogram; it can't be what it seems. The poet's task is to decode the incomprehensible obvious. His life becomes a deliberately constructed paranoia, as Rimbaud, Breton, Artaud were to say generations later. As we read him, we discover that Baudelaire believes in the charm, the incantation, the cryptogram, but he ceases to believe in the secret. The spirits have not risen. The code says nothing. This is the mystery concealed by the disorder of the world. The visionary experience ends in itself; the light of the illuminated comes only from and falls only on himself.