Thursday, October 3, 2024

 





















Charles Baudelaire 


There are many translations of this, and the one I prefer is the one that has the closing line

"It is the hour to be drunken! Lest you be the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will."

That's a much more interesting headswerve  - the idea that you could get intoxicated with virtue

Perhaps it's even possible to be intoxicated with sobriety, or the idea of sobriety as society-salvation, a cause, the single solution to everything wrong  (the fanatical anti-drink campaigners of the temperance movement)

Born again former drug users, addicted to AA meetings, clutching little positivist mantras to one's bosom

(R. Meltzer quite scathing on how a cleaned-up Lester Bangs got into this whole humanist trip, 'bring back emotions, they are threatened in this society', reeling out maxims and homilies of the kind he would once have mercilessly scorned and mocked)








  Charles Baudelaire  There are many translations of this, and the one I prefer is the one that has the closing line "I t is the hour t...