Forwarded from sketchhead
The world is going to end; the only reason it might endure is that it exists. And what a feeble reason that is, compared to all those that foretell the opposite—especially this one: What business does the world still have beneath the sky? For even if it were to go on existing in material terms, would that be an existence worthy of the name—or of a historical dictionary?
I’m not saying the world is reduced to the desperate expedients and clownish disorder of South American republics, nor that we’ll revert to savagery and wander, rifle in hand, through the grassy ruins of our civilization in search of something to eat.
No; for such a fate and such adventures would still suggest some kind of vital energy, an echo of the earliest ages.
New examples and new victims of the unknowable moral laws, we shall perish in precisely that by which we believed we would live.
Mechanization will have Americanized us so thoroughly, progress will have so utterly atrophied our spiritual faculties, that none of the bloodthirsty, sacrilegious, or unnatural dreams of the utopians will compare with its actual results.
I ask any thinking person to show me what remains of life. As for religion, I think it pointless to discuss or to search for its remains—when the only real scandal left is that anyone still bothers to deny God.
Property virtually disappeared with the abolition of primogeniture; but the time will come when humanity, like a vengeful ogre, will snatch the last crumbs from those who believe they have legitimately inherited the revolutions. Yet even that would not be the supreme evil.
The human imagination can conceive, without too much difficulty, of republics or other communal states worthy of a certain glory—if they are led by sacred men, by a kind of aristocracy.
But universal ruin—or universal progress, for all I care—will not reveal itself primarily through political institutions. It will be through the degradation of hearts.
Need I add that the little that remains of politics will struggle helplessly in the grip of general animality, and that governments will be forced, just to maintain themselves and to create a mere phantom of order, to resort to measures that would make even our present-day hardened humanity shudder!
Then, the son will flee the family—not at eighteen, but at twelve—emancipated by his own greedy precocity; and he will flee not to seek heroic adventures, not to rescue a maiden imprisoned in a tower, not to immortalize an attic room with sublime thoughts, but to launch a business, to get rich, and to compete with his wretched father—the founder and shareholder of a newspaper that spreads enlightenment and denounces the age as a remnant of superstition.
Then, the lost ones, the disowned, the women who’ve had a few lovers and are sometimes called angels as a thank-you for the glimmer of recklessness in their logically malicious lives—these women, I say, will be nothing but pitiless wisdom.
A wisdom that will condemn everything—except money. Everything, even the errors of the senses!
Then, what will pass for virtue—what am I saying—everything that is not a burning passion for Plutus will be considered utterly ridiculous.
Justice—if it even exists in that fortunate age—will banish all citizens who fail to make a fortune.
Your wife, O bourgeois! Your chaste half, whose legitimacy is your idea of poetry, will now introduce into legality an unimpeachable infamy, becoming the vigilant and loving guardian of your safe: the perfect ideal of the kept woman.
Your daughter, with a childish ripeness, will dream in her cradle of selling herself for a million.
And you, bourgeois—less a poet than ever—you will find nothing to object to. You will regret nothing. For in man there are things that grow stronger and thrive as others wither and weaken; and thanks to the progress of those times, nothing will remain of your guts but viscera!
I’m not saying the world is reduced to the desperate expedients and clownish disorder of South American republics, nor that we’ll revert to savagery and wander, rifle in hand, through the grassy ruins of our civilization in search of something to eat.
No; for such a fate and such adventures would still suggest some kind of vital energy, an echo of the earliest ages.
New examples and new victims of the unknowable moral laws, we shall perish in precisely that by which we believed we would live.
Mechanization will have Americanized us so thoroughly, progress will have so utterly atrophied our spiritual faculties, that none of the bloodthirsty, sacrilegious, or unnatural dreams of the utopians will compare with its actual results.
I ask any thinking person to show me what remains of life. As for religion, I think it pointless to discuss or to search for its remains—when the only real scandal left is that anyone still bothers to deny God.
Property virtually disappeared with the abolition of primogeniture; but the time will come when humanity, like a vengeful ogre, will snatch the last crumbs from those who believe they have legitimately inherited the revolutions. Yet even that would not be the supreme evil.
The human imagination can conceive, without too much difficulty, of republics or other communal states worthy of a certain glory—if they are led by sacred men, by a kind of aristocracy.
But universal ruin—or universal progress, for all I care—will not reveal itself primarily through political institutions. It will be through the degradation of hearts.
Need I add that the little that remains of politics will struggle helplessly in the grip of general animality, and that governments will be forced, just to maintain themselves and to create a mere phantom of order, to resort to measures that would make even our present-day hardened humanity shudder!
Then, the son will flee the family—not at eighteen, but at twelve—emancipated by his own greedy precocity; and he will flee not to seek heroic adventures, not to rescue a maiden imprisoned in a tower, not to immortalize an attic room with sublime thoughts, but to launch a business, to get rich, and to compete with his wretched father—the founder and shareholder of a newspaper that spreads enlightenment and denounces the age as a remnant of superstition.
Then, the lost ones, the disowned, the women who’ve had a few lovers and are sometimes called angels as a thank-you for the glimmer of recklessness in their logically malicious lives—these women, I say, will be nothing but pitiless wisdom.
A wisdom that will condemn everything—except money. Everything, even the errors of the senses!
Then, what will pass for virtue—what am I saying—everything that is not a burning passion for Plutus will be considered utterly ridiculous.
Justice—if it even exists in that fortunate age—will banish all citizens who fail to make a fortune.
Your wife, O bourgeois! Your chaste half, whose legitimacy is your idea of poetry, will now introduce into legality an unimpeachable infamy, becoming the vigilant and loving guardian of your safe: the perfect ideal of the kept woman.
Your daughter, with a childish ripeness, will dream in her cradle of selling herself for a million.
And you, bourgeois—less a poet than ever—you will find nothing to object to. You will regret nothing. For in man there are things that grow stronger and thrive as others wither and weaken; and thanks to the progress of those times, nothing will remain of your guts but viscera!
These times may be very near; who even knows if they haven’t already arrived, and if the coarsening of our nature isn’t the only thing preventing us from recognizing the very air we breathe!
As for me, who sometimes feels within myself the ridiculousness of a prophet, I know I will never have the charity of a physician.
Lost in this vile world, jostled by the crowd, I am like a weary man whose eye, looking back over the deep years, sees only disenchantment and bitterness, and ahead only a storm that contains nothing new—no lesson, no pain.
The evening when such a man has stolen from destiny a few hours of pleasure, lulled by digestion, forgetful—so far as possible—of the past, content with the present, resigned to the future, intoxicated by his composure and his dandyism, proud of not being as low as those passing by, he says as he contemplates the smoke from his cigar: What do I care where those consciences are headed?
I believe I have drifted into what the professionals call a diversion. Nonetheless, I will leave these pages as they are, for I wish to date my sadness.
Charles Baudelaire, Fusées [Rockets] (1867)
As for me, who sometimes feels within myself the ridiculousness of a prophet, I know I will never have the charity of a physician.
Lost in this vile world, jostled by the crowd, I am like a weary man whose eye, looking back over the deep years, sees only disenchantment and bitterness, and ahead only a storm that contains nothing new—no lesson, no pain.
The evening when such a man has stolen from destiny a few hours of pleasure, lulled by digestion, forgetful—so far as possible—of the past, content with the present, resigned to the future, intoxicated by his composure and his dandyism, proud of not being as low as those passing by, he says as he contemplates the smoke from his cigar: What do I care where those consciences are headed?
I believe I have drifted into what the professionals call a diversion. Nonetheless, I will leave these pages as they are, for I wish to date my sadness.
Charles Baudelaire, Fusées [Rockets] (1867)