Charles Baudelaire
A room which resembles a dream, a truly spiritual room, in which an atmosphere of stagnation is slightly tinted with rose and blue.
There the soul takes a bath of idleness, with the pungent odors of regret and desire. It is something crepuscular, bluish and rosy; a dream of pleasure during an eclipse.
The furniture has elongated, prostrated and languishing forms. The furniture seems to be dreaming. You might say it is endowed with a somnambulist life, like the vegetable and the mineral. The fabrics speak a mute language, like flowers, skies, and setting suns.
On the walls there is no artistic abomination. In its relationship to a pure dream, to an unanalyzed impression, definite art, positive art is blasphemy. Here, everything has a sufficient light and the charming darkness of harmony.
An infinitesimal odor of the most exquisite choice, to which is joined a very slight humidity, floats in this atmosphere, where the slumbering spirit is rocked by sensations of a greenhouse.
Muslin falls abundantly in front of the windows and the bed; it drops in snowy cascades. On the bed is lying the Idol, the goddess of dreams. But how is she here? Who has brought her? What magic power placed her on this throne of dreams and pleasure? What difference does it make? She is here and I recognize her.
Yes, these are her eyes whose fire cuts through the evening light; her subtle terrible eyes I recognize by their fearful malice! They attract, and subjugate, and devour, the glance of the man imprudent enough to look upon them. I have often studied those black stars which command our curiosity and admiration.
What kindly demon has seen to it that I am thus surrounded by mystery, silence, peace and perfumes? O beatitude! What we generally call life, even in its happiest expansion, has nothing in common which this supreme life I now know and savor minute by minute, second by second!
No! There are no more minutes and no more seconds! Time has disappeared; eternity now reigns, an eternity of pleasure!
But a fearful, heavy blow resounded against the door, and, as in my dreams of hell, I seemed to receive the blow of a pickaxe in my stomach.
And then a Ghost came in. A bailiff coming to torment me in the name of the law; an infamous concubine coming to cry poverty and add the trivialities of her life to sufferings of mine; or the errand boy of a newspaper director asking for the rest of a manuscript.
The heavenly room, the idol, the dream goddess, the Sylphide, as great René used to say, all that magic vanished with the brutal knock struck by the Ghost.
O horror! I remember! I remember! Yes! That hovel, that place of eternal boredom is mine. Here is the stupid dusty worn-out furniture: the hearthside with no flame and no embers, filthy with spittle; the gloomy windows where rain traced streaks in the dust; the manuscripts scratched out or incomplete; the almanac where a pencil had marked the ominous dates!
And that perfume of another world, on which with perfected sensibility I had gotten drunk, alas, was replaced by a tobacco stench mingled with a nauseating moldiness. Now we breathe here the rancidness of desolation.
In this narrow world, which is so full of disgust, a single known object smiles at me: the vial of laudanum; an old and fearful friend; and like all friends, alas, fertile in caresses and betrayals.
Oh, yes! Time has reappeared; time reigns as a sovereign now, and with the hideous old man has come back all of his demoniacal procession of Memories, Regrets, Spasms, Fear,Anxieties, Nightmares, Anger and Neuroses.
I assure you that now the seconds are strongly and solemnly accented, and each one, as it gushes forth from the clock, says: “I am Life, unbearable, implacable Life!”
There is only one Second in a human life which has the mission of announcing good news, the good news which creates in each one an inexplicable fear.
Yes! Times reigns; it has recovered its brutal dictatorship. And it pushes on, with its double goad, as if I were an ox. “Go on, she-ass! Sweat, slave! Live, soul in hell!”