"As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life"
About this Quote
Baudelaire names a rift that shaped his life and helped invent modern sensibility. From the beginning, feeling came as a double surge: a shiver at the worlds ugliness and a rapture before its beauty. That doubleness is not a pose but an early, visceral fact. Born in 1821, he lost his father young; his mothers remarriage to the rigid General Aupick left him feeling displaced and embattled. The child who sensed betrayal and constraint also discovered the intoxicating power of sensation and art. Those two currents, pain and delight, never stopped colliding.
Les Fleurs du mal is built on that collision. The very architecture of Spleen et Ideal declares an irresolvable tug-of-war between despairing heaviness and the thirst for the absolute. Ennui, decay, and the scent of sin press in; yet music, perfume, and light flare up in moments of almost religious intensity. Paradox becomes method. The poet does not reconcile the extremes; he stages their friction and finds a new beauty in the sparks. In LAlbatros, the bird is both ridiculous on deck and sublime in the sky. In Correspondances, the world is a living temple of analogies, where a hint of rot mingles with the incense of transcendence.
Horror, for him, names mortality, moral corrosion, the boredom that suffocates the soul in the modern city. Ecstasy names aesthetic rapture, erotic transport, the fleeting blaze when correspondences align and the finite touches the infinite. The flaneur wanders Paris with a childs raw nerves: dazzled and disgusted at once. That sensibility underlies his dandyism and his exhortation to be always drunk, whether on wine, virtue, or poetry, anything to rise above the leaden weight of spleen.
He turns a private contradiction into a poetics of modern life. To see clearly is to admit the worlds wounds and its wonders; to feel fully is to hold both truths, the horror and the ecstasy, at the same time.
Les Fleurs du mal is built on that collision. The very architecture of Spleen et Ideal declares an irresolvable tug-of-war between despairing heaviness and the thirst for the absolute. Ennui, decay, and the scent of sin press in; yet music, perfume, and light flare up in moments of almost religious intensity. Paradox becomes method. The poet does not reconcile the extremes; he stages their friction and finds a new beauty in the sparks. In LAlbatros, the bird is both ridiculous on deck and sublime in the sky. In Correspondances, the world is a living temple of analogies, where a hint of rot mingles with the incense of transcendence.
Horror, for him, names mortality, moral corrosion, the boredom that suffocates the soul in the modern city. Ecstasy names aesthetic rapture, erotic transport, the fleeting blaze when correspondences align and the finite touches the infinite. The flaneur wanders Paris with a childs raw nerves: dazzled and disgusted at once. That sensibility underlies his dandyism and his exhortation to be always drunk, whether on wine, virtue, or poetry, anything to rise above the leaden weight of spleen.
He turns a private contradiction into a poetics of modern life. To see clearly is to admit the worlds wounds and its wonders; to feel fully is to hold both truths, the horror and the ecstasy, at the same time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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