"Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams"
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Common sense, Baudelaire implies, is a provincial faculty: useful for buying bread, disastrous for grasping what a life feels like from the inside. The provocation lands because he borrows the language of the sensible to undercut it. If even "common sense" tells us the earth exists "only a little", then the everyday is demoted to a thin veneer, a temporary staging area. Reality, in this frame, isn’t what’s solid; it’s what’s vivid.
The subtext is classic Baudelairean revolt against bourgeois certainty and the 19th-century cult of material progress. Paris was being rebuilt into a modern capital, with wider boulevards and cleaner lines; he answers that new order with a counterclaim that the real city is psychic: desire, memory, intoxication, dread. "Dreams" here aren’t cute fantasies but an alternate jurisdiction where the self is most honest - and most ungovernable. He’s not praising sleep so much as the imagination’s ability to expose the fraud of "normal."
The phrasing also smuggles in a kind of spiritual cynicism. The earth "exists" but "only a little": enough to bruise you, not enough to justify its authority. Dreams become "true reality" because they compress and intensify experience, turning scattered sensations into meaning. Baudelaire’s intent isn’t to escape consequences; it’s to indict a world that mistakes durability for depth, and calls that mistake maturity.
The subtext is classic Baudelairean revolt against bourgeois certainty and the 19th-century cult of material progress. Paris was being rebuilt into a modern capital, with wider boulevards and cleaner lines; he answers that new order with a counterclaim that the real city is psychic: desire, memory, intoxication, dread. "Dreams" here aren’t cute fantasies but an alternate jurisdiction where the self is most honest - and most ungovernable. He’s not praising sleep so much as the imagination’s ability to expose the fraud of "normal."
The phrasing also smuggles in a kind of spiritual cynicism. The earth "exists" but "only a little": enough to bruise you, not enough to justify its authority. Dreams become "true reality" because they compress and intensify experience, turning scattered sensations into meaning. Baudelaire’s intent isn’t to escape consequences; it’s to indict a world that mistakes durability for depth, and calls that mistake maturity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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