Life's Pleasures Quote by Jean Cocteau

Cocteau frames modern life as a kind of compulsory velocity: even love, the one activity we like to imagine as timeless, is just another carriage on an express train whose destination is death. The image is melodramatic on purpose. It compresses the 20th century’s obsession with speed - industry, war, celebrity, desire - into a single mechanical metaphor. You don’t opt into the ride; you’re born on board. That fatalism makes his next move sharper: opium isn’t sold as pleasure, rebellion, or even oblivion, but as a perverse kind of agency. Not stopping the train (impossible), not changing its route (naive), but stepping off while it still moves - choosing a state that isn’t “living” in the socially approved sense, yet isn’t death either.

The subtext is classic Cocteau: aesthetic escape dressed as transgression. He’s less interested in narcotics as chemistry than as an artistic stance, a refusal of the era’s relentless narrative arc (work, love, accomplishment, decline). Opium becomes a trick of attention - an attempt to exit the moral blackmail of “make your life count before you die.” It’s also a frank admission of seduction: the drug offers a third category beyond the binary that structures most existential talk.

Context matters: Cocteau wrote about opium with the intimacy of someone who knew both its glamour and its cost. The line carries a director’s sensibility, too: the train is the plot, death is the ending, and opium is stepping out of the movie mid-scene to stare at the projector beam.