Life's Pleasures Quote by Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire doesn’t romanticize drunkenness so much as weaponize it. Time, in his telling, isn’t a neutral clock but a tyrant that makes martyrs out of ordinary people: it corrodes pleasure, shames desire, and reduces lived experience to a set of dwindling minutes. The imperative voice ("It is the hour... be ceaselessly drunk") lands like a street sermon, urgent and slightly hysterical, the kind of heightened command you hear when someone knows sobriety will mean surrender.

The trick is the pivot: intoxication isn’t only wine. It’s poetry. It’s virtue. Baudelaire smuggles a whole philosophy into a barroom proposition. Any practice that dislodges the self from petty accounting - money, schedules, reputation, the dull moralism of productivity - can count as a kind of sacred impairment. He offers a menu, but the point is not choice; it’s refusal. Refusal to be pinned to the calendar, to be disciplined into a compliant, time-keeping subject.

Context matters. Mid-19th-century Paris is modernity arriving with receipts: industrial rhythms, bourgeois respectability, the city rebuilt into cleaner lines that also make surveillance easier. Baudelaire, patron saint of the flaneur, reads that modernization as an assault on the inner life. So he proposes an antidote that sounds decadent but is really tactical: stay ecstatically out of step. Even "virtue" here feels sly, almost ironic - as if to say the moralists can have their intoxication too, as long as it breaks time’s grip.