Femmes Damnees

I haven't solved a paradox today, so, despite the subtitle of this blog, may I recommend Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. An excerpt:

You must always be high. Everything depends on it: it is the only question. So as not to feel the horrible burden of Time wrecking your back and bending you to the ground, you must get high without respite.

But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, whatever you like. But get high. 

And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of a ditch, in your room's gloomy solitude, your intoxication already waning or gone, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, 'It is time to get high! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get high; get high constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

If only I could read French!  I picked up Les Fleurs du Mal at the library today.  It's an excellent volume of poetry, though I confess that I prefer the prose of Paris Spleen.  Now there is a particular English edition of the former which collects together the (allegedly) best translations of each of his poems, and Aldous Huxley is credited with one poem - about the lesbians Delphine and Hyppolyta.  The French title is "Femmes Damnees"!  I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it, but it looks like it sounds sexy.  I'll be savoring a stunted little blossom each night before bed.  Inhale one here.

The Flowers of Evil begins with an excellent little poem "To The Reader", the conclusion of which will be keenly familiar to any respectable aesthete.  (Baudelaire was an aesthete and dandy who dabbled heavily in moral perversity, to wit, a decadent.)  The translation linked above differed from the two in my copy, and I think it bests them both.  This suggests that my qualification above (i.e., "allegedly best translations") was apropos.  In any case, a hellishly delicious morsel:

  Just as a lustful pauper bites and kisses
  The scarred and shrivelled breast of an old whore,
  We steal, along the roadside, furtive blisses,
  Squeezing them like stale oranges for more.