Lux lucet in tenebris

On analogy, we find the decisive word – calm, mordant, decisive – in Goethe: ‘Every existent is an analogon of the entire existent; and so that which exists always appears to us isolated and interwoven at one and the same time. If one follows analogy too closely, everything coincides in the identical: if one avoids it, all is dispersed in the infinite. In both cases contemplation stagnates, in the one case because it is too lively, in the other because it has been killed.’ As often happens in Goethe, the surprise comes from a single flash, at the end. In his carefully thought-out sentence, the shock is conveyed by the last word: getötet, ‘killed.’ How do you kill contemplation? And for Goethe this is tantamount to saying: How do you kill life itself? By avoiding analogy. Those who avoid analogy can mock the excessive liveliness – febrile, almost delirious – of those who instead abandon themselves totally to it. Everyone knows that analogy is not obligatory. You can simply ignore it. And this act of omission has a boundless power, like a blow delivered by a murderer.

Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved.

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves.”

“The language of flowers and silent things”

“The fact that violent mental suffering or unexpected and terrible events are frequently the cause of madness, I explain as follows. Each such suffering is as an actual event always confined to the present; hence it is only transitory, and to that extent is never excessively heavy. It becomes insufferably great only insofar as it is a lasting pain, but as such it is again only a thought, and therefore resides in the memory. Now if such a sorrow, such painful knowledge or reflection, is so harrowing that it becomes positively unbearable, and the individual would succumb to it, then nature, alarmed in this way, seizes on madness as the last means of saving life. The mind, tormented so greatly, destroys, as it were, the thread of its memory, fills up the gaps with fictions, and thus seeks refuge in madness from the mental suffering that exceeds its strength, just as a limb affected by mortification is cut off and replaced with a wooden one.”

Baudelaire was a lover of depth, understood in the strictly spatial sense. He waited, like some marvel always ready to flare into being, for certain moments in which space eluded its customary flatness and began to reveal itself in a potentially inexhaustible succession of stage wings. Then things – every single negligible object – suddenly took on an unexpected significance. In those moments, he wrote, ‘the exterior world offers itself with a powerful emphasis, a clearness of outline, a wealth of exquisite colors.’ As if to say that thought was possible only when the world presented itself in this way. These were also ‘the moments of existence in which time and extension are more profound, and the sentiment of existence has grown enormously.’ So, in Western terms, Baudelaire was getting close to describing what for Vedic seers, and later for Buddha, was bodhi, the ‘awakening.’ And in an equally literal Western spirit, he made this coincide with physiological awakening, with the moment in which ‘the eyelids have just been unburdened of the sleep that sealed them.’ This is what drugs are for: opium makes space deep (‘Space is deepened by opium’), while hashish ‘spreads over the whole of life like a magic varnish’ (perhaps similar to Vauvenargues’s comment ‘clarity is the vernis des maîtres’?). Yet Baudelaire also pointed out that drugs are only a surrogate for physiology, since ‘every man carries within himself the right dose of natural opium, which he unceasingly secretes and renews.’