#againstnature

Des Esseintes is the quintessential modern man: questing, longing for ‘something’ which isn’t what one wanted after all. The quest goes on, anxiously seeking new experiences, only to tell oneself, ‘No! That’s not what I meant. That really is not it’! Did Decadence ever really go away? In literary senses, it had its time. Is today the era of the New Decadence? Our senses, constantly overwhelmed to the point of satiety, we are never so unsatisfied. The moral certitudes we, as a society, clung to, have been eroded. We have access to more information, more TV & radio, yet we cannot hear ourselves in amongst the noise. We blot out the world, like Des Esseintes, with beautiful things and hope we can pacify the longing, the angst, with some new drug, some glittering opiate that will still the voice that keeps asking, ‘What’s it all about, then’? Huysmans offers no answers, maybe there aren’t any. But he does a beautiful job illuminating the path.

"He had long been a connoisseur in the sincerities and evasions of colour-tones. In the days when he had entertained women at his home, he had created a boudoir where, amid daintily carved furniture of pale, Japanese camphor-wood, under a sort of pavillion of Indian rose-tinted satin, the flesh would colour delicately in the borrowed lights of the silken hangings. This room, each of whose sides was lined with mirrors that echoed each other all along the walls, reflecting, as far as the eye could reach, whole series of rose boudoirs, had been celebrated among the women who loved to immerse their nudity in this bath of warm carnation, made fragrant with the odour of mint emanating from the exotic wood of the furniture."