Crowds
"The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be
himself or some one else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls
who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's
personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places
seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth
visiting.
The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in
this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd
enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a
box, and the slothful man like a molusk in his shell, will be
eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all
the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.
What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared
with this ineffable orgy, this dvine prostitution of the soul giving
itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected
as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes."
-Baudelaire
Thanks Rose
himself or some one else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls
who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's
personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places
seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth
visiting.
The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in
this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd
enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a
box, and the slothful man like a molusk in his shell, will be
eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all
the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.
What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared
with this ineffable orgy, this dvine prostitution of the soul giving
itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected
as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes."
-Baudelaire
Thanks Rose