At last! Alone! No sound but the rattle of a few belated, worn-out hackney cabs. For a few hours silence will be ours, if not rest. At last! The tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and I will suffer no more, except from myself.
Enfin! seul! On n'entend plus que le roulement de quelques fiacres attardés et éreintés. Pendant quelques heures, nous posséderons le silence, sinon le repos. Enin! la tyrannie de la face humaine a disparu, et je ne souffrirai plus que par moi-même.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Solitude
Charles Baudelaire, À une heure du matin (At one o'clock in the morning):