Horror of Life: The Suicide Letters of Charles Baudelaire
From his early twenties till the day he died, Baudelaire felt himself to be bound in chains: he wriggled, spat venom, apologized halfheartedly, then did it all over again. This absurd cycle comes across so energetically, so convulsively, so predictably, that reading the letters sometimes feels like a spectator sport.
[It’s a] privilege to witness such a wide variety of minds going at it, appreciating, remembering, confronting, excoriating an entire universe of art, from the canvases of Degas and Watteau to the Akkadian-carved basalt stele of Hammurabi.
The situation seemed ripe for mining a precious metal known as “poignancy,” the urgency of the [writers’] strong desires to fulfill their ambitions and the wrenching back of that desire in the form of rejection.