The Brocken Specter
The visual phenomenon known as the Brocken Specter is one of the most extraordinary things one can possibly encounter. Unfortunately, it is really only available to minority of the earth’s population: those dwelling at high altitudes or where the fog gets really thick. One could describe it with words—and Baudelaire did a great job—but to fully appreciate both the phenomenon and the imagery, check out examples here.
“On a beautiful Pentecost Sunday, let's go up the Brocken. Dazzling cloudless dawn! However April sometimes pushes its last forays into the renewed season, and sprinkles it with its capricious showers. Let’s reach the top of the mountain; such a morning promises us more chances to see the famous Brocken Specter. This specter has lived so long with pagan sorcerers, he has witnessed so many black idolatries, that his heart has perhaps been corrupted, and his faith shaken.”
The Taste of Infinity
The imagery quoted above opens its self-titled paragraph. And the example below also opens its self-titled chapter. One might well wonder whether Baudelaire shoots the moon with his imagery on opening paragraphs, but this is the type of language found throughout the text. While at times excessively hyperbolic in the enthusiasm expressed for drugs, it quickly becomes apparent that Baudelaire was at heart a poet who was dabbling in prose in this book:
“Those who know how to observe themselves and...have known how to build their spiritual barometer, have sometimes had to note, in the observatory of their thought, beautiful seasons, happy days, delicious minutes. There are days when man awakens with a young and vigorous genius. his eyelids barely relieved of the sleep which sealed them, the outside world offers itself to him with a powerful relief, a sharpness of outlines, a richness of admirable colors. The moral world opens its vast perspectives, full of new clarities. The man blessed with this bliss, unfortunately rare and fleeting, feels at the same time more artist and more just, more noble, to put it all in a nutshell.”
The Moral Argument for Addiction
In the chapter titled “Morality” we’re going to dive just a little deeper beneath the surface of the opening paragraph, but rest assured, it is equally exuberant in its robust pursuit of imagery. About halfway through the second paragraph, however, arrives this particular little cornucopia of imagery that manages to allude to a Faustian character named Melmoth who upon sealing a deal with the devil for a guaranteed life extension of 150 extra years immediately is overcome with moral regret and proceeds to waste the gift searching for someone to sublet his soul and take over payments as a means of staking the claim that taking drugs is morally superior to not:
“Indeed, it is forbidden for man, under pain of decline and intellectual death, to disturb the primordial conditions of his existence and to upset the balance of his faculties with the environments in which they are intended to move, in a in other words, to disturb his destiny in order to replace it with a fate of a new kind. Let us remember Melmoth, that admirable emblem. his terrible suffering lies in the disproportion between his marvelous faculties, instantly acquired by a satanic pact, and the environment in which, as a creature of God, he is condemned to live. And none of those he wants to seduce consents to buy him, on the same terms, his terrible privilege. Indeed, any man who does not accept the conditions of life, sells his soul.”
Remember: This is all About Hashish
To suggest that “Morality” is really quite a troubling chapter title—if not downright unintentionally ironic—is to engage in understatement. Just a few paragraphs later arrives this example of imagery. Make no mistake: as literature, it is positively brilliant. But keep in mind: this entire example is about the morality of partaking in the pleasures afforded by hashish. No, really, it actually is:
“It is really superfluous, after all these considerations, to insist on the immoral character of hashish…That I assimilate it with witchcraft, with magic, which want, by operating on the matter, and by arcana of which nothing proves the falsity nor the effectiveness, to conquer a domination prohibited to the man or allowed only to him who is deemed worthy of it, no philosophical soul will blame this comparison. if the Church condemns magic and witchcraft, it is because they militate against the intentions of God, because they suppress the work of time and want to make superfluous the conditions of purity and morality; and that she, the Church, considers as legitimate, as true, only the treasures won by assiduous good intention.”
