Books: On Wine and Hashish, Charles Baudelaire

These two essays are Baudelaire's jubilant celebration of intoxication, by (as the title indicates) wine and hashish. He describes the experience of drunkenness and getting high as transcendental experiences, and really tries to give some sense of what it's like to people who have never tried either. Part of a bohemian group of artists and poets living in Paris in the mid 19th century he saw alcohol as a great social leveller, and hashish as an exotic and mysterious drug that opened the user up to new ways of seeing the world, though (surprisingly) he does point out that drugs are only useful to the artist when they are the slave and not the master, advice he didn't succeed in following himself.

Back when I was eighteen and read this for the first time I was blown away. Here is someone describing the thrill of getting out of your own head and inhabiting a different state of being in such ebullient prose that it makes it seem as if the pursuit of intoxication is somehow noble; he talks about "the totality of beings in the universe rises before you with a new and hitherto expected glory. Grammar, arid grammar itself, becomes something like an evocative sorcery; words rise from the grave clothed in flesh and bones, the substantive, in its substantial majesty, the adjective, a transparent garment which clothes and colours it like a glaze..."

Rereading it ten years later I can still enjoy the language and admire his creativity in trying to describe things that are essentially indescribable, but it felt a lot like getting stuck in conversation with  someone who tells you that they had the weirdest dream last night and your heart sinks because you know the next twenty minutes are going to include sentences like; 'and when I got to the beach my dog was the lifeguard, expect it wasn't really my dog, you know? It was actually my driving instructor but also my dog, right?'. So like that, but much better written. I've got a feeling that this is one of those books that you have to read when you're still impressionable enough to take it seriously, but I still have a soft spot for Charles and his ramblings.