“The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the avian’s, and the water of the piscean. His fervour and his profession is to meld with the crowd. For the consummate idler, for the impassioned observer it becomes an immense source of satisfaction to establish his dwelling amongst the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite.
To be abroad from home, yet to belong to home anywhere, to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be invisible of the world, such are some of the trivial pleasures of those sovereign, intense, and impartial souls, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions.
The observer is a prince savouring his incognito wherever he travels. The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from from all the enchanting women he has perceived, from those which could be perceived, and those impossible to be, just as the picture lover exists in an enchanted world of fancy painted upon canvas.
Thusly, the lover of universal life saunters amongst the throng as within an enormous reservoir of electricity.
He, the lover of life, must also be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every movement presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the elements of life.”
~ Charles Baudelaire from “The Painter of Modern life”.
Come! Let us stroll with the cat!
Come, let us take a stroll with the cat.
