Quite a meaty Bone, this fragment of Baudelaire...

Baudelaire as a thinker, a writer, a (God 'elp us all) philosopher, I have always disliked. His wonderfully beautiful, exquisitely ingenious poetry apart--the man has always seemed to me narrow, cold, contrived, and contriving; humorless, conventional, and absurd: just the sort who would suppose that he divined supernal beauty in the narrow, cold, charmlessly contrived work of my countryman-jingleman Edgar Alan Poe.  But I'm still not done with those few paragraphs at the end of l'Ecole Païenne.  I return now to the opening sentences:

     "To repudiate the efforts of the society that came before us, its philosophy and Christianity, would be to commit suicide, to reject the impulse and tools of improvement. To surround oneself exclusively with the seductions of physical art would mean in all probability to lose onself.  In the long run, the very long run, you will see, love, feel only what is beautiful, you will be unable to see anything but beauty.  I use the word in its narrow sense. The world will appear to you as merely material.  The mechanisms that govern its movement will long remain hidden...."

     Nothing in my reading of history has more puzzled me than the dogged unreflecting persistence of just those things, "the efforts, philosophy, and Christianity of the society which came before."  As a ten-year-old, eleven-year-old, twelve-year-old boy growing up in the Far West where Transcendental Individualism, thanks to the Schoolmarm and the circumambience of Open Horizons and Infinite Space, held sway above all creeds and conventions, I found them easy to repudiate, quite naturally so, and I held "the society which came before" in fairly serene and untroubled, offhand contempt--except, of course, for art and music, in which it may be I did lose myself; but in which, in a manner apparently unimaginable to Baudelaire, I also found my truest self.   There was nothing suicidal about it.  Where I come from, you're expected to take responsibility, and to think, for yourself.  The world is material, but scarcely "merely" material. And when you realize that, the "hidden mechanisms which govern it" reveal themselves with astonishing clarity, very early, both to the intuition and to the discerning intellect.  Thus reality never, for me, "appeared as the effect of (social) constructions."  I have always understood, I think--at least from the time that I was ten years old (reflecting, with horror and outrage, on the military service which had been imposed on a couple of much loved older male cousins)--that military conscription in peacetime is an abomination, bespeaking a military/industrial society corrupt to the core, based on violence and the making of victims. It took five or six more years for the full iniquity of the U.S. Criminal Justice/Prison System to penetrate my consciousness....But, let's just say, that there was never any doubt whatsoever in my mind that it was my business in life not to become a victim, not to get caught in the gears of those "hidden mechanisms"--never to do jail time, never to perform any military duty of any sort, never to give orders, and never, ever to follow them.