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One should always be drunk. That's the Great Thing;
the one question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your
shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without
respite. Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.
And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the
stairs of a palace, on
the green grass of a ditch, in a dreary solitude
of your own room, and find
that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave,
ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans,
everything that flows, everything that sings,
everything that speaks, ask
them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, and the clock will
all reply: "It is time to get drunk! If you are not to be martyred slaves of
Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please."
Get Drunk! - Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, 1869 |