One should always be drunk

After a wonderfully summery fall, the winter has arrived all of a sudden to San Francisco. Today has been dark, cold and rainy. I’ve spent the last couple of days at home, hiding under piles of blankets and books and chocolate and silence. Tonight will be a long night, we’re gaining an hour because it will supposedly save us light (wtf), and my usual insomnia is making me catch up with my blog reading. I just had a couple of glasses of Bosnian wine and I read this:

No tomar alcohol significa acercarse a todas las situaciones en la desnudez pura de la incomodidad social. “All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment”, dijo Walt. En este caso, el castigo es sobrevivir a los que no queremos (a los extraños, a los conocidos casuales, a la familia lejana) en un doloroso estado de sobriedad. Cuando uno está ebrio nunca se pregunta qué estoy haciendo aquí (la respuesta es bebiendo, pues), ni hace cuánto. Estar sobrio significa estar tristemente apegado a la cronologí­a y los hechos: los minutos perdidos en la aridez brutal del small talk, las horas interminables en casas ajenas, las largas superficialidades necesarias para establecer tenues conexiones personales. Lo único que nos entretiene es pensar la forma más ágil de emprender la huída, las creativas excusas que hay que elaborar para irse temprano, no vaya uno a decir la verdad: “I’d rather go home to my dog and read a 500 page book about the IRS”.

Even drinking I find small talk incredibly exhausting and soul-sucking. So I also make excuses to be able to go home and make quiche. Or hide under piles of blankets and books and chocolate. And drink wine by myself. Which reminded me of this poem by Charles Baudelaire, “Get drunk” from “Paris Spleen”.

One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only 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 the 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 the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”

And here’s the original version in French, “Enivrez-Vous”:

Il faut être toujours ivre.
Tout est là:
c’est l’unique question.
Pour ne pas sentir
l’horrible fardeau du Temps
qui brise vos épaules
et vous penche vers la terre,
il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.
Mais de quoi?
De vin, de poésie, ou de vertu, à votre guise.
Mais enivrez-vous.
Et si quelquefois,
sur les marches d’un palais,
sur l’herbe verte d’un fossé,
dans la solitude morne de votre chambre,
vous vous réveillez,
l’ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue,
demandez au vent,
à la vague,
à l’étoile,
à l’oiseau,
à l’horloge,
à tout ce qui fuit,
à tout ce qui gémit,
à tout ce qui roule,
à tout ce qui chante,
à tout ce qui parle,
demandez quelle heure il est;
et le vent,
la vague,
l’étoile,
l’oiseau,
l’horloge,
vous répondront:
“Il est l’heure de s’enivrer!
Pour n’être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps,
enivrez-vous;
enivrez-vous sans cesse!
De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise.”

[via Poetry Dispatch and Other Notes from the Underground]