Short unreliable biography of Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire’s father was a former priest who became a personal tutor of wealthy and influential people of his time. He was already wealthy and popular by the age of 60 when he married the 26 year old Caroline Archimbaut Dufays. Caroline gave birth to Charles at the age of 27 and raised her by herself after her husband died in 1827 (Charles was 6). In 1828 however Caroline remarried to Major Jacques Aupick, a typically military/disciplined man that was later to work his way into becoming a senator. Charles hid his dislike for the major while his mother and nurse fawned him.

In 1833 (Charles was 12) they moved to Lyon. Charles was entered in a military boarding school exaggerating his dislike for his stepfather and probably his disciplined, logical and un-imaginary world of the militant man.

At the age of 15, Baudelaire enrolled in Louis-De-Grand (well known French high school). He grew even more insolent and was expelled in 1839. He decided he would be a writer but agreed to study law at Ecole de Droit where he lived excessively and became indebted while also making Bohemian acquaintances. He grew radical and also contracted Syphilis from a prostitute.

1841: His mother and step-father sent him on a trip to India but that was short-lived. After a forced landing at Mauritius Baudelaire abandoned Captain Saliz and returned to France after a trip to Reunion.

1842: He received an inheritance of 100,000 francs from his step-father and moved to Saint-Louis where he spent his time meditating and visiting art galleries. He earned the reputation of a dandy there through eccentric behaviour, extravagant clothing and excessive spending. He was placed under a legal guardianship after 2 years (he had already spent half his fortune and was still heavily indebted). He lived on low income and was chased by his debtors for the rest of his life.

In 1842 he met Jeanne Duval (actress in the Latin Quarter where he frequented) who is probably his most influential inspiration appearing with her dark beauty. Baudelaire’s mother named her and called her “Black Venus” illustrating her dislike and disapproval. She became his long-time mistress at the time of Baudelaire’s extravagant lifestyle and his initial use of hashish and opium was between 1843-1845 at Hotel Pimodan (now the Hotel Lauzun).

In 1852 he became involved with Apollonie Sebatier, a French hostess famous for her Sunday dinners with artists and writers. During 1855-1860, Marie Daubrum, a young and beautiful actress was his mistress. She probably was more to him since 1847 when he first came to meet her.

Baudelaire became all more and more despondent and attempted suicide in 1845. However that was considered to be a deliberate failure in order to draw his mother attention that took him to live with her and her husband in Paris where he moved out a few months after.

In 1857 the first publication of Les Fleurs du Mal came out and it was subsequently criticised by the press as offending public morality (both Baudelaire and his publisher were fined and 6 of the poems were banned as too radical for publication) due to its focus on Satanic and lesbian themes mainly. “Figaro” published a scathing review 1 month after publication. This together with the death of his step-father (1857) dragged him deeper into pessimism and despondency. After 2 years he moved away from Paris to Honfleur with his mother that was there since the death of Aupick. There he wrote Le Salon de 1859 and more poems fro Le Fleurs du Mal (Le Voyage).

In 1860 he published Les Paradis Artificiel (2 essays) in an attempt to condemn drug use, something he was putting himself through in search of inspiration.

The second edition of Le Fleurs du Mal came out in 1861 with 35 new poems. During the following months he was discouraged (by his friends) from entering the French academy, he was unable to help his friend and publisher, Poulet Malassis who was imprisoned for debt and also discovered that Jeanne Duval was living with another man. In 1862 he started complaining for strong headaches and was under the impression that he was going mad.

In 1863 he moved from Paris to Brussels in search of a publisher. His health worsened and in 1865 he had the first of a series of heart attacks. In 1867 he was left with aphasia and partial paralysis. He moved to Paris and died in his mother’s arms in 1867.

Short unreliable biography of Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes is believed to have been born on the 29th of September 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, a small university town next to Madrid, the day of St Miguel in Spain although no official record of his birth has ever been traced and his first residence is not undoubtedly established. He was the second son and fourth out of seven children of Rodrigo de Cervantes and Leonor de Cortinas. The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on "Don Quixote." A man who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errant extending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada was likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of the romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than one place about families that have once been great and have tapered away until they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. It was the case of his own history. The Spain of his time was one of transition, with chivalry dying away, absolutism of the sovereign being re-established with the help of the clergy and the Inquisition, the nobles being stripped of their powers and liberal town constitutions being dismantled. With the spread of printing, literature was undergoing major changes as well, with Spaniards returning back from Italian wars they carried back with them the cultural flows of Post-Renaissance pastoral poetry, with novelty airs entrapped within them. At the time old and traditional pastoral songs, songs ballads and stories of the peasant life were assembled and printed. But the most noticeable printing effect was the flood of the literature world with chivalry romances. All of these had an immense impact on a youth growing up at that age, with a special inclination towards the theatrical and literary world and also growing up in a university town that was taking over older historical printing centres with its expanding publishing activity.


Little is known for Cervantes early childhood years. It is assumed that he travelled a lot due to his father search for a job. His educational background is also vague with the only confirmed entry being Cervantes study under Juan López de Hoyos, a well-known humanist situated in Madrid. In 1568 he followed Guilio Acquavita back to Rome to serve as his chamberlain. In 1570 he resigned his post, which was endowed with opportunities for a career in the Papal state, to enrol as a soldier during stirring times. Spain at the time entered into an alliance with Venice and the Pope against the expanding Turks. Cervantes fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto under the commands of Don John (Don Juan) of Austria. The allied forces secured a decisive naval victory while the personal history of Cervantes has it that he was shot 3 times, one of the bullets striking his left hand to leave it permanently disabled. This however did not leave him totally unfit for service, and in 1572 he returned under the commands of Manuel Ponce de Leon, this time fighting side by side with his brother and taking part in the captures of Tunis and Goletta. He obtained leave to return to Spain in 1575 upon the Sun, endowed with letters of recommendation from Don John (Austria) and the Duke of Seca (Venice) for the king of Spain.


The Sun, the galley upon which Cervantes was returning to Spain, was captured by Algerine galleys and were shipped to Algiers were both brothers were kept as hostiles for ransom. Due to the letters Cervantes held on him, he was considered to be a person of importance and the first ransom collected by his family was deemed as insufficient and rejected. During his 5 year captivity, Cervantes led a number of escape attempts all ending in disaster. One of his attempts, which involved other prisoners as well as his recently freed brother returning to the rescue with a vessel, had as a result the murder of a Spaniard helper, and Cervantes being bought by the Dey from the private prisoner that previously held him. Cervantes on this occasion defied torture and admitted to be the sole cause of the plan. During his imprisonment he held 2 further escape attempts, both resulting in failure and nearly costing him his life. In 1580 he was finally set free with a ransom partly raised by his family and partly by Father Juan Gil.


Upon his return, he rejoined his regiment being now penniless. He took part of the expedition of Azores in Portugal and returned to Spain in 1583 with the end of the war bringing with him a daughter and the first manuscript of Galatea, his first pastoral romance. With no possibility of advancement within the army due to his crippled hand and the death of Don John, he turned to literature publishing Galatea in Alcala, his birth city. During the time Galatea was being published, he married Dona Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano in 1585, 18 years younger than him, making him the owner of a fortune that could make him survive his prosecutors for a while. He proceeded to write theatrical plays that were not of the best quality but survived the stage as Cervantes exclaimed. He was however more successful in prose writing winning the first prize (3 silver spoons) in a literary contest in Saragosa in 1595. In 1594 he had been appointed as a collector for the state of Granada but was sent to prison in Seville in 1597 for mishandling of state money. He was soon released as the balance against him was a small one, and was later appointed as the king’s tax collector travelling from town to town in the course of his business. His where-about is lost from 1598 until 1603 but it is widely believed based on his introduction to Don Quixote that he captured the idea in the prison of Seville and initiated the writing of the great novel behind bars.


Cervantes sold the publishing rights of Don Quixote to Francisco Robles of Madrid in 1604 and publication was completed in 1605. The book’s initial welcome is controversy with clashing beliefs. However a certainty is established in that Cervantes, with his highly critical/ironic work came into open conflict with the established men of letters and power that ridiculed in his writings. Don Quixote’s popularity however grew, crossing the borders of the Pyrenees as early as 1610 into a Milan publishing house and in 1611 into Brussels. Cervantes literary activity continued by publishing in 1613 the Novelas Exemplares, a collection of short stories written over the years after Don Quixote. In its preface, the first proof is provided for a second Don Quixote part. We learn however that Cervantes did not hold into great esteem his greatest work, by failing to correct publishers and by actually stating that he considered himself the stepfather, rather than the father of the book.


Taking advantage of the reputation Don Quixote secured him, he proceeded into attempts of recognition of his person as a dramatist, trying to compose dramas and comedies that would be worthy of comparison with ancient Greek works. However, he went on to write several chapters of the second part of Don Quixote when in 1614 a print of "Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licentiate Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda of Tordesillas came into his hands. Avellaneda, whose identity and history are unknown, unleashes a personal attack on Cervantes through his preface by presenting him as old, with one less arm, a former convict, a present friendless poor person with a built in hatred towards López works. In this, Avellaneda presents himself as a follower of López, possibly one of his drama students. Avellaneda’s assault and forgery prompted Cervantes to embark on his long standing task of finishing the second part of Don Quixote which was published towards the end of 1615. The fear of further “Avellanedas” appears to have pushed Cervantes into an early “murder” of his hero.


Cervantes himself died on April 23 1616, the same day with Shakespeare’s casualty to humanity although the two losses are quoted on different calendars and also it is believed that in Spain of the time, the tomb engraved date is the day of the funeral rather than the date of death of the diseased.

The Doors of Perception

We live together, we act, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or 'feeling into'. Thus remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even non-existent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

Aldous Huxley
The Doors of Perception

Time Vs History

At a time when history still made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop. known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale nut rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

Milan Kundera

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Lost Letters

Society

There was death in that place on the hill. I knew it the first day I walked out the screen door and into the backyard. A zinging, binging buzzing whining sound came right at me: 10,000 flies rose straight up into the air at once. All the backyards had these flies-there was this tall green grass and they nested in it, they loved it.

Oh Jesus Christ, I thought, and not a spider within 5 miles!

As I stood there, the 10,000 flies began to come down out of the sky, setting down in the grass, along the fence, the ground, in my hair, on my arms, everywhere. One of the bolder ones bit me.

I cursed, ran out and bought the biggest fly sprayer you ever saw. I fought them for hours, raging we were, the flies and I, and hours later, coughing and sick from breathing the fly killer, I looked around and there were as many flies as ever. I think for each one I killed they got down in the grass and bred two. I gave it up.

Charles Bukowski
The Post Office II, 6 

Bukowski

Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.

Charles Bukowski
The Post Office, IV, 13