The Artifact Itself

The book itself is slight, the pages yellowed and with more white space than necessary around the edges, common for the era it seems. The cover has that trippy painting by Margo Herr:

The cover definitely made me think: drugs.

Published in 1971 in the middle of the Freak Moment, it makes a certain kind of sense. An editor or a scholar (or both) figured the time was ripe for the Freaks or the heads---time to unleash the old French classics. They must have rounded up two of the best pieces from the first wave of hash hitting Paris 125 years before, packaged it with a tripped out cover that was a signal to a prospective reader, and then sell it for 95 cents.

Before I read the pieces, I started to research the background, like who was Baudelaire? Why had I heard of him and not Gautier? And who was Gautier?

Baudelaire, for me, was just a French name that I recognized, like Rimbaud. I once had a book called Rembrandt and Spinoza, a book about the spiritual and philosophical conflicts in Holland in that era, that at least turned Spinoza from a name into a person for me. (I'm still ignorant of Rimbaud.)

I got busy...

...And it turns out Baudelaire is considered one of the brightest literary thinkers in French history.

Gautier was well respected, but never considered on the same level as Baudelaire, and consequently his material has largely been out of print or never properly collected.

After reading the introduction by Githens, Gautier's translator, the impression I got about the two pieces went like this:

• Gautier wrote an experiential and anecdotal piece about his eating the hash, full of fanciful scenes that featured a creature named Daucus Carota, a gnarled root of a menacing figure;
• Baudelaire wrote a piece far more clinical and not anecdotal, and in fact was not about eating the hash at all.

I should possibly reread Githens piece again, because somehow I was left with the idea that Charles Baudelaire constructed "The Poem of Hashish" through interviewing the people who were invited to these nights in that forgotten neighborhood in Paris.

It doesn't take a reader very long to understand that, uh, yes, Charles Baudelaire certainly ate the dawamesk, possibly multiple times, and wrote beautifully from his own experience.

How did I not know Baudelaire, one of the greatest French thinkers? 

Should those who fancy themselves deep thinkers and Serious People of Letters be cognizant of important examples of themselves from the past?