Baudelaire - stanza from Spleen (From Fleurs du Mal)

 one of the great stanzas in poetry (trns from the French):


...No chest of drawers crammed with documents, 
love-letters, wedding-invitations, wills,
a lock of someone's hair rolled up in a deed, 
hides so many secrets as my brain.
This branching catacombs, this pyramid 
contains more corpses than the potter's field:
I am a graveyard that the moon abhors,
where long worms like regrets come out to feed
most ravenously on my dearest dead.
I am an old boudoir where a rack of gowns, 
perfumed by withered roses, rots to dust; 
where only faint pastels and pale Bouchers 
inhale the scent of long-unstoppered flasks.

Benjamin on the Novel vs Storytelling- Information - the novel-information as debased

 From the storyteller:  [this was written in the 1930s, amazing] Every morning, news reaches us, from around the globe.  And yet we lack rem...