The Arcades Project - Operi

Earthquakes rumhle in the helly of the cities
Beneath their hooves, lire in their wake.
Georg Heym, Dichtungen (Munich, 1922), p. 19. [J72a,1]
'Je t'adore it l'egal de la voute nocturne" d adore you no less than the vault of
Night>·,oo-nowhere more clearly thau in this poem is Sexus played off against
Eros. One must turn from this poem to Goethe's "Selige Sehnsucht" "01 to see, by comparison, what powers are conferred on the imagination
when the sexual is joined with the erotic. [J72a,2]
"Sonnet d'automne" describes, in a reserved but scrupulous way, the state of
being that conditions Baudelaire's erotic experiences: "My heart, on which
everything jars, / . . . / is unwilling to disclose its hellish secret, / . . . / I hate all
passion . . . / Let us love each other gently:' Tbis is like a distaut reprise of tlle
stanza in the West-Ostficher Divan where Goethe conjures out of the houris aud
their poet au image of the erotic as a sort of paradisal variant of sexuality: "Their
friendship reward his endeavor, / Compliant with sweet devotions, / Let him live
with them forever: / All the good have modest notions."402 [J72a,3]
Marx on the Second Repuhlic: "Passions without truth, truths without passion;
heroes without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose sole
driving force seems to he the calendar, wearying with constant repetition of the
same tensions and relaxations . ... If any section of history has been painted gray
on gray, it is this." Karl Marx, De,. achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, ed.
Rjazanov (Vienna and Berlin