The Arcades Project - Operi

America. Near the Capitol the roofs already reached to the level of the hill-saddle.
But always the splendid mass-cities harhor lamentahle poverty and degraded hahits,
and the attics and mansards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new
type of raw man . ... Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced
to living in one of these wretched upper-floor tenements of Rome." Oswald
Spengler, Le Declin de l'Occident , voL 2 (Paris, 1933),
p. 143.'"'' [J91a,3]
On the decline in the birthrate: ""When the ordinary thinking of a highly cultivated
people begins t.o regard 'having children' as a question of pro's and con's, the
great turning point has come . ... At that point hegins prudent limit.ation of the
number of births . ... In subsequent Roman t.imes, it became appallingly generaL
At first explained by the economic misery of the times, very soon it eeased to
explain itself at all." Oswald Spengler, Le Declin de l'Occident, voL 2 (Paris),
p. 147. Compare p. 116: the peasant feels himself to be a link in the chain of
forebears and deseelldants.499 [J91a,4]
Concerning the t.itle, Les Flenrs lin mal: ""During naive epochs, and as late as 1824,
the title of a volume of poetry simply indieated the genre taken up by t.he author.
There were odes, epistles, light verse, heroic verse, satires. Today, the title is a
symhoL Nothing is more refined. When the author harbors lyric intentions, he
gives his eollection a sonorous and mnsical label: Melodies, Prelndes . .. Tenderhearted
friends of nature prefer to take their titles from The Good Gardener's
Almanac. Thus, we have Dead Leaves, ... Branches of Almond . . . . We have
Palms and Cypresses . . . . And then the flowers: Flowers of Noon, Flowers of
Provence, Flowers of the Alps, Flowers of the Fields ." Charles Louandre, "Statistique
litttraire: La Poesie depuis 1830," Revue des deux mondes, 30 (Paris, June
15, 1842), p. 979. [J92,1]
The original title of "'Les Sept Vieillards"; "Fantomes parisiens. ??:"i()()
[J92,2]
"From the beginning, the proclamation of Equality as a constitutional principle
was not only an advance for thought, but a danger as well:' (Max Horkheimer,
"Materialismus und Moral;' Zeitsdcriflfor Sozia.fforschung [1933], no. 2, p. 188.)50'
Within the zone of this danger lie the absurd uniformities in Poe's description of
the crowd. The hallucination of the seven identical old men is in the same mold.
[J92,3]
It is only as commodity that the thing has the effect of alienating human beings
from one anothel: It produces this effect through its price. What is decisive is the
empathy with the exchange value of the commodity, with its equalizing substrate.
(The absolute qualitative invariance of the time in which labor that gener·
ates exchange value runs its course-such absolute equality is the grayish
background against which the gaudy colors of sensation stand out.) [J92,4]