Every Man His Chimæra

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Section two of Little Poems and Prose by Charles Baudelaire.
This librivance recording is in the public domain. Every man
his chimera, beneath a broad gray sky, upon a vast
and dusty plain, devoid of grass, and where not even
a nettle or a thistle was to be seen. I

(00:22):
met several men who walked bowed down to the ground.
Each one carried upon his back an enormous chimera, as
heavy as a sack of flour or coal, were as
the equipment of a Roman foot soldier. But the monstrous
beast was not a dead weight. Rather, she enveloped and
oppressed the men with her powerful and elastic muscles, and

(00:46):
clawed with her two vast talons at the breast of
her mount. Her fabulous head reposed upon the brow of
the man, like one of those horrible casks by which
ancient warriors hoped to add to the terrors of the enemy.
I questioned one of the men, asking him why they
went so. He replied that he knew nothing, neither he

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nor the others, but that evidently they went somewhere, since
they were urged on by an unconquerable desire to walk.
Very Curiously, none of the way affarers seemed to be
irritated by the ferocious beast hanging at his neck and
cleaving to his back. One had said that he considered
it as a part of himself. These grave and weary

(01:31):
faces bore witness to no despair. Beneath the splenetic cupola
of the heavens, their feet trudging through the dust of
an earth as desolate as the sky, they journeyed onwards
with the resigned faces of men condemned to hope forever.
So the train passed me and faded into the atmosphere

(01:51):
of the horizon, at the place where the planet unveils
herself to the curiosity of the human eye. During so
several moments, I obstinately endeavored to comprehend this mystery, But
irresistible indifference soon threw herself upon me. Nor was I
more heavily dejected thereby than they by their crushing chimeras

(02:16):
in section two,