cheap thrills and dead divine (aragon)

The world evinces so little faith in human aspirations, as is so knowing about the extent of each depravity, the universal fear of compromising oneself, the mechanical resignation to happiness, habit (the only woman who wears a corset nowadays), that—to my great consternation I admit—I wonder if skipping town for some other region better adapted to the mobility of my nature would not be well advised; that I dream of a sweet, cruel people; a feline people infatuated with its claws and perpetually ready to tear out its eyes and scruples. I dream of a people various like moire and sporting the bruises of love, that no one any longer cares to provide our avid sloth with the diversions to which it dares not lay claim. (42, The Passage de L'Opera)

But midnight is not enough for your adorable ghosts: the entire day and sleep scarcely suffice, in your walls the perpetual noise of a trailing gown disturbs you in some marvelous way, and you love it, that noise. (145, The Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont)

Among natural forces one power, acknowledged from time immemorial, remains as mysterious to man as ever, and an integral part of his existence: night. This great black illusion conforms to fashion and to the slightest variations of its slaves. The night of our cities bears no resemblance to that howling of dogs in the Roman shadows, nor to the bat of the Middle Ages, nor yet to that image of sorrows which is the Renaissance night. She is a gigantic monster of sheetmetal perforated with knife holes. The blood of modern night is a singing light. On her breast she wears shifting tattoos. Her hair is curled around sparklers, and where the plumes of smoke finally evaporate, some men have climbed aboard shooting stars. Night has whistles and lakes of incandescence. She hangs like a fruit from the earth’s littoral, like a side of beef from the cities’ golden fist. This palpitating corpse has let her tresses fall loose over the world, and in this nest the last, uncertain ghost of liberties takes refuge, slaking just a few steps from streets brightly lit by the civil sense, its all-consuming thirst for open air and danger. Thus, in public gardens, the densest region of shade merges its identity into a desperate kiss of love and revolt. (115, The Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont)

- Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon