Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last––possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.
—Maurice Blanchot. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. p 65.
To see our own face as it is would be madness, since we would no longer have any mystery for ourselves and would, therefore, be annihilated by transparency. Might it not be said that man has evolved into a form such that his face remains invisible to him and he becomes definitively unidentifiable, not only in the mystery of his face, but in any of his desires?
—Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime. Trans. Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 2008. p 6-7.
然後，牛津大學出版社「世界經典」系列的英譯本The Flowers of Evil (iv) 就是我花錢買的第一本英文書吧，扉頁上的墨跡指證，那是1993年10月19日，一本翻過又打開另一本，也就是這樣開始接觸英語世界建構的「世界文學」。十年以後，受著指導老師的影響，我的碩士論文中有一章是以波特萊爾幾首詩作為例子，討論到第二帝國（1852-1870）的巴黎重建大計，令巴黎的街道與社鄰空間由席捲歐洲的革命現場變成方便軍車與資本快速調動的馬路城市之同時，在拿破崙「子姪」與政商利益集團的高壓管治下，城市住民所經驗的各種社會意義上與精神上（psyche）的流離、斷裂，人身自由與政治權利的受壓，如何以一種厭煩、沉悶（ennui）的癥候方式呈現於波特萊爾的創作，換言之，厭煩、沉悶並不是個人偶然的心理狀態，而是歷史性的。
還有人要談波特萊爾嗎？
我知道的「波特萊爾」似乎更像個原地流放的的零餘者、前朝遺孤。回憶讓詩人無論身處那裡都被一種隔世感、錯置感所折磨，正因為回憶無所憑證，光亮的新城與廢墟無異。第二帝國大肆托建的時代之都，呼召歷史、標誌傳承（追宗認祖從拿破崙一直追溯至古羅馬戰神Minerva）,可是此光榮「歷史」所取消、取締的一切，不能做訪、不允憑弔。煤氣燈點亮的繁華巴黎，不過是管治者搭建的舞台布景，當「歷史」可以重複，現實不過一齣荒謬鬧劇。(v) 每一棟新蓋的建築，每一種新鮮事物都刺著詩人的心事，都變成失落（loss）與一切所失去的（all that is lost）的託寓（allégorie）(vi)，外間一切變得特別擾人，厭煩、納悶的取態乃是一種保存自我的防衛機制，這無疑與學院中人天天在說波特萊爾是「城市漫遊者」、是「Dandy」的說法大相逕違：
More Memories than if I’d lived a thousand years!
A giant chest of drawers, stuffed to the full
With balance sheets, love letters, lawsuits, verse
Romances, locks of hair rolled in receipts,
Hides fewer secrets than my sullen skull.
It is a pyramid, a giant vault
Holding more corpses than a common grave.
—I am a graveyard hated by the moon
Where like remorse the long worms crawl, and turn
Attention to the dearest of my dead.
[…]
Nothing is longer than the limping days
When under heavy snowflakes of the years,
Ennui, the fruit of dulling lassitude
Takes on the size of immortality.
—Henceforth, o living flesh, you are no more!
You are of granite, wrapped in a vague dread,
Slumbering in some Sahara’s hazy sands,
An ancient sphinx lost to a careless world,
Forgotten on the map, whose haughty mood
Sings only in the glow of the setting sun. (vii)
i) 文題取自波特萊爾（Charles Baudelaire），〈天鵝〉，《惡之華》（Les Fleurs du Mal）。莫渝譯，台北：志文，1985。頁280.
ii) 同上。頁278-279。
James McGowan的英譯：
A swan, who had escaped from his captivity, / And scuffing his splayed feet along the paving stones, / He trailed his white array of feathers in the dirt. / Close by a dried out ditch the bird opened in his beak, / Flapping excitedly, bathing his wings in dust, / And said, with heart possessed by lakes he once had loved: / ‘Water, when will you rain? Thunder, when will you roar?’ / I see this hapless creature, sad and fatal myth, / Stretching the hungry head on his convulsive neck, / Sometimes towards the sky, like the man in Ovid’s book — / Towards the ironic sky, the sky of the cruel blue, / As if he were a soul contesting with his God!
見：Charles Baudelaire. The Flowers of Evil. Trans. James McGowan. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1993．
Our destiny (as contrasted with the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. (i)
(*) Jorge Luis Borges. “A Refutation of Time.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. London & New York: Penguin, 1970. p269.
Let us consider a life in whose course there is abundance of repetitions: mine, for example. I never pass in front of the Recoleta without remembering my father, my grandparents, and great-grand parents are buried there, just as I shall be some day; then I remember that I have remembered the same thing an untold number of times already; I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does; I cannot lament the loss of a love or friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had; every time I cross one of the street corners of the southern part of the city, I think of you, Helen; every time the wind brings me the smell of eucalyptus, I think of Adrogué in my childhood; every time I remember the ninety-first fragment of Heraclitus “You shall not go down twice to the same river”, I admire its dialectical dexterity, because the ease with which we accept the first meaning (“The river is different”) clandestinely imposes upon us the second (“I am different”) and grants us the illusion of having invented it; every time I hear a Germanophile vituperate the Yiddish language, I reflect that Yiddish is, after all, a German dialect, scarcely coloured by the language of Holy Spirit. These tautologies (and others I leave in silence) make up my entire life. Of course, they are repeated imprecisely; there are differences of emphasis, temperature, light and general psychological condition. I suspect, however, that the number of circumstantial variants is not infinite: we can postulate, in the mind of an individual (or of two individuals who do not know of each other but in whom the same process works), two identical moments. Once this identity is postulated, one may ask: Are not these identical moments the same? Is not one single repeated term sufficient to break down and confuse the series of time? Do not the fervent readers who surrender themselves to Shakespeare become, literally, Shakespeare?
— Jorge Luis Borges. “A Refutation of Time.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. London & New York: Penguin, 1970. p258-9