My Baudelaire Summer

“How difficult it is to do as one ought every day.”

Dear readers! Last time I wrote to you all, in July, I was wrapping up an eight-week, worm-themed summer course that I had concocted as an elaborate piece of self-help: I would break down, step by step, the habits that I needed to adopt in order to finally finish my next book. So did it help? I’ll tell you at the end of this email.

First, I wanted to share my great research discovery of the summer: the letters of the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, which I picked up from the library around the same time I was writing Worm School. Anyone who’s been following this newsletter knows that I can’t resist a tortured artist figure—and Baudelaire may have been the most tortured of them all?

Charles Baudelaire by Nadar, circa 1855–57, when Baudelaire was in his mid-thirties (adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty Images)

As a writer, Baudelaire wanted “to crush people, astonish them, like Byron, Balzac, or Chateaubriand.” But he suffered from “terrible bouts of listlessness that disrupt everything.” Over and over, he admitted to wasting time, to letting the days slip through his fingers without applying himself to his projects. Along the way he became almost a scientist of procrastination, carefully observing the ins and out of his self-defeating pattern:

When I’m unfortunate enough to neglect a duty, the following day it’s even harder to perform that duty, and it becomes daily more and more difficult until that duty ends by seeming impossible to perform. . . . The only way I ever get out of difficult situations is through an explosion—but what I suffer in my existence is beyond expression, believe me.

At times, he clung to the idea of habit—the solution to all his ills, if only he could attain it! On June 3, 1863: “Habit alone can offset all the vices of my temperament.” Five months later: “The great aim, the only aim of my life now is to transform work, the hardest, most problematic thing in the world, into the thing I most enjoy, and that’s a question of habit.” But he never became a true creature of habit, or at least not of the good habits he wished so fervently to adopt. “I’ve acquired the detestable habit of putting off until the morrow all my duties, even the most pleasant of them,” he wrote to his mother on December 31, 1863.

A self-portrait from 1860 (API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Oh boy, Baudelaire and his mother. They were incredibly close when he was a child, especially following his father’s death when Baudelaire was six years old. But her remarriage to an ambitious military officer—and their decision to send sensitive young Charles away to boarding school—set up an irresolvable tension that would play out for the rest of Baudelaire’s life. He was desperate to recapture his mother’s full affection, to impress her with his brilliance and renown, but at the same time he needed to utterly reject his stepfather’s disciplined, rational worldview.

The amazing thing is, he succeeded! His writing—especially Les Fleurs du mal but also his art criticism, his prose poems¹, and his studies and translations of Edgar Allan Poe—really did change the course of literature, really did place him alongside his heroes in the pantheon of great French poets. (Even his mother, eventually, was impressed.) But, man, did he suffer along the way—from procrastination, from poverty (despite receiving a substantial inheritance at age twenty-one), from a tormented on-and-off relationship with the actress and dancer Jeanne Duval, and from a terribly damaging case of syphilis that he contracted around age eighteen and that finally killed him.

Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat, 1863, four years before his death at age forty-six (Heritage Images/Getty Images)

My friend

Anna Brones

wrote recently about the creative edge—the idea of operating at the very limit of your creative ability, which is extremely uncomfortable but also, perhaps, where the best work comes from. Baudelaire seemed to be operating not just at the creative edge but at the human edge, at the very limit of what any individual could endure and still write about it. Often he couldn’t write about it, could only endure it—and maybe that’s why reading his letters is so compelling, because you’re rooting for him to finally achieve some equilibrium, to finally adopt even a single good habit. “Truly, I consider the man who succeeds in healing himself of a vice as infinitely braver than a soldier or a man who defends his honor in a duel,” he wrote to his mother on July 31, 1864. “But how to heal myself?”

How indeed? I find this question both touching and profound. Might that be the job of adulthood, in fact, to heal ourselves of whatever wounds we’ve been inflicted with (or inflicted upon ourselves)? Making art may help, or it may not. Certainly Baudelaire achieved astonishing levels of self-expression without ever managing even a sliver of self-improvement.

Which brings us back to my attempt, over the summer, to hustle myself into finishing my book project, through a step-by-step elaboration of the habits I ought to be adopting in my writing life. Did it work? Not really! I had fun writing that series—and it brought in some extra cash at a moment when I needed it (huge thanks to everyone who subscribed!)—but at the end of the day it was a distraction from the book, it just was. I did get some good writing done over the summer, but, truthfully, I can see now that Worm School ended up draining away energy I should have been applying to the book.

That said: One happy outcome of the series was the weekday “Worm Zoom” session I started hosting in July. I’d heard that these kinds of virtual coworking groups can help create a sense of accountability and camaraderie—and, jeez, it’s really true. I was originally planning to host these sessions for just a few weeks, but I’ve found them so useful that I’ve decided to keep them going on an ongoing/indefinite basis. The sessions take place every weekday morning from 6–8am Pacific / 9–11am Eastern time. All the details are here; please join us anytime.

I’ll end with one last Baudelaire quote:

How difficult it is to do as one ought every day without a single interruption. How difficult it is, not to dream up a book, but to write it without lassitude—in a word to be in good heart day after day.

Oh dear, yes. Fortunately, the Zoom sessions are helping to keep me “in good heart day after day”—and the newsletter has always performed that function, too. Thanks so much for reading; see you again in two weeks.

Baudelaire by Nadar, 1855 (adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty Images)

---

“APPLYING FORCE CREATES RESISTANCE” (!)

As I was working on today’s post, I read a terrific essay by

Kristin Posehn

that was ostensibly about decluttering but that got into the whole dilemma of trying to force yourself to do anything, namely: “In the subtle realms of mind and emotion, applying force creates resistance.” She continues (emphasis mine):

That’s super counterintuitive. This batshit mental culture trains us to make things happen, hustle and grind, just do it or whatever. But you can’t boss around your inner life, and attempting to, sooner or later, hatches a rebellion. Even subtly, exerting force to rid yourself of, say, an anxiety, just makes the attachment to it stronger.

So what’s the alternative? Posehn writes about something called the Sedona Method, which is supposed to help with letting go of painful or unwanted feelings. But I also wonder if there’s a way to use the rebellion your psyche has been hatching, to put all that resistance to good purpose. The Baudelaire Method?

Émile Deroy’s portait of Baudelaire as a young man, from 1844 (Christophel Fine Art/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

---

RELATED ISSUES

From the archive:

Power doesn’t answer to the will

Edgar Allan Poe, procrastinator

---

Thanks for reading! This newsletter comes out every other Monday—and you can help keep it coming by upgrading to a paid subscription, buying one of my Daily Rituals books, forwarding this email to a friend, or even just clicking the “like” button below.

1. Baudelaire once described the prose poems as “laborious little nothings that demand constant good humor”—pretty much how I feel about the vignettes I’m trying to write for my book. Baudelaire again: “But these little things, when one wants to express them with both penetration and lightness of touch, are so difficult to perform!”