Charles Baudelaire. Poet of modern life (№ 454708)

The observer is a prince who remains incognito everywhere. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just as the lover of the fair sex unites all the beauties into one family - both those whom he has already found, and those who he will meet, and those whom he is not destined to find, just as the lover of painting lives in the enchanted society of a dream imprinted on canvases. He who is moved by the love of the life of the world penetrates the crowd like a gigantic electric battery. He is like a mirror, as big as the crowd itself; it is like a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, each pattern of which reflects the diversity of life and the changing beauty of all its elements. This is the self that the not-self craves insatiably and embodies it every moment in images more alive than the fickle and fleeting life itself.