In week 42 of the humanities crash course, I read a selection of poems from Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil and Gustave Flaubert’s short story A Simple Heart. As usual, I found the poems hard going, but enjoyed the story. I paired it with a classic film that raised important questions — and sparked surprising answers.

Readings

Gioia recommended assorted poems by Charles Baudelaire. I read The Flowers of Evil, his celebrated collection of poetry. (Or did I? More on this below…) As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of verse. I find most poems hard to follow. But I liked Baudelaire’s imagery (if not his subject matter.) I especially liked two poems in the collection:

  • Evening Harmony: a melancholic old-age reflection on impending death, with late afternoon lighting as a metaphor.
  • The Joyous Defunct: another reflection on death, this time from the perspective of a corpse relishing its absorption back into nature.

It’s mostly grim stuff, told vibrantly and memorably — it reminded me of 1980s goth music such as The Cure. Here’s the entirety of Evening Harmony to give you a sense of the vibe:

The hour approacheth, when, as their stems incline,
The flowers evaporate like an incense urn,
And sounds and scents in the vesper breezes turn;
A melancholy waltz—and a drowsiness divine.

The flowers evaporate like an incense urn,
The viol vibrates like the wailing of souls that repine.
A melancholy waltz—and a drowsiness divine,
The skies like a mosque are beautiful and stern.

The viol vibrates like the wailing of souls that repine;
Sweet souls that shrink from chaos vast and etern,
The skies like a mosque are beautiful and stern,
The sunset drowns within its blood-red brine.

Sweet souls that shrink from chaos vast and etern,
Essay the wreaths of their faded Past to entwine,
The sunset drowns within its blood-red brine,
Thy thought within me glows like an incense urn.

On to Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, which traces the life of Felicité, an uneducated and simple-minded, yet well-meaning, servant. The narrative starts with her childhood and adolescence, when she experiences a traumatic romantic betrayal: her beloved abandons her for money.

Eventually, she’s employed by Madame Aubain, who has two children: Paul and Virginia. Felicité also has a beloved nephew, Victor. These children grow and Felicité loves and serves them unconditionally. Alas, all die of different — but in all cases, tragic — circumstances.

Felicité grows old alongside Madame Aubain. Eventually, she inherits a parrot called Loulou. Felicité’s increasing deafness isolates her from everyone except Loulou: the parrot acquires religious significance for the old woman. Alas, eventually, Loulou also dies. Devastated, Felicité has it stuffed and placed in her room.

Eventually, Madame Aubain dies too. Felicité is left alone in their house, which is now for sale. Nobody buys it, and rather than attract attention, Felicité lets it go to rot. Eventually, her body starts falling apart too. As she nears the end, she bequeaths Loulou to the local church. She dies with an ecstatic vision of Loulou as the Holy Spirit.

Audiovisual

Music: classic U.S. Country music: Hank Williams, June Carter, and the O.G., Jimmy Rodgers. Gioia recommended a few others, some of which I was familiar with (Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson.) But this genre isn’t my thing, so I didn’t spend more time here.

(I realize this tune is more Western than Country, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to showcase these legends playing together.)

Arts: Rembrandt van Rijn. Again, an overly familiar painter: I’ve had the privilege of seeing several of his works in person at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, so I didn’t spend time revisiting his works this week.

Oil painting showing six men wearing black attire and wide-brimmed hats sit around a table covered with an ornate red cloth, engaged in conversation. *The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild* (1662) by Rembrandt via [Wikimedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt#/media/File:Netherlands-4183_-_The_Syndics,_Rembrandt.jpg)

The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662) by Rembrandt via Wikimedia

Cinema: Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, a classic Belgian “art” film from 1975. The “art” label is a warning: this film is famously challenging due to its length, pacing, and subject matter. It presents three days of the titular character’s life. Jeanne is a widow living with Sylvain, her teenage son. But their interactions — as with much of the movie — are sparse, cold, and monontonous.

The film revels in details conventional narratives leave out. The always-still camera lingers on Jeanne as she takes a bath, waits for elevators, prepares meatloaf, etc. These extremely long shots aren’t arbitrary: they emphasize the drabness of Jeanne’s life and her perfectionism. We know she’s spiraling because she starts missing beats, something we can only realize after we’ve been inducted into the numbing repetitiveness of her intimate routines.

Well, most of her intimate routines. On the side, Jeanne prostitutes herself to regular customers in her apartment. She stores their payments in a tureen that has place of honor in the dining room: this is the money for grocery shopping, Sylvain’s allowance, etc. Akerman wisely avoids showing what happens while Jeanne services her clients — until the critical final encounter.

Reflections

Flaubert was a pioneer of realism, bringing characters to life by noting seemingly trivial details. He also took their moral and spiritual struggles seriously, painting a vivid and compassionate picture through careful observation. The point: even someone as “simple” as Felicité can have a rich, meaningful existence despite (or perhaps because of) life’s sufferings.

The movie uses a similar approach to very different ends. I’d long known about this film, and given the Flaubert reading this seemed like the right time to watch it. Little did I know how much the two stories would contrast, especially given their similarities.

Like Flaubert, Akerman focuses on apparently trivial details. Both elevate the mundane through keen observation of detail: simple everyday things and actions — the tureen, the parrot, making coffee — take on mythic import. But the film trades tenderness and compassion for cold analysis.

Thematically, the biggest contrast is in how the characters handle their respective situations. Given her instinctive faith, Felicité faces one hardship after another with stoic aplomb, ending her life in grace. Jeanne — a prototypical middle-class secular European — has no such grounding. Her life isn’t merely drab: it’s spiritually empty. It’s no surprise she cracks up.

Many people see JEANNE DIELMAN as a Feminist milestone, with Jeanne as a victim lashing out against domesticity, patriarchy, capitalism, etc. But the film doesn’t specify how she came to her current condition. Did someone force her into prostitution? How? Jeanne is an intelligent, organized, and capable person living in a free society, surely she could’ve chosen a different life.

And (spoiler!) things won’t improve after her pivotal choice at the end of the film. To the contrary, her life will become much worse. Which is to say, far from being a heroine, Jeanne is pathetic and tragic. Instead of a revolutionary statement, I saw the film as a cautionary tale about living without the deep foundations that allow us to transcend individual concerns. While Jeanne doesn’t explicitly reject God, Sylvain does — and she doesn’t contradict him.

One of the central lessons in this course is that religion has played a central role in the life of our species. Clearly, these characters have “moved on” from the worldview that framed European life for two millennia. That, as much as anything else, ails them: JEANNE DIELMAN warns us of the risks of living in a society that has drained all transcendence out of everyday life.

Notes on Note-taking

So far this year, I’ve read ninety-three long form texts, the most ever. Ironically, I’ve bought the fewest books, since most of the material is available online for free. That has pros and cons. The pros are obvious: instant, free availability. The cons are more nuanced.

Given their age, all these works are in the public domain. So why buy any at all? For one thing, free ebooks often have formatting glitches: poor typography, uneven tables of contents, punctuation and spelling errors (presumably from poor scans,) etc.

Some free ebooks are reformatted versions of Project Gutenberg editions. PG has the largest repository of free ebooks, but many suffer from the typographic and flow issues noted above. I’ve read several during the course, and all have had glitches. (The best reformats are from the excellent Standard Ebooks.)

Also, not all translations are in the public domain. Same goes for audiobooks: the text might be free, but the audio often isn’t. Plus, some commercial editions have notes or ancillary materials not present in the free versions. This week, I also learned some free ebooks can be incomplete.

I read a free edition of The Flowers of Evil from Alice & Books, which includes 54 poems. FleursDuMal.org, a website dedicated to the book, lists 164 poems over various editions. It’s unclear how these 54 were selected or by whom. Of course, I could read the whole set in the website, but I prefer e-reader apps (either Apple Books or Kindle.)

So, I can’t trust free ebook editions to be authoritative or have the best translations. That won’t matter as much with a collection of poems, but it could be an issue with other kinds of works. So caveat emptor — with the caveat that the emptor here isn’t paying with anything but their time.

(That said, I’ve gladly sponsored Standard Ebooks. Check them out if you’re into classic literature.)

Up Next

Gioia recommends two keystone texts of African-American history: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois’s The Souls of Black Folk. I’ve already read Douglass’s book, so I’ll replace it with Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!