The quill whispered quick over the thick parchment. His eyes stared unseeing at the sea. A feather of smoke escaped his pipe, languorous and unacknowledged.
Baudelaire pulled the writing board in harder to his diaphragm. The quill licked the parchment, dipping with limber regularity into the inkstand on the arm of the heavy wooden chair, brought over to face the window. Baudelaire’s knees were almost against the sill, and he was somehow almost leaning into the writing board, almost standing up from his chair. His body language, viewed more closely than a casual glance would reveal, showed an athlete at the starter blocks, all a poised readiness, an alertness. But not an alertness to the view, which was the feisty sea, nor to the room, which was a stripped, bare place rented for a few weeks of “scribbling down what my surgical tortures and acid experiments have revealed of my crabbed skeleton,” nor his pipe, which puffed mechanically the burning weed, nor, even, the quick quill, although his gaze was locked to its mystically moving nib, sharpened with habitual periodicity by a handy penknife. Baudelaire was bending over the still pool of his mind. And the room, the writing board, the nicotine, and the entirety of his body were in service to this attention to the rills of the ever-arriving mind—the mind whose lucid mirror our own breath too-often clouds into a damnable obscurity. Even the sea served her part, providing the white noise that loving motherhood so often gives her toddlers. “Come on, honey, that’s the way, good step, good step, oh how wonderful….”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.