In the midst of the fugitive

“Do you remember a picture (it really is a picture!), painted – or rather written – by the most powerful pen of our age, and entitled The Man of the Crowd? In the window of a coffee-house there sits a convalescent, pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. But lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing in all the odours and essences of life; as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, he remembers, and fervently desires to remember, everything. Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed countenance that has, on an instant, bewitched him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion! […] The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.” – Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). 
 
Separate myself 
Dig and fill the moat 
Build the highest wall 
Drown until I float 

On the other side of this wall 
There is no one at all 
On the other side of this wall 
There is nothing at all 

Separate myself 
Such a lonely place 
Cut away from all 
A king of all this space 

On the other side of this wall 
There is no one at all 
On the other side of this wall 
There is nothing at all