Charles Baudelaire In Extremis

Partially paralyzed, rendered speechless after a stroke, the dying poet argued with his doctor, a fashionable atheist, about the existence of God. He pointed toward the setting sun - its golden sheen burning across the low horizon, framed by skeletal trees - and he mouthed strangled sounds, and kept pointing and gesturing, gasping for the words that once flowed so easily from his lips to the page. But what was his meaning? Did he mean only a beautiful God could have created the sunset? Or did he mean the sunset itself was a god, that it was enough to worship its timely recurrence every night of every day across time? Or in his affliction had he acquired the sky's view of the landscape? And in that passionate apprehension had the poet of Flowers of Evil finally achieved a full blossoming within his yearning soul?