Baudelaire, a Mexican saying, and some other things

[Charles Baudelaire, looking haunted, which he was]

Baudelaire, dead at 46. Ravaged by years of self-abuse. Do you think, if you could raise him from the dead and offer him 20 more years if he never drinks or takes drugs, activities he claimed were essential to the fuel of his writing, he’d go for it?

Balzac died at 50, wrecked by chronic lack of sleep.…