Strangeness

 Margaret bought me a small pack of Baci chocolates.  We shared them together.

Two of the quotes inside interested me.  They were:-

        "There is no beauty without a touch of strangeness."  by Edgar Allen Poe....and

        "Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty." by Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writing on Art and Literature (written for the Paris Exhibition Universelle of 1855) 

Edgar Allen Poe

My Investigation

Main points-

Born in 1809 to English actors.  He may have been named after Edgar in King Lear.  His father abandoned the family; his mother died before he was three.  He was taken in by the Allen family.  

He attempted to live by writing.  He died aged 40 after a 11 year marriage to his cousin aged 13 at the time, when he was 27.  Was he marrying for a mother?  - His aunt became 'as a mother', his wife his sister.

My grandfather read 'The Pendulum and the Pit' to us when we where about 10 years old, and yes it terrified us, though when our grandfather fell asleep during the rendition this did help reduce sense of complete terror.

Allen Poe was one of the first writers to invent the 'detective novel', complete with difficult genius detective, innocent side kick, and cack-handed  police detective.  My grandfather went on to read us the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.  Conan Doyle apparently said if all the writers who were profoundly influenced by Poe paid to give him a monument, he would have a pyramid.

Poe died under suspicious circumstances aged 40, found in the street in someone else's clothes. (Enough said.)  I enjoyed listening to The Forum on BBC World Service by the way.

If you search google for the origin of the quote found in Baci, you find only references to the quote found in Baci.  So there we have it-  What is strangeness?  What is beauty?  

Charles Baudelaire was born in 1821, 12 year younger than Poe, but he also died aged 46.  His father was 37 years older than his mother and died when Baudelaire was 6 years old. Baudelaire had an inadequate attachment to his mother, and was sent by his step-father to India, aged 20.  Here he was greatly influenced by the ocean, but not India.  He returned straight home, back to the taverns of Paris.

I read the following:- 

'In 1847, Baudelaire became acquainted with the works of Poe (Poe died in 1849), in which he found tales and poems that had, he claimed, long existed in his own brain but never taken shape. Baudelaire saw in Poe a precursor and tried to be his French contemporary counterpart. From this time until 1865, he was largely occupied with translating Poe's works; his translations were widely praised. Baudelaire was not the first French translator of Poe, but his "scrupulous translations" were considered among the best.'

Portrait of Baudelaire by
Emile Deroy, 1844

Quote taken with gratitude from 'Brainpickings' 

"Beauty always has an element of strangeness. I do not mean a deliberate cold form of strangeness, for in that case it would be a monstrous thing that had jumped the rails of life. But I do mean that it always contains a certain degree of strangeness, of simple, unintended, unconscious strangeness, and that this form of strangeness is what gives it the right to be called beauty. It is its hallmark, its special characteristic. Reverse the proposition and try to imagine a commonplace beauty! And how could this necessary, incompressible, infinitely varied strangeness, dependent upon environment, climate, habits, upon race, religion and the temperament of the artist, ever be controlled, amended, corrected by utopian rules, excogitated in some little temple or other of learning somewhere on the planet, without mortal danger to art itself? This element of strangeness which constitutes and defines individuality, without which there is no beauty, plays in art (and may the precision of this comparison excuse its triviality) the role of taste or flavouring in cookery; if the individual usefulness or the degree of nutritious value they contain be excepted, viands differ from each other only by the idea they reveal to the tongue."

Baudelaire's Grave in Montparnasse
Cemetery, Paris