Halcyon nights

The true Decadent believes that faith in any kind of progress is misplaced; there is no better world to come, which is still to be made by yet another revolution. He accepts also that salvation is highly unlikely to be found at the personal level; the quest for ideal love cannot succeed because people are not naturally loving and monogamous at all, but fundamentally duplicitous, ever ready to betray those whom they claim to love. Thus, the wholehearted Decadent renounces eutopia, euchronia and eupsychia alike, and contents himself with making what adjustment he can to their irrevocable loss.

Decadence is not a happy state, and the Decadent does not bother to seek the trivial goal of contentment, whose price is wilful blindness to the true state of the world. Instead, he must become a connoisseur of his own psychic malaise (which mirrors, of course, the malaise of his society). He is the victim of various ills, whose labels become the key terms of Decadent rhetoric: ennui (world-weariness); spleen (an angry subspecies of melancholy); impuissance (powerlessness).

Gripped by these disorders, the Decadent is thoroughly apathetic, but his apathy is not so much a failing as a kind of curse visited upon him by the times in which he must live. If it is to be reckoned as a king of sin - and we must remember that what we would nowadays call “clinical depression” was once reckoned by the Catholic Church to be the sin of accidie - then it is a sin from which conventional morality offers no hope of redemption. If the flame of his ashen spirit is to be reignited he must have recourse to new and more dangerous sensations: the essentially artificial paradises by means of drugs - particularly opium and hashish, but also absinthe and ether - but he remains well aware that the greatest artifice of all is, of course, Art itself.


From the introduction of “Moral ruins” by Brian Stableford (1990)