“Ennui!... He would gladly turn the earth into a waste and swallow the whole globe in a yawn; hypocrite reader, — my likeness, — my brother!”Charles Baudelaire · Les Fleurs du mal · 1857 · Les Fleurs du mal, poemul de deschidere «Au Lecteur», versurile finale
The worst demon devours not through deeds but through emptiness: boredom that wants nothing and therefore wants everything.
Baudelaire inventories the vices that devour man — stupidity, sin, avarice — but declares them small beside the final monster: Ennui, boredom that wants nothing and therefore wants everything. Its mechanism is inertia: it destroys not through deeds but through spite, through the refusal to feel any longer. The final blow is aimed at the reader: you, watching these pictures from outside, are made of the same stuff. The poem does not condemn from above; it includes the reader in the diagnosis.
Why it matters In a world where everything can be consumed instantly, Baudelaire's monster has not vanished but refined itself: the appetite for expensive, fast novelty is a form of boredom that mistakes itself for passion.