Baudelaire was a Dumbass....Just My Opinion

     A couple weeks ago, the group was forced on another mandatory excursion to Haut-Koenigsbourg Castle and to Struthof. I know that many of us complain about these excursions, why on earth would we be  interested on waking up at the butt- crack of dawn (slight exaggeration, but really no one likes getting up early on a Saturday) in order to see some centuries old castle that has been ripped down and rebuilt so many times that hardly any of the original structure remains? If it was not for the planned trips then I know that I typically would not view these excursions as must do's on my European list of sights to see. However, I do appreciate the fact that I do get to experience this part of history. It's the sense of history that a place like Haut- Koenigsbourg holds that draws me in to exploring it. One gets the sense of wonderment about what happened there, who lived there and what was their daily routine. Especially growing up as a child you relate castles to kings and queens, princes and princesses, knights in shining armor and the all around fairy tale feeling. It's when you discover the real occurrences behind those huge thick walls that you get the real story. The fact that many castles were built in order to keep strange and evil enemies away from the main sources of power, the bigger cities where the real kings and queens lived. The fact that so many gave up their lives to protect someone who probably didn't even know what was going on in that particular castle. Or perhaps not, maybe the castle was simply there as a note of how rich a particular lord was, maybe it was there to protect the people who lived in the village below. It's the history of such a place, that draws people to it, not really the fairy tale stories that one hears as a child, but its when you grow up and and what you are taught in school about the realities of such structures. That is what drew me into discovering the story of Haut-Koenigsbourg. You cannot really get how amazingly real these structures are until you really go there.
    It surprises me when in De Botton's book, he talks about the character Charles Baudelaire, who always dreamt as a child to travel and experience what the world has to offer, but later on would gain a heavy "ambivalence" towards the whole institution. He described Baudelaire as perfectly content to sit in his library and simply read about all the places he was interested in, instead of going out there and getting his hands dirty. I believe that I pity Baudelaire. What kind of person are you, when you have no real life experiences outside of your little bubble to create the person you want to be? You dream of the certainty of your life when you are young, you want to be an astronaut or a veterinarian, however, in order to become those things you must go out into the world, away from your comfort zone and experience things. Those experiences shape you in the person you want to be. Therefore, if Baudelaire did not go out and live his childhood dreams, had no- dirt- under- the- fingernails experiences. Then what kind of man was he really?