“You have to be always drunk.” The line arrives like a small, impossible command. It is blunt and absurd and tender all at once, a demand that asks not for stupor but for rescue. Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “Enivrez-vous”—included in the posthumous Petits poèmes en prose collection often called Le Spleen de Paris (1869)—extends that demand to anyone willing to receive it. The poem doesn’t only counsel intoxication with alcohol; it opens a hinge: be drunk on anything that keeps Time’s weight from folding you flat.
When I told people I was moving to Dublin for college, several friends laughed and said what every southwestern American says when the word Ireland comes up: “You’ll drink a lot.” It was meant as both a joke and a prophecy. Dublin is famously awake at night, hospitable to talk and to the slow drumming of pints on wooden tables. Student life in the city leans into that rhythm. Trinity College’s health promotion pages, in the practical, sober voice of university policy, point out that a very high proportion of Irish students drink and that alcohol is embedded in many social scripts on campus.
That proximity between the social and the alcoholic makes Baudelaire feel, at first glance, like a threat and a shop window at the same time. He implores us to “get drunk” so that the horror of Time won’t break us; the Irish landscape and its public houses make the metaphor dangerously literal. I tell people that on my campus there is, in fact, a bar—a place where lectures are downgraded into shorter, looser conversations, and where the sequence of a week can be neatly punctuated: seminar, essay, pint. It’s easy to conflate being drunk on joy with being drunk on drink. It’s easy to imagine that the only calibrations for being “drunk” are chemical. But Baudelaire offers options. Wine, poetry, or virtue; each is an instrument for being lifted off the clock. His list is both a concession and an accusation. It concedes that all of us must find a lever, and it accuses any one of us if we choose the dullest, most destructive lever without reflection.
When I read Baudelaire in the quiet of my temporary room, the city below me already moving in its nightly rituals, I thought about Ponyboy’s voice from my seventh-grade copy of The Outsiders. When I first read him in the States, Ponyboy had a way of placing his brother Sodapop in the center of a small orbit of light. “He gets drunk on just plain living,” S.E. Hinton writes. “And he understands everybody.” That line lodged in my adolescent chest because it was the first time I saw intoxication described without tragedy, as an appetite for life rather than an escape from it. Sodapop’s drunk is not a danger. It’s a kind of curiosity, a capacity to be moved by small things. In Dublin, I keep returning to both images: Baudelaire’s imperative and Ponyboy’s understated witness. They’re conversations with one another, two ways of recognizing a human effort to stay buoyant under gravity.
There’s a strange generosity in calling someone “high on life.” It assumes a surplus. It assumes that feeling can be manufactured from openness rather than swallowed as an anaesthetic. But the generosity runs alongside the very real social pressure of the pub table and those around it. To accept a drink at eighteen or twenty in Dublin is to accept an invitation, sometimes to a broader community, sometimes to the easy erasure of loneliness for a night. University life has rituals that make alcohol an accelerant. The college bar isn’t only a place of consumption but a civic hall, a last-minute meeting point, the place where friendships are formed between questions about tutorials. That doesn’t absolve the harm that sometimes follows. Nor does it make the habit moral or neutral. It simply complicates what it means to obey Baudelaire’s command here and now.
There are shifts, though. The picture of Dublin as an inescapable pub crawl feels dated in places. Recent reporting has shown that Ireland’s drinking patterns are changing. New bars have opened that don’t center on alcohol, and market data point toward a decline in per-capita alcohol consumption compared with the early 2000s. Young people in the city often prioritize experiences that look, at first pass, sober: cafés that stay open late, spaces for board games, performance nights, and alcohol-free cocktails. The city’s nightlife is diversifying, and that matters because being “drunken” needn’t be chemically administered. It can be social, aesthetic, and ethical.
If Baudelaire is asking us to choose our intoxication, then moving here for college was a selection process. I arrived last year with a suitcase of books and a nervous appetite. For the first semester, days arranged themselves into study, bus, lecture, pub, sleep, repeat. It was intoxicating in the literal way—bright lights, new friends, the vertical, physical sensation of being carried along by a current. But after a few months, the novelty thinned into routine. The “horrible burden of Time” that Baudelaire names didn’t disappear. It found new vectors: the pressure to find internships, to make small payments on big dreams, to decide if staying in the city was a plan or just a season. There’s a danger in confusing the lifting that feeds you with the lifting that uses you. That’s what being “continually drunk” must guard against. The charge is to choose a sustaining intoxication, not to be worn down by a habit that promises more than it delivers.
It might help here to drop the metaphoric pretensions and name, plainly, what I mean by “drunk on poetry” or “drunk on virtue.” To be drunk on poetry is to be available to the unmatched economy of words; it is to have your days punctured by lines that return you to yourself. To be drunk on virtue is to be addicted not to moral theater but to the steady work of making things better in tiny ways. In practice, these states aren’t pure. The same person can be drunk on music in the pub and drunk on compassion in the flat above it. The trick is to notice what’s curative and what’s camouflage. Baudelaire’s poem isn’t a permit for self-annihilation. It’s a plea for vigilance: find your buoyancy and stay with it so that Time can’t reduce you to a list of obligations.
What does this look like on a Thursday night? For me, it’s sitting with friends in a damp alleyway that smells faintly of frying oil and rain, listening to someone play an old song on a borrowed guitar. It’s the way a glass of cider can turn talk into confession. It’s also the decision, sometimes, to leave the pub early and walk home because there’s beauty in the city’s strange geometry at two a.m., when tram lines and street lamps recast the map. It’s choosing a lecture because it might open a new version of my life, and choosing a night out because the friends who’ll be there are practicing tenderness. Both are intoxications in Baudelaire’s sense. Both keep the clock from bone-crushing insistence. Neither is moralized easily.
There’ll be mornings when the funny voice in your head asks whether you’re merely rephrasing old habits with prettier language. Isn’t “poetry” sometimes a romanticized alibi for avoidance? Aren’t “virtue” and “wine” easily interchangeable when they mean simply numbing? These are the right questions. To be intoxicated by something mustn’t preclude accountability. The Pavilion Bar, which is also a theater arm of student life, must be held to rules. Students must be allowed to refuse. Social scripts must make room for those who are “drunk on just plain living,” not made to feel like martyrs for choosing a sober joy. Institutions can be gentle and proactive with education and support precisely because intoxicants are real in their capacity to harm. Trinity’s own health pages and student journalism show that sensible, informed discussion can coexist with a vibrant social life.
The figures and features of Dublin aren’t fixed. They’re shifting under a younger generation that’s open to different ecologies of pleasure. That doesn’t mean the pubs will empty or that the poet’s voice will stop asking us to be drunk. It means the frame of Baudelaire’s order—seek a sustaining intoxication—has new options. The same city that offers bars also provides late cafés, volunteer collectives, music nights, and quiet spaces that aren’t subsidized by the glass. Contemporary Dublin, in its contradictions, offers the opportunity to test what “getting drunk” could mean for you. In practice, the decision will be messy. You’ll participate in things that won’t fit neatly under the categories of virtue or vice. You’ll wake sometimes in the “mournful solitude of your room,” and there’ll be a period when your chosen intoxication diminishes. Baudelaire tells us, then, to ask everything that moves what time it is. The wind, the wave, the bird, the clock will answer: it is time to be drunk. The city will respond the same way.
So what do I do, having learned these things in a city that knows how to hold the two faces of “drunk” at once? I keep the books on the shelf and the piano keys oiled. I take notes in lectures, and I go to the pub on the nights that feel like they’ll matter later. I say yes, and sometimes I say no. I try to make my intoxication expansive enough to include repair. There’s a civic charm in being young in Dublin: you’re invited into so many small communities. You can be drunk on wonder, on solidarity, on learning your own edges and being gentle with them. In the end, Baudelaire’s extreme advice is a test: can a life be arranged so that you’re not bent by Time’s weight? If the answer is yes, then perhaps we’ve found our lever. If not, then maybe the work is still to come.
I leave you with the two voices that began this essay: the French poet telling you to be continually drunk, and the adolescent in Oklahoma telling you that some people are “drunk on just plain living.” They’re not opposed. They’re only different accents of the same care. Choose the intoxication that moves you toward others and toward yourself. Choose the habit that’ll lift, not the habit that’ll erode. And when the moment comes, ask the wind, the star, the clock: what hour is it? Let the city answer however it wants. Then decide, with as much clarity as you can muster, what you’ll be drunk on.
