On Decadence

"Incandare ex ardere nascitur."

Without question, the most important phrase mapped to “Decadence” in the Anglophone world, is Walter Pater’s impulsion in the “Conclusion” chapter to his 1873 work The Renaissance, “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”¹ My habit of breaking up quotations with snark is silenced here— these are words that have chilled the hearts of all native English speakers with any theory of mind since they were first uttered.”

Today I am here to try and punch a hole in my English prison. “Sentence first,” declares the Red Queen,² “then verdict!” I will do it to poor old Alice,³ and to one other. This will certainly not be a total escape from Shakespeare, nor the more nebulous figure of Milton, but punching a holes does break something. And we are here to move fast and break things. Most importantly, for someone who is cosmically earth dominated— it lets in the air. Sunlight and air pierce a dark chamber.

Once in New Mexico an off duty park ranger brought me to an unmarked cavern. I don’t remember the geology, but I do remember descending through the Earth, to an unfathomable level at manual operation speed. The cavern’s only source of light is a narrow band of sunlight that pings through a chance path from the Sun, 93 some odd million English miles away. To be a photon finally absorbed by the rock of that cavern is a pretty improbable outcome, and what the few visitors have been witness to is the piercing of Earth by Fire and Air. At that level of fundamentality, it is easy to see, and I idly wonder what the proportion of witnesses do not synthesize the immensity of the display. They all feel something though, I am sure.

The prisoner first feels the urge to escape at the touch of wind and sunlight— the smell of salt on a long sea, or the mesquite cologne of an endless savannah, under an ocean of stars. But he must first sense where he is. What path has brought him to this tempestuous sentence?

“To burn always with this hard gemlike flame.” If taken alone, this comment can be universalizing, in which case it means little. Its particularities are important. “To burn, always!” one of our only clues that we are even still talking about the Renaissance at all. The sense of “burning” as an eternal form of living is an old one— we recognize the condition immediately. But then we have this other word “always.” A word that exists in antiquity, disappears out of antiquity and re-emerges in the Renaissance as ‘Oblivion.’ Take we must these two components each in solitary, and thus bring them together.

To Carthage then came I, where a dish of loves unlawful and licentious did seethe and fry about me. Not as yet did I love anything; but had I a thirst and hunger to love. And through a privy want, I hated my self for being less needful than my desire compelled. Hunted I about to find something to love; being desirous to love, I hated that security, and that way, which was without snares.

There is no need to go all the way back to the beginning of this context, we are kind of going to anyway. Latin the oldest language I can talk about, may be instructive. Latin offers a nuanced vocabulary for "to burn," each verb capturing a specific shade of the act or experience of burning. Urere is the most versatile, encompassing “general burning” or scorching, often caused by heat or flames, as in "the sun burns." Ardere, in contrast, conveys an intense, almost consuming internal fire, applicable both in a literal sense and metaphorically for passions like love or anger. Meanwhile, flagrare, vividly describes the scene of an object or place actively ablaze, a more dramatic portrayal of burning, as if flames visibly envelop the subject. Lastly, incendere focuses on the act of setting something on fire, emphasizing intention and direction, frequently with a direct object, such as "to set the city on fire." Each term reveals the subtleties Latin provides for describing the different states, causes, and intensities of burning, offering depth in both literal and metaphorical contexts. If we look at them, we can properly contextualize what we are looking at with Pater.

While flagitium, the word employed by Augustine primarily means "disgrace" or "shameful act," there’s an etymological connection to the verb flagrare, which means "to burn" or "to blaze." This connection suggests that the "shameful loves" (flagitiosorum amorum) in Carthage are not just disgraceful but also burning or inflamed, resonating with Augustine’s depiction of intense, uncontrolled passions.

In this sense, flagitiosorum can carry two (or more!) implications in Augustine's description: the passions he encounters are both "shameful" and have an aspect of being "burning" or "searing." Curiously, of the various possible Latin words for burn, flagare seems the most atemporal, or universal, indicating its interminable sustainment. Shame, then, is the word whereon English translators have been spun for centuries, to our own novelty and often detriment.

Burning is easy— but always, is a very hard thing. Not even the raunchiest poets of the Middle Ages would dare suggest an always. S'i' fosse foco, arderéi 'l mondo, writes Cecco Angliolieri— “If I were fire, I’d set the world ablaze!”⁴ He goes on to lament:

If I were death, I'd run down my father; 
If I were life, I'd flee from him. 

And still later (in only fourteen lines!):

I'd chase the young and pretty girls; to others
Would I leave the lame or wrinkled dam.

What Cecco acknowledges, that Walter Pater, in his own reading of the Renaissance, does not is the passing of time. Walter Pater’s flame burns forever— purely negating temporal constraints. Cecco— the earthy, medieval bound sonneteer, can imagine no such forever. “I’d run towards Father death, and flee life, I’ll take the girls while they’re young and pretty." Cecco and Walter are both burning, bur it is here that we probably need to pause and set up the following framework for meanings of burning.

Which brings us to ardere. In classical poetry, ardere frequently links to consuming emotions, especially romantic passion. Roman poets like Ovid evoke love as a fire that "burns" the heart, suggesting an intensity that sustains yet risks destruction. In the Heroides, Phaedra writes of her longing for Hippolytus: “ardeo amore vetito” (I burn with forbidden love). In this sense ardere captures a flame devouring her honor and reason. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, too, lovers are described as “ardentes”⁵—burning with desire, an unquenchable force that overtakes them.

Similarly, Virgil’s Aeneid uses ardere to depict Queen Dido’s passion for Aeneas. As her love grows, est mollis flamma medullas (the flame eats her tender heart), describing ardere as an all-consuming blaze that ultimately leads her to ruin. Here, ardere is not just warmth but an overpowering fire that destroys everything it touches.

In medieval Christian theology, ardere takes on a purer, spiritual sense, often symbolizing holy zeal. St. Augustine speaks of a ardens amor Dei, the “burning love of God,” that purifies the soul, unlike worldly passion. Saints and martyrs, ardentes zelo, or “burning with zeal,” are fueled by ardere in their devotion, enduring suffering with an inner flame. In this context, ardere represents a focused, divine fire, elevating the soul closer to God, a devotion that refines rather than consumes.

Urere sublimates into Incendere by means of Ardere. That regular burn, which in Eliot himself’s depiction of the “ordinary man,” whose “experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.”⁶ This is a nasty distinction— he is setting up an opposition with the poet, the figure who “falls in love, or reads Spinoza,” and add the important qualifier that “these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking.” It is easy to let Eliot walk back this frightening elitism in the conclusion, “in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes,” but a genuine, and unified reading of his context places the onus on the poet to elevate the ordinary into wholeness. However do we do that. Most people would probably say sex!

Incandere, from the older candere ("to glow" or "to shine"), describes a burning so intense that it radiates outward, unlike the internal smoldering of ardere. It is by far the rarest verbiage to encounter in its metaphorical sense. Classical and medieval writers used incandere to convey emotions or divine fervor that glow visibly, transforming and illuminating both the individual and their surroundings. From Statius’s⁷ depiction of Tydeus’s rage that “boils and glows intensely,” incandere insinuates a passion that cannot be contained. In medieval theology, Bernard of Clairvaux⁸ describes the devout soul as “incandescent at the presence of God,” and Dante’s saints in Paradiso shine with divine love, “all flame,” embodying an outward glow that purifies rather than consumes.

In Thebaid, Statius uses incandescit to capture the visible intensity of Tydeus's rage: “Fervetque et incandescit ira,” meaning “His anger boils and glows intensely.” Here, incandescit, or “glows intensely,” transforms Tydeus’s fury into a radiant, outwardly visible force, a blaze that conveys rage so powerful it can no longer be contained within. This image aligns with incandere as a burning that consumes and shines, outwardly expressing an internal storm.

Medieval writers extend incandescere in a similar way as with ardere, and not with the others, into the divine realm. Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, describes the soul as “incandescent at the presence of God,” saying “Animus incandescit ad praesentiam Dei,” where incandescit suggests an inner radiance, as though touched by divine light. In Paradiso, Dante uses “candenti” for the saints’ radiance in Heaven, conveying a holy glow that is both internal and outwardly visible. In Canto III, Beatrice shows Dante the blessed souls as shining embodiments of divine love: “nel suo fulgore io vidi… l’amore che move il sole e l’altre stelle,” translated as “In its radiance, I saw… the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” ⁹Later in Canto XIV, the souls appear as incandescent spheres, “tutta fiamma parve,” or “all flame seemed to me.” Here, candente or “candente fiamma” captures holy love so intense it outwardly glows, illuminating rather than consuming, as these souls are pure extensions of divine light.

On the other hand— Urere, that “normie burning”, may also, in cases impure collapse simply upon itself. It may not incandess! He may already be running with our de-dimensionalized readings of “to burn,” in fact. He’d intimated as much before, in the seminal “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” whereon he first defines his “historical sense,” admonishing its importance “to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year.”

In Canto XXVI, Dante follows along with Augustine and emphasizes fiamma as the individualized flame that enwraps and tortures each sinner. Describing Ulysses and Diomedes, he writes, “dentro dalla lor fiamma si tormento”—“within their flame, they are tormented.” Fiamma here serves as both container and expression of their particular transgressions. For Ulysses, this fiamma embodies the consuming ambition that drove him to forsake duty in pursuit of forbidden knowledge. It’s not merely physical flame; it’s also metaphorically infused with an inner burn, like ardere, signifying his unquenchable thirst for experience that ultimately led to his ruin. He is not repentant. This gran desio—“great desire” —captures an intense, internal fire akin to ardere, an eternal, inward burn that reflects his intellect and desire to transcend human limits, but we can see that hard linguistic limits have clamped down, making the genealogy harder to track.

In Canto XXVII, Guido da Montefeltro is likewise trapped within his own fiamma, but it represents a different betrayal. Here, Dante describes Guido’s punishment as a “fiamma che avvolge”—a “flame that envelops” him, reflecting his self-deception and, hesitantly, his collapse of moral integrity.

Eliot’s idea of a “historical sense,” which “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature… has a simultaneous existence,” transforms urere—the everyday, irregular burn—into ardere, an illuminating, unified force. For Eliot, the poet’s work is to take “chaotic, irregular, fragmentary” experience and elevate it, creating an “incandescence” that resonates with tradition. This illumination, however, demands “continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something more valuable,” a burning that transcends the self, reflecting incandere, the nuclear radiative outward blaze to contribute to a larger whole.

In Canto XXVI, Dante follows along with Augustine and emphasizes fiamma as the individualized flame that enwraps and tortures each sinner. Describing Ulysses and Diomedes, he writes, “dentro dalla lor fiamma si tormento”—“within their flame, they are tormented.” Fiamma here serves as both container and expression of their particular transgressions. For Ulysses, this fiamma embodies the consuming ambition that drove him to forsake duty in pursuit of forbidden knowledge. It’s not merely physical flame; it’s also metaphorically infused with an inner burn, like ardere, signifying his unquenchable thirst for experience that ultimately led to his ruin. He is not repentant. This gran desio—“great desire” —captures an intense, internal fire akin to ardere, an eternal, inward burn that reflects his intellect and desire to transcend human limits, but we can see that hard linguistic limits have clamped down, making the genealogy harder to track.

In Canto XXVII, Guido da Montefeltro¹⁰ is likewise trapped within his own fiamma, but it represents a different betrayal. Here, Dante describes Guido’s punishment as a “fiamma che avvolge”—a “flame that envelops” him, reflecting his self-deception and, hesitantly, his collapse of moral integrity.

Eliot likens the poet to “a shred of platinum,” a catalyst that enables disparate elements to unite and produce something transformative. Just as platinum doesn’t change itself but allows gases to react, the poet’s role is not to burn for personal expression but to synthesize individual fragments into a coherent glow. This catalytic incandescence is the poet’s true gift—producing a light that illuminates material around it, transcending the personal.

This vision culminates in Four Quartets,¹¹ where Eliot writes, his last lines of pure poetry ever, in fact:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Here, fire—symbolizing both suffering and enlightenment—merges with beauty, embodying incandere as a radiance that is both consuming and outwardly illuminating. True artistry, for Eliot, is this twin flame: banal fragmentation, sublimated by one incandescent encounter, into the “historical sense,” a place where time moves and a space of divine brilliance that enriches and illuminates human experience.

But what has this all to do with decadence, and Walter Pater, and love? It has been a not very short road to get here, to talk about these words “to burn with a hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, always.” In a sense, we have been reading and writing about it on this blog for over a year— I have been studying it intensely for well over a decade, and arguably, have waited thirty five years to understand this concept.

What truly distinguishes incandere and ardere from ulere and flagrare, is Time. As I said recently— time moves differently in the crystal. Normies and the damned, they share the crystal. For the rest of us, the questor, the woman in waiting, the poets, the artists, the persons who can genuinely feel the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” and like Milton, of whom Wordsworth said “thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart,” and of whom he said: “and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay,” it all depends on how we read always.

In his Conclusion, Pater’s imagery of “burn” and “flame” becomes a metaphor for living fully in the present—a life of heightened, fleeting moments. He argues that to truly live is to avoid habit entirely, rejecting stability in favor of a relentless, vibrant pursuit of sensation. As he puts it, “our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world.” For Pater, habit ties us to a “stereotyped world,” where moments lose their brilliance to repetition, dulling the intensity of experience. To avoid this, he suggests one must “grasp at any exquisite passion” that can lift the spirit out of the ordinary, even if only for a moment.

But in this Paterian decadence—defined by the rejection of habit and the chase for pure pleasure—there is a paradox. By burning brightly in each passing moment, one becomes trapped in a cycle of consuming and fading, unable to escape temporality. Each intense experience, or “flame,” devours itself and dissipates. This is the essence of “flagrare”: a burning that is intense but brief, forever caught within the limits of the moment. The effort to avoid habit through heightened experience paradoxically becomes habitual itself, a repetitive striving that never truly escapes Time’s adversarial hold. In casting habit as an enemy, Pater’s vision becomes imprisoned in “ardere,” burning intensely within the confines of Time but never transcending it.

True decadence, however—the decadence of incandescence—offers a richer, more lasting illumination. This is the decadence of Dante’s encounter with Beatrix, of the poet endowed with a historical sense, and of Dante’s “incandare” moments clustered in the Paradiso. In this higher form, decadence becomes an inward radiance rather than a devouring flame, a steady and expansive light. Here, burning is not adversarial but illuminative; it connects each moment with what came before and what will follow, integrating rather than isolating experience. Instead of avoiding habit, this decadence allows it to be part of an ascent, a movement through Time that grows in meaning and depth.

Thus, while Pater’s “flame” is locked in an endless cycle of bright flashes and fadeouts, potentially trapped in an ardere cycle? Genuine Decadence achieves an incandescent steadiness—a flame that aligns experience with the timeless, where Time itself is not a prison but a pathway to something eternal. In incandescence, novelty ceases to exist. Pleasure emerges from the formation of habits. From collaborating on a language shared by only two, from using the good China for no reason at all. For combining on the creation of a house and garden— perhaps not measuring out with coffee spoons, but choosing— very deliberately choosing, to relish the sound of the procelain on silver and the touch of another’s soul.

My English prison— what has been shattered, and indeed it was shattered, not just pierced. What has been shattered? Enmity of time. The seeking of novelty, of pleasure, of even notoriety. What remains? Incandescence. The historical sense. The pleasures of the passage of time— the appreciation of another’s china. The fading of a Texas sun I have seen a thousand times, and am tired of suggesting is ever just that. I want to get old. To form habits, and to luxuriate in them, to burn always, with a flame so bright that banalities are lifted to my own countenance. Something to combine with. I hover at the gates of Paradise, arms outstretched. What else can a poet do? Must I grab, and bruise the flower? This is as far as I can go alone.

I watched A Love Song For Bobby Long recently.¹² Our correction of Pater’s concept of burning, our liberating improvement on his decadence, hinges on the pull of deeply human flaws and the search for redemption through small, quiet moments of connection. Bobby Long, a once-brilliant professor now worn down by regret and whiskey, lives a life of reflection and slow decay in the humid streets of New Orleans. His life, alongside those he draws close, reveals a truth about the kind of incandescence that arises not from eternal flame but from finding beauty within imperfection and sharing it with others. Bobby waited for a long time. In fact he never made it. This is as far as you can go alone.

If you want the longer, full version, my girl Joan can take you there. Thanks for listening folks—my synapses are firing, I hope I’m making sense. Losing the ability to disaggregate the words and thought, getting old. We will be right back. The Promised Land is denied to the prophet, because the prophet is a solo figure.

1. British essayist, critic, and philosopher, often associated with the Aesthetic movement and best known for his emphasis on “art for art’s sake.” His work The Renaissance (1873) especially influenced the Decadent movement in England and France.

2. A character from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, known for her arbitrary and authoritarian pronouncements, such as "Sentence first—verdict afterwards!"

3. Refers to Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a figure who encounters a surreal world that questions Victorian norms and authority.

4. A medieval Italian poet known for his earthy, satirical sonnets, which express desire, cynicism, and the folly of human emotion, as in his famous line, “If I were fire, I’d set the world ablaze!”

5. Ovid is a weird one— am not normally prone to enjoying his poetry, silver age dreck on the whole. This is a very unique use though— rather than referring to them as lovers, he is calling them “desirers.” It should come as no shock that Ovid died by suicide— though at the behest of the Emperor of Rome himself, over an instance of Ovid refusing to betray his conscience.

6. At the outset of The Waste Land, we are of course told “you know only a heap of broken images.” We are right over the target.

7. Roman poet of the 1st century, author of Thebaid, depicting myths and tragedies. His characters often embody intense, outwardly burning emotions, a “boiling” or “glowing” rage.

8. Medieval French abbot and theologian, influential in Christian mysticism. He described the devout soul as “incandescent” with divine love.

9. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Beatrice is a symbol of divine love and guides Dante through the Paradiso, embodying an elevated, holy form of incandescence.

10. Famously, Eliot quotes this one in the front matter to “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,” a damning accusation against his speaker.

“If I did think my answer given
Might reach a soul that e'er could cross again
To the bright world above, this flame would still,
And tremble no more in my confession’s wake.
But since, as truth hath told, from this dark deep
No living soul returns, I answer thee
Freely, unafraid of shame’s reproach.”

11. Eliot’s final major work, which meditates on time, faith, and enlightenment. The line “the fire and the rose are one” encapsulates a union of suffering and beauty, symbolizing a transcendent burning.

12. A film (2004) adapted from the novel Off Magazine Street by Ronald Everett Capps, portraying themes of regret, redemption, and the beauty within imperfection.