You did well to leave, Arthur Rimbaud!

You did well to leave, Arthur Rimbaud! Your eighteen years refractory to friendship, to malevolence, to the idiocy of Paris poets as well as to the purring of the sterile bee of your slightly mad Ardennaise family, you did well to cast them to the winds of the open sea, to the knife-edge of their precocious guillotine. You were right to abandon the boulevard of idlers, the estaminets of piss-lyres, for the hell of fools, for the commerce of the sly and the good-day of simpletons.

That absurd élan of body and soul, that cannonball which reaches its target blasting it, yes, that is indeed the life of a man! One cannot, emerging from childhood, indefinitely strangle one’s neighbor. If volcanoes hardly move from their place, their lava runs through the great life of the world and brings it virtues that sing in its wounds.

You were right to leave, Arthur Rimbaud! We have some few of us to believe happiness possible with you.

René Char