Rimbaud Love Quotes

Love...no such thing. Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist. Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.

A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!

On the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths, And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat: Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet. I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak, I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will mount in my soul; And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy, through the countryside - as happy as if I were with a woman. "Sensation

I could never throw Love out of the window.

The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.

He would say, "How funny it will all seem, all you've gone through, when I'm not here anymore, when you no longer feel my arms around your shoulders, nor my heart beneath you, nor this mouth on your eyes, because I will have to go away some day, far away..." And in that instant I could feel myself with him gone, dizzy with fear, sinking down into the most horrible blackness: into death.

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!

What an old maid I'm getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death!

The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one--and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! ....So the poet is actually a thief of Fire!

...these poets here, you see, they are not of this world:let them live their strange life; let them be cold and hungry, let them run, love and sing: they are as rich as Jacques Coeur, all these silly children, for they have their souls full of rhymes, rhymes which laugh and cry, which make us laugh or cry: Let them live: God blesses all the merciful: and the world blesses the poets.

These verses believe; they love; they hope; that is all.

I am unknown: so what? This verses believe; they love; they hope: that's enough.

If hunger was adequate proof of love, I would starve at your altar.

Since they weren't sleepy and nothing had been left unsaid, they began to read poetry to each other, taking turns like children and enjoying it. Bachir had a lovely voice, one that was already that of a man. He knew many poems by heart. He lovingly recited Victor Hugo, with warmth Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre, and poems written by young people going into battle; he then moved on to the poets of liberty - Rimbaud again, Eluard, and Desnos.

Quick! Aren’t there other ways of living?− To sleep in the midst of wealth is impossible. Wealth has always been public property. Divine love alone offers the keys to science. I see that nature is only a spectacle of plenitude. Farewell chimeras, ideals, errors! The reasonable song of the angels rises up from therescue ship: it is divine love. − Two loves! I may die of earthly love, die of devotion. I have left behind me souls whose suffering will only increase at my going! You chose me from among the shipwrecked, but what about the friends I left behind? Save them!

Delivered to oblivion...growing and flowering with incense and weeds to the sullen whine of nasty flies... I loved deserts, burnt out orchards, faded boutiques...I dragged myself down stinking alleyways... General, if there's an old cannon left, aim for the glass of splendid shops, into the living rooms...make the city eat its own dust.

I On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping White Ophelia floats like a great lily; Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils... - In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort. For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river. For more than a thousand years her sweet madness Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze. The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath Her great veils rising and falling with the waters; The shivering willows weep on her shoulder, The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow. The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her; At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder, Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings; - A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars. II O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow! Yes child, you died, carried off by a river! - It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom. It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair, Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind; It was your heart listening to the song of Nature In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights; It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar, That shattered your child's heart, too human and too soft; It was a handsome pale knight, a poor madman Who one April morning sate mute at your knees! Heaven! Love! Freedom! What a dream, oh poor crazed Girl! You melted to him as snow does to a fire; Your great visions strangled your words - And fearful Infinity terrified your blue eye! III - And the poet says that by starlight You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils White Ophelia floating, like a great lily.

O may it come, the time of love, The time we'd be enamoured of. - Song of the Highest Tower

Enough tears! Dawns break hearts. Every moon is wrong, every sun bitter: Love’s bitter bite has left me swollen, drunk with heat. Let my hull burst! Let me sink into the sea!

Comme elle vous trouve immensément naïf, Tout en faisant trotter ses petites bottines, Elle se tourne, alerte et d'un mouvement vif.... Sur vos lèvres alors meurent les cavatines...

I am unknown; what does it matter? Poets are brothers. These lines believe; they love; they hope; and that is all. Dear Master, help me up a little. I am young. Hold out your hand to me.

And from then on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent, Devouring the green azure where, like a pale elated Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks; Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight, Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres, The bitter redness of love ferments!

Let it come, let it come The time that we will love. So patient have I been That I’ve forgetten everything: Fear and suffering Have departed for the heavens, And an unholy thirst Darkens my veins. Let it come, let it come The time that we will love. Like the field Left to forgetfulness, Growing and flowering With incense and weeds, And the fierce buzzing Of dirty flies. Let it come, let it come The time that we will love. I loved the desert, burnt orchards, musty shops, tepid drinks. I dragged myself through stinking alleys, and with eyes closed I offered myself to the sun, the god of fire.

Enough tears! Dawns break hearts. Every moon is wrong, every sun bitter: Love’s bitter bite has left me swollen, drunk with heat. Let my hull burst! Let me sink into the sea! —Arthur Rimbaud, from “The Drunken Boat,” Rimbaud Complete, transl. by Wyatt Mason (Modern Library, 2013)

Delivered to oblivion...growing and flowering with incense and weeds to the sullen whine of nasty flies...I loved deserts, burned out orchards, faded boutiques...I dragged myself down stinking alleyways...General, if there's an old canon left, aim for the glass of splendid shops, into the living rooms...make the city eat its own dust.

Mankind is King! And Man is God! But Love is the only faith...

Mankind is King, And Man is God! But Love is the only faith

Mankind is King, And Man is God! But Love is the only faith...

Oh! May the time come when hearts fall in love.

You’re in love. Off the market till August. You’re in love. —Your sonnets make Her laugh. Your friends are gone, you’re bad news. —Then, one night, your beloved, writes…!

O Muse, how I served you beneath the blue; And oh what dreams of dazzling love I dreamed!

Love would live at the expense of its sister; Friendship lives at the expense of its brother.

Thimothine! You were lovely! Were I a painter, I would memorialize your holy features on a canvas

Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it. My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced. At the factory where I had labored with a hard-edged, illiterate group of women, I was harassed in his name. Suspecting me of being a Communist for reading a book in a foreign language, they threatened me in the john, prodding me to denounce him. It was within this atmosphere that I seethed. It was for him that I wrote and dreamed. He became my archangel, delivering me from the mundane horrors of factory life. His hands had chiseled a manual of heaven and I held them fast. The knowledge of him added swagger to my step and this could not be stripped away. I tossed my copy of Illuminations in a plaid suitcase. We would escape together.

After every abortive escape attempt, he returned to his mother, doing so both after the separation from Verlaine and at the end of his life, when he had finally sacrificed his creative gifts by giving up his writing to become a businessman, thus indirectly fulfilling his mother’s expectations of him. Although Rimbaud spent the last days of his life in a hospital in Marseille, he had gone back to western France immediately before that, where he was looked after by his mother and sister. The quest for his mother’s love ended in the prison of childhood.

The poet makes himself a seer through a long, tremendous, planned detachment of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he himself seeks and in himself exhausts all poisons, so as to keep only the quintessential. A self torture that takes all his faith, all his superhuman strength, that makes him, among his fellow men, The Sick Man, The Criminal, The Accursed, and The Supreme Sage! For he reaches the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, rich already, more than anyone else and if maddened in his pursuit, he should in the end lose all understanding of his. . . .” —Arthur Rimbaud

But no one leaves. - Let us set out once more on our native roads, burdened with my vice, that vice that since the age of reason has driven roots of suffering into my side - that towers to heaven, beats me, hurls me down, drags me on. Ultimate innocence, final timidity. All's said. Carry no more my loathing and treacheries before the world. Come on! Marching, burdens, the desert, boredom and anger. Hire myself to whom? What beasts adore? What sacred images destroy? What hearts shall I break? What lie maintain? - Through what blood wade? Better to keep away from justice. - A hard life, outright stupor, - with a dried-out fist to lift the coffin lid, lie down, and suffocate. No old age this way, no danger: terror is very un-French. - Ah! I am so forsaken I will offer at any shrine impulses toward perfection. Oh my self-denial, my marvelous Charity! my Selfless love! And still here below! De Profundis Domine, what an ass I am!

Far from birds, from flocks and village girls, What did I drink, on my knees in the heather Surrounded by a sweet wood of hazel trees, In the warm and green mist of the afternoon? What could I drink from that young Oise, − Voiceless elms, flowerless grass, an overcast sky! − Drinking from these yellow gourds, far from the hut I loved? Some golden spirit that made me sweat. I would have made a dubious sign for an inn. − A storm came to chase the sky away. In the evening Water from the woods sank into the virgin sand, And God’s wind threw ice across the ponds. Weeping, I saw gold − but could not drink. − ——— At four in the morning, in the summer, The sleep of love still continues. Beneath the trees the wind disperses The smells of the evening feast. Over there, in their vast wood yard, Under the sun of the Hesperidins, Already hard at work − in shirtsleeves − Are the Carpenters. In their Deserts of moss, quietly, They raise precious panelling Where the city Will paint fake skies. O for these Workers, charming Subjects of a Babylonian king, Venus! Leave for a moment the Lovers Whose souls are crowned with wreaths. O Queen of Shepherds, Carry the water of life to these labourers, So their strength may be appeased As they wait to bathe in the noon-day sea.

The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one--and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! ....So the poet is actually a thief of Fire! ― Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete. (Modern Library; Reprint edition January 14, 2003) Originally published 1870.

But these ideas were no more than abstractions because, despite his intellectual rejection of conventional morality, his emotional allegiance to the code of conduct it prescribed was unswerving. Self-disgust was legitimate, but detesting his mother was unthinkable. He could not pay heed to the painful messages of his childhood memories without destroying the hopes that had helped him to survive as a child. Time and again, Rimbaud tells us that he had no one to rely on except himself. This was surely the fruit of his experience with a mother who had nothing to offer him but her own derangement and hypocrisy, rather than true love. His entire life was a magnificent but vain attempt to save himself from destruction at the hands of his mother, with all the means at his disposal. Young people who have gone through much the same kind of childhood as Rimbaud are often fascinated by his poetry because they can vaguely sense the presence of a kindred spirit in it. Rimbaud

A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony.       A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders.      You look away: the new love!      You look back,—the new love!      “Change our fates, shoot down the plagues, beginning with time,” the children sing to you. “Build wherever you can the substance of our fortunes and our wishes,” they beg you.      Arriving from always, you’ll go away everywhere. — Arthur Rimbaud, “To a Reason,” Poetry (April 2011) Translated from the French by John Ashbery.

Madness—the kind you lock away—breeds sophistries, and I haven’t avoided a single one. I could list them all: I’ve got them down. My health suffered. Terror struck. I’d sleep for days, and, risen, such sad dreams would stay with me. I was ripe for death, and down a dangerous road my weakness drew me to the edges of the earth and on to Cimmeria, that dark country of winds. I sought voyages, to disperse enchantments that had colonized my mind. Above a sea I came to love as if it were rinsing me of stain, I watched a consoling cross rise. Damnation, in the shape of a rainbow. Bliss was my undoing, my remorse, my worm: my life would always be too ungovernable to devote to strength and beauty.

["What They Want"] Vallejo writing about loneliness while starving to death; Van Gogh's ear rejected by a whore; Rimbaud running off to Africa to look for gold and finding an incurable case of syphilis; Beethoven gone deaf; Pound dragged through the streets in a cage; Chatterton taking rat poison; Hemingway's brains dropping into the orange juice; Pascal cutting his wrists in the bathtub; Artaud locked up with the mad; Dostoevsky stood up against a wall; Crane jumping into a boat propeller; Lorca shot in the road by Spanish troops; Berryman jumping off a bridge; Burroughs shooting his wife; Mailer knifing his. -that's what they want: a God damned show a lit billboard in the middle of hell. that's what they want, that bunch of dull inarticulate safe dreary admirers of carnivals.

The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one–and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! ….So the poet is actually a thief of Fire! ― Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete. (Modern Library; Reprint edition January 14, 2003) Originally published 1870.

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed—and the great learned one!—among men.—For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul—which was rich to begin with – more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!

বিক্রয় ইল্যুমিনেশান ৪২ বন্ধকী কারবারিরা যা বিক্রি করেনি তা বিক্রয়ের জন্যে, আভিজাত্য ও অপরাধ যে অভিজ্ঞতা আস্বাদন করেনি, যা প্রেমের কাছে এবং জনসাধারণের নারকীয় সততার কাছে অজানা; তাকে সমসময় ও বিজ্ঞানের স্বীকৃতির প্রয়োজন নেই : কন্ঠস্বরগুলোর পুনর্গঠন হয়েছে ; তাবৎ ঐকতানীয় ও সুরসংযোজিত কর্মচাঞ্চল্য এবং তাদের তাৎক্ষণিক প্রয়োগ ; উপলক্ষ, একক, আমাদের ইন্দ্রিয়কে মুক্ত করার জন্য ! দামের চেয়ে বেশি দরে দেহ বিক্রির জন্যে, অপরিচিত জাতির, জগতের, যৌনতার, কিংবা অধঃপতনের জন্য ! প্রতি পদক্ষেপে ধনদৌলতের উৎসার ! হীরের অবাধ বিক্রি ! জনগণকে বিক্রির জন্য নৈরাজ্য ; রসপণ্ডিতদের জন্য অদম্য আনন্দ ; প্রেমিক-প্রেমিকার জন্যে, অনুগতদের জন্যে নৃশংস মৃত্যু ! বিক্রির জন্য রয়েছে বসত এবং স্হানান্তর, খেলধুলা, নিখুঁত পুলক ও আরাম, এবং শব্দাবলী, প্রণোদন ও যে ভবিষ্যৎ তারা গড়ে তুলবে ! বিক্রির জন্যে রয়েছে শোনা যায়নি এমন গণনা ও ঐকতান-ধাবনের প্রয়োগ আকস্মিকতা আবিষ্কার করে অভাবিত স্হিতিকাল, তার তাৎক্ষণিক মালিকানাসহ। অদৃশ্য সমারোহ, অননুভবনীয় পরমানন্দের প্রতি আরণ্যক ও অশেষ আবেগ, সঙ্গে তাদের প্রতিটি পঙ্কিলতার জন্যে এবং ভিড়ের ভয়াবহ চালচলনের জন্যে পাগলকরা গোপনীয়তা। বিক্রির জন্য রয়েছে দেহ, কন্ঠস্বর, প্রচুর প্রশ্নাতীত ধনদৌলত, সবকিছুই যা কখনই বিক্রির জন্যে নয় । বিক্রেতারা এখনও পর্যন্ত তাদের মাল শেষ করতে পারেনি ! বহুদিন পর্যন্ত দোকানদাররা তাদের বেতন দাবি করতে পারবে না ! [ রচনাকাল ১৮৭৩ - ১৮৭৫ ] [ অনুবাদ : ২০১৯ ]

Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was one of the key figures of decadentism. This turn-of-the-century trend was an outgrowth of romanticism and carried certain features to and past their breaking point. However, the word "decadent" can be used in two ways. One the one hand, it is a fairly neutral term referring to a certain postromantic trend in the arts running parallel and partly covering styles ranging from Pre-Raphaelitism to symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, and so on, and including artists such as Charles Baudelaire, Jovis Huysmans, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé in France, Oscar Wilde and William butler Yeats in Britain, Gerhard Hauptmann and Stefan George in Germany, and D'Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello in Italy. Sometimes the term has been extended to included even Proust, Mann and James Joyce. On the other hand, the word "decadence" has pejorative connotations. Thus works considered decadent can only too easily be considered to actually promote the excesses they depict in such loving detail. And true enough, at its most excessive , decadentism could lead to indulgence in shameless subjectivity and sensuality, a wallowing in the forbidden and the perverse, morbid interest in sickness and death, a flaunting of moral and social values, fierce antireligiousness and arrogant faith in the rights and possibilities of men supoosedly elect because of racial or cultural superiority and threatened only by undecipherable and pernicious women. In any case, decadence in the arts obviously cannot be separated from its social context: bourgeois society heading toward a crisis at the turn of the century.

To salvage the genuine love he was deprived of in childhood, Rimbaud turned to the idea of love embodied in Christian charity and in understanding and compassion for others. He set out to give others what he himself had never received. He tried to understand his friend and to help Verlaine understand himself, but the repressed emotions from his childhood repeatedly interfered with this attempt. He sought redemption in Christian charity, but his implacably perspicacious intelligence would allow him no self-deception. Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very early age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. He experienced himself as a monster, his homosexuality as a vice (this was easy to do given Victorian attitudes toward homosexuality), his despair as a sin. But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinately shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child who was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her. Rimbaud’s biography is a telling instance of how the body cannot but seek desperately for the early nourishment it has been denied. Rimbaud was driven to assuage a deficiency, a hunger that could never be stilled. His drug addiction, his compulsive travels, and his friendship with Verlaine can be interpreted not merely as attempts to flee from his mother, but also as a quest for the nourishment she had withheld from him. As his internal reality inevitably remained unconscious, Rimbaud’s life was marked by compulsive repetition.

I had to travel, to distract the enchantments gathered in my brain. Over the sea, that I loved as if she’d wash me clean of stain, I saw the cross of consolation rise. I had been damned by the rainbow. Happiness was my fatality, my remorse, my worm: my life would be forever too immense to be devoted to strength and beauty. O Happiness! its tooth, killing sweetly, warned me at cock-crow,

I loved idiot paintings, tops of doors, decors, saltimbanques, canvases, signboards, popular engravings, obsolete literature, church Latin, badly-spelled pornographic works, novels by our grandmothers, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, folk refrains, popular rhythms. —Rimbaud, “A Season in Hell

what they want, Vallejo writing about loneliness while starving to death; Van Gogh’s ear rejected by a whore; Rimbaud running off to Africa to look for gold and finding an incurable case of syphilis; Beethoven gone deaf; Pound dragged through the streets in a cage; Chatterton taking rat poison; Hemingway’s brains dropping into the orange juice; Pascal cutting his wrists in the bathtub; Artaud locked up with the mad; Dostoevsky stood up against a wall; Crane jumping into a boat propeller; Lorca shot in the road by Spanish troops; Berryman jumping off a bridge; Burroughs shooting his wife; Mailer knifing his. – that’s what they want: a God damned show a lit billboard in the middle of hell. that’s what they want, that bunch of dull inarticulate safe dreary admirers of carnivals.

There was no time. There was too much of it.

I want this, she might have said. I have wanted this. I have written this question in the margin of each day longer than I will tell.

You're in love. Taken until the month of August. You're in love - Your sonnets make Her laugh. All your friends disappear, you are not quite the thing. - Then your adored one, one evening, condescends to write to you...! That evening,... - you go back again to the dazzling cafes, You ask for beer or for lemonade... - You are not really serious when you are seventeen And there are green lime trees on the promenade...

On the homunculus the shadow of doom announced by Spengler and Lawrence falls more tragically than on the proud. Oswald Spengler, the prophet of cyclical history, D. H. Lawrence, the psychologist of love and sex, and Henry Miller, the visionary who perceives his wisdom in the microcosm of the heart, are all contained in the boy-prophet Arthur Rimbaud and in Jim Morrison, the rock singer who strives to "break on through to the other side".

These two forces of love, one selfish and self-seeking, the other charitable (caritas) and loving, continue to struggle with one another for domination in a man's soul.

I tell Ceri, this is most likely when I developed an utter love of literature. The Adventures of Tom Sayer. David Copperfield. The Little Prince. Then Cervantes. Balzac. Nabokov. Capote. Some of Miller – but my folks found out and said I was too young for that. I tell Ceri, most likely this is when I developed my inner fears. But that would be an oversimplification. Some-times he used to come around when my mum wasn't there, and Dad was always tired and angry cause he couldn't find a job. And when they had done drinking and Dad was resting, sometimes he would come to my room and we'd read together. He would pull me out of my bed, put me on his knees and hold me tight and read Verne or Rimbaud or Carroll. In candlelight, we would read Dickens and Doyle. Salinger as well. I tell Ceri, this is most likely when my brain started to repress memories and wounds. Then one day they had an argument, Mum was crying a lot that day and at one point came to my room and hugged me till night. We moved out of there shortly after, we moved to a smaller house and I never saw him again. The first time I meet her, I tell Ceri this is just another story now. No need to worry about anything, really. I tell her, I don't even read Rimbaud or Cervantes anymore, you know.

Rimbaud Do you love her? Verlaine Yes, I suppose so. Rimbaud Have you got anything in common with her? Verlaine No. Rimbaud Is she intelligent? Verlaine No. Rimbaud Does she understand you? Verlaine No. Rimbaud So the only thing she can give you is sex?

Paul went to pick him up at the train station, but they must have failed to meet because Rimbaud came on his own, on foot. I expected him to be similar to my beloved romantic poets. Beautiful and childishly pure like Alfred de Musset. Or divinely handsome like Lamartine, with the appearance of a Greek god. Or manly and strikingly comely like Chateaubriand, gazing at the sea as the breeze blows his long curls of hair. As a young girl, I was in love with the poetry of our bards and their portraits. Meanwhile, here in front of our well-kept house, I saw a sloppy rascal in tattered clothes, with disheveled hair, a sweaty face, and no luggage! I was itching to ask: and where is your Sunday garb? A change of underwear? Toothbrush, clothes brush, shoe brush, handkerchief, comb? Well, call me overly idealistic, but I genuinely believed that a normal person couldn’t do without these things.

Arthur was six years old when I left the family. Due to my infrequent stays at home, we did not form a strong bond. Occasionally, I longed for the lost fatherhood. Did he long for his lost childhood? I did not have a chance to tell him about the sea in which the stars float, about the red, fiery sunrises and sunsets, about the storm that tosses a ship like a nutshell, about flocks of screeching seagulls, schools of fish, and picturesque islets. I wanted to spin a tale about life in the desert, about the scorching sand burning the feet and the hot air shimmering with strange mirages. About wild, freedom-loving people, bizarre customs, and exotic beasts. I remember him squatting over a puddle at dusk.