Two not unfrequented shelters from the storm

j'étais dans son âme comme dans un palais qu'on a vidé pour ne pas voir une personne si peu noble que vous ..

I lived in his soul as though in a palace which had been emptied in order to avoid the sight of someone so ignoble as oneself ..

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

When we pass a day of fear, we remember every second, ignoring those days which lengthen into years of illness. In the Piedmont, the tropical storm has brought (as one writes) continuing wind and rain, both comparatively dulcet, but for surges one would expect of such lengthy perturbation. There is nothing to recall surviving, here, but of treasuring, more than usual. My English dog was eased in the proximity he chose with me, as I turned to our uncanniest artist after Mozart, and to a gorgeously neo-Classicist poet of, I think, certain permanent importance. 

Rimbaud's sacrificial poetic struggle is pertinent, as is the interval of life in which he conducted it. And from the Greeks, gorgeously renewed in the work of Anne Carson, we find how their attachment to reality lies at the heart of Rimbaud's supposed debauchery. It's not a bad storm, which gives understanding of what we love, and of the things that honest people have said of it.

Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud

1854 - 1891

Une saison en enfer

1873

Translation Laurent

Anne Carson

Autobiography of Red

  From the Archaic to the Fast Self

Knopf, 1998©