The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud Read Online Free PDF

one biographer. “Under his weary glance all flowers fade, all stars pale.” Yes, there is a grain of truth in this. I know became I suffer from the same disease.
But
, if one has dreamed an empire, the empire of man, and if one dares to reflect at what a snail’s pace men are advancing toward the realization of this dream, it is quite possible that what are called the activities of man pale to insignificance. I don’t believe for a minute that the flowers ever faded or the stars were ever dimmed in Rimbaud’s eyes. I think that with these the core of his being always maintained a direct and fervid communication. It was in the world of men that his weary glance saw things pale and fade. He began by wanting to “see all, feel all, exhaust everything, explore everything, say everything.” It was not long before he felt the bit in his mouth, the spurs in his flanks, the lash on his back. Let a man but dress differently from his fellow creatures and he becomes an object of scorn and ridicule. The only law which is really lived up to whole-heartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity. No wonder that as a mere lad he ended “by finding the disorder of his mind sacred.” At this point he had really made himself a seer. He found, however, that he was regarded as a clown and a mountebank. He had the choice of fighting for the rest of his life to hold the ground he had gained or to renounce the struggle utterly. Why could he not have compromised? Because compromise was not in his vocabulary. He was a fanatic from childhood, a person who had to go the whole hog or die. In this lies his purity, his innocence.
    In all this I rediscover my own plight. I have never relinquished the struggle. But what a price I have paid! I have had to wage guerilla warfare, that hopeless struggle which is born only of desperation. The work I set out to write has not yet been written, or only partially. Just to raise my voice, to speak in my own fashion, I have had to fight every inch of the way. The song has almost been forgotten for the fight. Talk of the weary glance under which flowers fade and stars pale! My glance has become positively corrosive: it is only a miracle that under my pitiless gaze they are not blasted away. So much for the core of my being. As for the superficies, well, the outward man has gradually learned to accommodate himself to the ways of the world. He can be in it without being of it. He can be kind, gentle, charitable, hospitable. Why not? “The real problem,” as Rimbaud pointed out, “is to make the soul monstrous.” That is to say, not hideous but prodigious! What is the meaning of monstrous? According to the dictionary, “any organized form of life greatly malformed either by the lack, excess, misplacement or distortion of parts or organs; hence, anything hideous or abnormal, or made up of inconsistent parts or characters, whether repulsive or not.” The root is from the Latin verb
moneo
, to warn. In mythology we recognize the monstrous under the form of the harpy, the gorgon, the sphinx, the centaur, the dryad, the mermaid. They are all prodigies, which is the essential meaning of the word. They have upset the norm, the balance. What does this signify if not the fear of the little man. Timid souls always see monsters in their path, whether these be called hippogriffs or Hitlerians. Man’s greatest dread is the expansion of consciousness. All the fearsome, gruesome part of mythology stems from this fear. “Let us live in peace and harmony!” begs the little man. But the law of the universe dictates that peace and harmony can only be won by inner struggle. The little man does not want to pay the price for that kind of peace and harmony; he wants it ready-made, like a suit of manufactured clothes.
     
     
    There are obsessive, repetitive words which a writer uses which are more revealing than all the facts which are amassed by patient biographers. Here are a few that we come across in Rimbaud’s