Random French Symbolism

(I will go back to writing more substantive law and legal academy related posts shortly, but for now am too exhausted by both gender discrimination and the federal regulation of child pornography, which are exceedingly depressing subjects to write about and read all day. )

Just because at certain times and on certain days, when you can't say everything you wish you could say, there is a story that is better left untold, writing sucks, school is dreary, and life in general is not as awesome as Awesome Part of the Country:


The Foe

My youth was naught else but a dark, raging storm,
Traversed here and there by a ray of bright sun;
The thunder and rain wrought such havoc and harm
That but few crimson fruits in my garden remain.
Now it seems I have reached the autumn of ideas,
And must use in that garden the spade and the rake
To make whole once again the inundated ground,
Where the water has hollowed out holes big as graves.
And who konws if the new blooms I'm now dreaming of
Will find in this soil, washed and leached like a strnad,
The mystical food which would cause them to thrive?
O sorrow! O grief! Life is eaten by Time,
And the dark, deadly Foe who still gnaws at our hearts,
From the blood that we lose, grows gigantic and strong!

--Baudelaire


Ville

I am an ephemeral and a not too discontented citizen of a metropolis considered modern because all known taste has been evaded in the furnishings and the exterior of the houses as well as in the layout of the city . Here you would fail to detect the least trace of any monument of superstition. Morals and language are reduced to their simplest expression, at last! The way these millions of people, who do not even need to know each other, manage their education, business, and old age is so identitcal that the course of their lives must be several times less long than that which a mad statistics calculates for the people of the continent. And from my window I see new specters rolling through the thick eternal smoke--our woodland shasde, our summer night!--new Eumenides in front of my cottage which is my country and all my heart since everything here resembles it,--death without tears, our diligent daughter and servant, a desperate Love, and a pretty Crime howling in the mud of the street.

--- "Ville," Arthur Rimbaud