Mention Rimbaud, and what flies up in my mind are scattered blocks of memory — homosexuality, the vagabond, the desert, absinthe — all of it so far removed from our own lives. The first things I encountered were just fragments of the story and poetry of Verlaine and Rimbaud, and I tried to understand the homosexual relationship between them, but the more I understood, the more contradictions arose, and the less I understood at the same time — for instance, why did Rimbaud give up literature? How did Verlaine really feel, deep down, about Rimbaud? Question after question that wouldn’t go away — it would almost be easier to just explain it all away as a soul devoured by dark capitalism.

Over summer break I read a thick biography of Rimbaud, and it helped me a great deal. The book didn’t chase rumors, nor did it fixate endlessly on Rimbaud’s homosexual relationship; compared to other biographies built mainly around ideology, the Rimbaud in this book is simply a poet, pure and plain, his poetic nature saturating every fragment of his restless, wandering life. The image that stuck with me most vividly is Rimbaud drinking absinthe late into the night, arguing fiercely with his friends. I wished I could step right into that scene and feel it, a glass of “the green fairy” in hand, letting time slow down, watching closely what this literary young man was doing and thinking at every single moment of that period. Unfortunately, history won’t let us know, and Rimbaud himself didn’t want us to know either — he personally burned a good number of his poetry manuscripts. Thinking about it now, he lived as if he wished many things dead, and that may well be why he gave up literature. What he left us are scene after scene, image after image — or is it all just emptiness in the end? Every bit of it is worth pondering.

Mallarmé called him “a passer-by worthy of respect.” That phrase fits perfectly. He once studied grammar earnestly, once wrote poetry with utter abandon, perhaps even truly loved Verlaine and wanted to spend his life beside him, and perhaps even dreamed of becoming a fabulously wealthy merchant, wandering for twelve years to bring honor to his family — but in the end, none of it became eternal. Strip away the labels the world has stuck on Rimbaud, and he is truly “the giant who stole fire from heaven.”