Having read about Rimbaud’s life (and how he had stopped writing altogether) in Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, I re-read The Aesthetics of Silence by Susan Sontag. It’s incredible how Sontag – who was only 34 at the time this essay was published – reaches an impeccable style and an enormous lucidity. An excerpt:

The scene changes to an empty room.

Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village school-teacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess. Accompanying these exemplary renunciations of a vocation, each man has declared that he regards his previous achievements in poetry, philosophy, or art as trifling, of no importance. —…

The essay is published in the bundel Styles of Radical Will, which also features the seminal The Pornographic Imagination (1967).