I am an ephemeral <br />and a not too discontented citizen <br />of a metropolis considered modern <br />because all known taste <br />has been evaded in the furnishings <br />and the exterior of the houses <br />as well as in the layout of the city. <br /> <br />Here you will fail to detect the least trace <br />of any monument of superstition. <br />Morals and language <br />are reduced to their simplest expression, <br />at last! The way these millions of people, <br />who do not even need to know each other, <br />manage their education, business, <br />and old age is so identical <br />that the course of their lives <br />must be several times less long <br />than that which a mad statistics <br />calculates for the people of the continent. <br /> <br />And from my window I see new specters rolling through <br />the thick eternal smoke-- <br />our woodland shade, our summer night!-- <br />new Eumenides in front of my cottage <br />which is my country and all my heart <br />since everything here resembles it,-- <br />Death without tears, <br />our diligent daughter and servant, <br />a desperate Love, and a pretty <br />Crime howling in the mud in the street.<br /><br />Arthur Rimbaud<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/city-10/
