Let me tell you how we Rimbaudians work. Sometimes, we refuse to do the smart thing and let ourselves go to shit for it so that we can see what happens, where it leads.
Example. I will wait until the bitter end before i go back to a hospital to address this chronic debilitating lower back pain just because, in principle, the health care system is a joke and i want nothing to do with it.
Now, if that pain, say, leads me to having to make money other ways because i can’t work comfortably anymore, i won’t make a career change. Instead, I’ll go broke or make money illegally.
Why. Because, in addition to the health care system being a joke, a fellow who’s back is destroyed by twenty-five years of low-paying hard labor and then hasn’t the money to pay the doctors to fix em… well, that’s now doubly absurd in principle.
The principled Rimbaudian does not make the sacrifices and compromises that others make to avoid a plunge into a life of struggle because he, unlike the others, is not a meager hedonist satisfied with a paltry allowance. What he wants is truth, not comfort, not security. And he will not hestitate to sacrifice himself for that.
And as the many years pass and he accumulates the results of all these ‘refusals to compromise’ along the way, he becomes something of a disheveled mad man, half enamorated by the truths he has discovered and half insane because he had to sacrifice himself to have them.
No. I will not ask for help, for i should not need to. No, i will not find another job, for i should not need to. No, i will not seek legal recourse to expunge my record, for i should not need to. Rather, all of you shall bear witness to my great going down.