London's too big for us, we decide. It's too big, too sprawling. And there's too much money here, even though there's a great deal of poverty. Too much money! Too much health! Have you noticed how healthy these people are?, W. says of the people sitting around us. They make us feel stunted, we agree. We're shorter than they are - in W.'s case, much shorter, in mine, quite a bit shorter. They have brighter eyes. Their skin shines. They're elegantly dressed. They iron their shirts. And us? They can tell our kind a mile off, we suppose. They know what kind of people we are. We know what kind of people we are, for all that we'd like to live in truth, generosity and grandeur ...
We have London sickness, we decide, remembering the title of one of Blanchot's essays. At first, you're impressed at the buildings - here is St Paul's in person, as it were. Here is Trafalgar Square. But these buildings are so sure of themselves, so pleased with their prestige, and so imposing - exposing themselves with such a desire for spectacle that they turn us into spectators who are very impressed at first, then a little uncomfortable, then sick, sick of seeing too much greatness ...
We're men of small cities, we decide on the overground link to Greenwich. We love only those cities we can walk across in a day.
Rimbaud lived in London, of course. He was shacked up with Verlaine, the two lovers learning English and taking great walks out through Greenwich (where we're headed) and out in the other direction to Kew. By day, they would spend their days in the British Museum with their 'reader's tickets', reading books by the Communards forbidden in France. Rimbaud wore a top hat like a dandy, and smoked a long clay pipe like a bohemian. In the perpetual fog of the city, he and Verlaine were followed by police, who suspected them as Communard sympathisers ...
True life is lacking. We do not belong to the world: did Rimbaud write those lines in London? Was it the 'enormous city' he evoked 'with its skies spotted with fire and mud'. London was the city of rotting rags, bread soaked in rain', of 'drunkenness' ... Of Rimbaud's and Verlaine's drunkenness, of their lover's quarrels, where they stabbed at each other with knives wrapped in towels ...
Didn't Verlaine shoot Rimbaud in the wrist? Wasn't he sent off to prison? That's what London drives you to, W. says. And that's why Rimbaud fled, first London, and then Europe. And then the world, Rimbaud fled the world. Rimbaud fled all the way to death ...
