"At the cost of appearing biased, I have to say that the literary mind can be intentionally prone to the confusion between noise and meaning, that is, between a randomly constructed arrangement and a precisely intended message. However, this causes little harm; few claim that art is a tool of investigation of the Truth - rather than an attempt to escape it or make it more palatable. Symbolism is the child of our inability and unwillingness to accept randomness; we give meaning to all manner of shapes; we detect human figures in inkblots. I saw mosques in the clouds announced Arthur Rimbaud the 19th-century French symbolic poet. This interpretation took him to "poetic" Abyssinia (in East Africa), where he was brutalized by a Christian Lebanese slave dealer, contracted syphilis, and lost a leg to gangrene. He gave up poetry in disgust at the age of 19, and died anonymously in a Marseilles hospital ward while still in his thirties. But it was too late. European intellectual life developed what seems to be an irreversible taste for symbolism - we are still paying its price, with psychoanalysis and other fads."
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