Ever since stumbling across his grave at the Montparnasse cemetery, I have been not quite obsessed — persistently inquisitive — about the life and times of the Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dadaist movement. I was just looking over his single entry in Wikipedia, and found this quote plastered on the top right side, perhaps signifying it (to the author or whoever it is that has say over these things) as one of his more well-known or oft-quoted sayings:
“I consider America responsible for the shame of our age: the glorification of work, that stupid ideology which has engendered the idea of material progress and the disdain of every utopia or poetry tending toward the perfection of the human soul… I cannot help opposing those influences… with the most violent lunge forward, the idea, and the most creative of actions, idleness.”
—Tristan Tzara
Trust a poet to say something like that. And trust me, from somewhere inside my heart, to fully concur or less pretentiously (if that’s possible for me) — to second that emotion.
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