And yet once you leaped in the sun like a sentinel of burnished steel shining in the distance, and then rapidly returned to the green gorge where the sun never reaches, but where you find the tremendous task that is always with you and that whispers courage in the void of your soul. And once with your agile metallic prow you agitated the green water all around your shining body, and you did not feel the torments of the winds nor the black clouds of the hurricane that remained like spiteful women in a corner of the horizon, with hair dishevelled and the eye eager to spy below, from the firmament, the lost, the shipwrecked, the unknown that have no pilot. Once from your sonorous sides, quietly, but vigilant and mad, the torpedo shot out, making its track in silence, and carrying within its thin body death, and the infinite power of dynamite. As you passed the sharks fled, as you passed the corals suspended their tenacious and clumsy work, and the fish with rapid movement swam away. You seemed like an enormous monster of a fantastic destiny and yet you are only a light submarine, a slender ship that the blow of a beam could sink, that a whirlpool could submerge in the abyss. I do not know your story, but I will sing your glory that is part of the desire of audacious men. Submarine, Destiny may have willed you to sink silently, and remain lost forever in the viscid bed of the sea-weed, (O submarine, able to challenge the unconsciousness of the seas and the impotence of the lighthouses,) but you are alive and strong; there is no death, but only an appearance of death that remains. Destiny newly moulds you in a long phantom and you are run, submarine, by the courage of men who, in the unfathomable silence of the water, are piloted by the will of the strong. New brothers will arise and pursue you because your shining back carries a banner, not tri-colored, nor French, but the only color that dazzles; the banner of the battle that amidst disasters combats with this ferocious mystery that is foolishly determined to shut us out from the doors of Nature. Blaa-Blaa-Blaa I am sick of words—spoken words—verbal refuse thrown off by the mental hypochondriacs who imagine themselves suffering from thought and afflicted with ideas. I am sick of the artificial inanities of the drawingroom—the polite poppycock, the meaningless, emotionless enthusiasms. I often have entered a room where male and female husks sat, their faces wreathed in empty grimaces—animated masks discharging automatic phrases—and wished to God I was dumb and could be forgiven for silence. Listening is not so bad because one doesn’t have to listen.