--- Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell (1873), cited in the Wikipedia article on Blaise Cendrars and Arthur Krystal's "The Joy of Lists," The New York Times (2010)
From Krystal's "The Joy of Lists" (the last paragraph in the essay)
The first modern list could very well be Arthur Rimbaud’s recitation of favorite things in “A Season in Hell” (1873): “absurd paintings, door panels, stage sets, backdrops for acrobats, sign boards, . . . outdated literature, Church Latin, misspelled erotic books, novels of grandmothers. ” No underlying order here or columnar progression. What we get instead is Rimbaud’s oddly stocked mind, in which disparate elements jostle one another collage-like on the page. The great contemporary list maker, of course, is Borges, who, in his fabulous story “The Aleph,” attempted the ultimate list, the universe seen simultaneously and in its entirety: “the heavy-laden sea; . . . the multitudes of America; . . . a silver-plated cobweb at the centers of a black pyramid; . . . all the mirrors in the planet; . . . a copy of the first English version of Pliny; . . . tigers, emboli, bison, ground swells and armies; . . . the earth in the Aleph and in the earth the Aleph once more and the earth in the Aleph.” This list is Borges, and it suggests — does it not? — the continuing incalculable exchange between the self and the world. So we catalog as we go, itemizing things seen and unseen, as we move inexorably forward, listing toward oblivion.
