Rimbaud envy

I have become a Rimbaud-phile and here's why take a gander at Graham Robb's passage:

"In the last three years, Rimbaud had spent about fifteen months at home and about twenty-one at sea or on the road. He had visited thirteen different countries - excluding coastlines seen from the deck of a ship - and travelled over 32,000 miles. He already had more than enough material for his anecdotage. He had worked as a pedlar, an editorial assistant, barman, farm laborer, language teacher, private tutor, factory worker, docker, mercenary, sailor, tout, cashier and interpreter, and he was about to add a few more jobs on the list. On almost every occasion, he had done something for which he was not previously qualified.

Though he lacked the most ordinary qualification of all - the baccalaureat - he had a working knowledge of five languages, had seen more sights and experienced more interesting intoxications than an English lord on the Grand Tour, published a book, been arrested in three countries and repatriated from three others. The most he had ever earned from his writing had been a free subscription to a magazine, but he had left behind a body of work that would one day open up new regions of the mind to poetic explorers. He had begged, been to jail, committed aproximately twelve imprisonable offences with impunity, and survived war, revolution, illness, a gunshot wound, his own family and the Cape of Good Hope. He had been intimate terms with some of the most remarkable writers and political thinkers of the age.

The Arthur Rimbaud who eventually washed up on the shores of East Africa was not a helpless innocent."

I wanted to add this passage from "Tramping with Tramps" from the legend Josiah Flynt:

"...although I learned to ride in freight cars with as much peace of mind and often more comfort than in passenger-coaches, there was always something strange to me in the fact that I never bought a ticket. During my first trip to Hoboland, which lasted, eight continuous months, I must easily have traveled over twenty thousand miles, and there were not more than ten occasions during the entire experience when any payment was demanded of me..."