Considered radical at the time, Breton's ideas today seem almost prescient, yet breathtaking in their passionate underlying belief in the indestructibility of life and the freedom of the human spirit. Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Perce Rock - its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty - as his central metaphor, Breton considers issues of love, loss, aggression, war, pacifism and feminism.… (more)