Tropic of Capricorn (Miller, Henry)

by Henry Miller

There are no “facts”—there is only the fact that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous and patient.

The moment you have a “different” thought you cease to be an American.

One thing seems clear, however—and this is a hangover from the 25th—that I was born with a crucifixion complex. That is, to be more precise, I was born a fanatic. Fanatic! I remember that word being hurled at me from early childhood on. By my parents especially. What is a fanatic? One who believes passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes. I was always believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were slapped the more firmly I believed. I believed—and the rest of the world did not! If it were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on believing till the end; but the way of the world is more insidious than that. Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed out, the ground taken from under your feet. It isn’t even treachery, what I have in mind. Treachery is understandable and combatable. No, it is something worse, something less than treachery. It’s a negativism that causes you to overreach yourself. You are perpetually spending your energy in the act of balancing yourself. You are seized with a sort of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can’t believe that beneath your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of enthusiasm, through a passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your love. The more you reach out toward the world the more the world retreats. Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in his sacred entrails—t...

Getting the bread becomes more important than the eating of it. Everything is calculated and everything has a price upon it.

For the first time in my life I understood what it was to experience a vital friendship and yet not to feel enslaved or attached because of the experience. Never, after we parted, did I feel the need of his actual presence; he had given himself completely and I possessed him without being possessed. It was the first clean, whole experience of friendship, and it was never duplicated by any other friend. Hamilton was friendship itself, rather than a friend. He was the symbol personified and consequently entirely satisfactory, hence no longer necessary to me.

Yiddish, nothing but this sputtering, choking, hissing tongue in which God and rotten vegetables sound alike and mean alike.

The world, in its visible, tangible substance, is a map of our love.

Then one day, without the slightest warning, I wake up and looking about me I understand absolutely nothing of what is going on about me, neither my own behavior nor that of my neighbors, nor do I understand why the governments are at war or at peace, whichever the case may be.

I have never found a man as generous as myself, as forgiving, as tolerant, as carefree, as reckless, as clean at heart.

swimming behind them in the electric effluvia of her incandescent vision.

The moment a child is born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life rhythm but the death rhythm. The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm. There is not only no need to keep alive at any price, but, if life is undesirable, it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death.

Men are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their inventions speak only of death.

Art ought to be something funny and a trifle boring.”

If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist—it is because I want to laugh more. I don’t say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you’ve got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God. My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That’s why it doesn’t matter to me what road I take.

I wanted to be wide awake without talking or writing about it, in order to accept life absolutely.

All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten.

Truth is only the core of a totality which is inexhaustible.

I became an angel. It is not the purity of an angel which is so valuable, as the fact it can fly. An angel can break the pattern anywhere at any moment and find its heaven; it has the power to descend into the lowest matter and to extricate itself at will.