Tropic of Cancer

by Henry Miller

Miller is the twentieth-century reincarnation of Whitman.

Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.

Morally I regard Miller as a holy man, as most of his adherents do—Gandhi with a penis.

The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it’s the same story. Nature dominates, Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people—healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up.

You can’t put a fence around a human being. It ain’t done any more.

For the man in the paddock, whose duty it is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.

A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails.

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.

“I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

Charles the Silly,

Charles VI

Once in a while the parents were received in the big reception room just off the driveway, where there were busts of the heroes of antiquity, such as Molière, Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, etc., all the scarecrows whom the cabinet ministers mention with moist lips whenever an immortal is added to the waxworks. (No bust of Villon, no bust of Rabelais, no bust of Rimbaud.)

We drove on past the Arc de Triomphe. A few sightseers were loitering around the remains of the Unknown Soldier.