Tropic of Capricorn

by Henry Miller

I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.

Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.

For there is only one great adventure and that is inward toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter.

I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself.

Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of effort, I cannot say what I think and feel—that bothers me, that rankles.

Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous and patient.

To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd. You may dream, if you dream alike.

They left a bad smell behind them—a poison, a vomit of sorrow. The stink they were trying to take out of the world was the stink they themselves had brought into the world.

To taste it once is to taste it forever—life or death. Whichever way the coin flips is right, so long as you hold no stakes.

And why the hell should one want to go on breathing forever? Anything that would have to be done interminably would be torture.

I am the germ of a new insanity, a freak dressed in intelligible language, a sob that is buried like a splinter in the quick of the soul. I am dancing the very sane and lovely dance of the angelic gorilla. These are my brothers and sisters who are insane and unangelic. We are dancing in the hollow of the cup of nothingness. We are of one flesh, but separated like stars.

But first come the morganatic diseases, of which we must now speak.... There is a condition of misery which is irremediable—because its origin is lost in obscurity. Bloomingdale’s, for example, can bring about this condition. All department stores are symbols of sickness and emptiness,

Just as the slightest breeze can set a vast forest in motion so, by some unfathomable impulse from within, the rocklike self can begin to grow, and in this growth nothing can prevail against it.

I was like those men who have been too long in the trenches, too long under fire. Ordinary human suffering, ordinary human jealousy, ordinary human ambitions—it was just so much shit to me.

I had become an absolute stranger standing in the very midst of my own people. They looked crazy to me, my people, with their newly sunburned faces and their flannel trousers and their clockwork stockings.

The man whom God loves is the onion with a million skins. To shed the first layer is painful beyond words; the next layer is less painful, the next still less, until finally the pain becomes pleasurable, more and more pleasurable, a delight, an ecstasy. And then there is neither pleasure nor pain, but simply darkness yielding before the light.

I was really afraid of myself, of my appetite, my curiosity, my flexibility, my permeability, my malleability, my geniality, my powers of adaptation.

Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I’m here to live, not to calculate. And that’s just what the bastards don’t want you to do—to live! They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures.

the realization that life is indestructible and that there is no such thing as time, only the present.

Be forbearing when you compare us With those who were the perfection of order. We who everywhere seek adventure, We are not your enemies. We would give you vast and strange domains Where flowering mystery waits for him would pluck it.

Have compassion on us who are always fighting on the frontiers Of the boundless future, Compassion for our errors, compassion for our sins.

Yes, yes, and again yes! O, let us do some rash thing—for the sheer pleasure of it! Let us do something live and magnificent, even if destructive!

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.

It’s just as hard to go back as to go forward.

There was no place for me—as yet. And yet the books I read, the music I heard assured me that there were other men in the world like myself.

When I woke up to the fact that as far as the scheme of things goes I was less than dirt I really became quite happy. I quickly lost all sense of responsibility.

It annoyed everybody to see the way I enjoyed myself. Their logic was that art was very beautiful, oh yes, indeed, but you must work for a living and then you will find that you are too tired to think about art.

I would have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge if it would have convinced people that I wasn’t a heartless son of a bitch. I had a heart as big as a whale, as I was soon to prove, but nobody was examining into my heart.

About the big issues I was clear, but confronted by the petty details of life I was bewildered. I

The friends who think they know me know nothing about me for the reason that the real me changed hands countless times.

Of what use was it to prove that I could be what was expected of me when I did not want to be any of these things? Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem—to be yourself!

One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this. The woman whom you never hoped to meet now sits before you, and she talks and looks exactly like the person you dreamed about. But strangest of all is that you never realized before that you had dreamed about her. Your whole past is like a long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no dream.