Jahanshah Javid

Last week I finished reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, the 1938 sequel to his classic Tropic of Cancer (see "Cancer of the Book"). This one, much more than the previous, is about ideas than life experiences. He rambles on and on about creation and the human condition and quite a bit of it bored me. But there were enough great passages to keep me going. I'm mesmerized by his determination to be true to himself and his readers, his fierce individuality, his equal contempt and love for life and people, an optimist who sees blood and hopelessness all around, a man who seems like he can't wait to die, turn to dust and become one with the silent, painless universe, and yet lives and loves to the fullest.

Here are some excerpts I saved on my Kindle electronic reader:

"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."

***

"I sat riveted to my desk and I traveled around the world at lightning speed, and I learned that everywhere it is the same -- hunger, humiliation, ignorance, vice, greed, extortion, chicanery, torture, despotism: the inhumanity of man to man: the fetters, the harness, the halter, the bridle, the whip, the spurs."

***

"To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again as an individual."

***

"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. The world was like a museum to me; I saw nothing to do but eat into this marvelous chocolate layer cake which the men of the past had dumped on our hands. It annoyed everybody to see the way I enjoyed myself."

***

"No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a book. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as a molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself."

***

"I look at people brushing by me to see if by chance one of them might agree with me. Supposing I intercepted one of them and just asked him a simple question. Supposing I just said to him suddenly: 'Why do you go on living the way you do?' He would probably call a cop."

***

"I have never found a man as generous as myself, as forgiving, as tolerant, as carefree, as reckless, as clean at heart. I forgive myself for every crime I have committed. I do it in the name of humanity. I know what it means to be human, the weakness and the strength of it. I suffer from this knowledge and I revel in it also. If I had the chance to be God I would reject it. If I had the chance to be a star I would reject it. The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human. It embraces the whole universe. It includes the knowledge of death, which not even God enjoys."

***

"The poor human bastards that we are, we ought to be glad that somebody devised a way out. We don't quibble about going to sleep. A third of our lives we snore away like drunken rats. What about that? Is that tragic? Well then, say three-thirds of drunken ratlike sleep. Jesus, if we had any sense we'd be dancing with glee at the thought of it! We could all die in bed tomorrow, without pain, without suffering -- if we had the sense to take advantage of our remedies. We don't want to die, that's the trouble with us."

***

"You have to realize, Henry my boy, that you're dealing with cutthroats, with cannibals, only they're dressed up, shaved, perfumed, but that's all they are -- cutthroats, cannibals."

***

"With the entrance into life these traits of difference fell away and we all became more or less alike and, of course, most unlike our own selves. And it is this loss of the peculiar self, of the perhaps unimportant individuality, which saddens me."

***

"I have gained nothing by the enlargement of my world; on the contrary, I have lost. I want to become more and more childish and to pass beyond childhood in the opposite direction. I want to go exactly contrary to the normal line of development, pass into a superinfantile realm of being which will be absolutely crazy and chaotic but not as crazy and chaotic as the world about me."

***

"The mountain goat stands alone amidst the Himalayas; he doesn't question how he got to the summit."

***

"My home is not in this world, nor in the next. I am a man without a home, without a friend, without a wife. I am a monster who belongs to a reality which does not exist yet. Ah, but it does exist, it will exist, I am sure of it... My home? Why it is the world -- the whole world! I am at home everywhere, only I did not know it before. But I know now. There is no boundary line any more. There never was a boundary line: it was I who made it."

***

"The world, in its visible, tangible substance, is a map of our love. Not God but life is love. Love, love, love."

***

"I am forced to break with friends and family and loved ones. I am obliged to break camp. And so, just as naturally as in dream, I find myself once again drifting with the current, usually walking along a highway, my face set toward the sinking sun. Now all my faculties become alert. I am the most suave, silky, cunning animal -- and I am at the same time what might be called a holy man. I know how to fend for myself. I know how to avoid work, how to avoid entangling relationships, how to avoid pity, sympathy, bravery, and all the other pitfalls. I stay in place or with a person just long enough to obtain what I need, and then I'm off again. I have no goal: the aimless wandering is sufficient unto itself."

***

"All my life things had worked out all right -- in the end. It wasn't in the cards for me to exert myself. Something had to be left to Providence -- in my case a whole lot. Despite all the outward manifestations of misfortune or mismanagement I knew that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. And with a double crown, too. The external situation was bad, admitted -- but what bothered me was the internal situation. I was really afraid of myself, of my appetite, my malleability, my geniality, my powers of adaptation. No situation in itself could frighten me: I somehow always saw myself sitting pretty, sitting inside a buttercup, as it were, and sipping the honey. Even if I were flung in jail I had a hunch I'd enjoy it. It was because I knew how not to resist, I suppose. Other people wore themselves out tugging and straining and pulling; my strategy was to float with the tide. What people did to me didn't bother me nearly as much as what they were doing to others or to themselves."

***

"I had just made the realization that life is indestructible and there is no such thing as time, only the present."

***

"Nature is eternally whispering in one's ear -- 'if you would survive you must kill!' Being human, you kill not like the animal, but automatically, and the killing is disguised and its ramifications are endless, so that you kill without even thinking about it, you kill without need."

***

"If I am against the human 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."

***

"Even when a town becomes modernized, in Europe, there are still vestiges of the old. In America, though there are vestiges, they are effaced, wiped out of the consciousness, trampled upon, obliterated, nullified by the new. The new is, from day to day, a moth which eats into the fabric of life, leaving nothing finally but a great hole... In America the destruction is complete, annihilating. There is no rebirth, only a cancerous growth, layer upon layer of new, poisonous tissue, each one uglier than the previous one."

***

"No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than to Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out as the American Indian; no land was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that California was raped by the gold diggers. I blush to think of our origins -- our hands are steeped in blood and crime. And there is no letup to the slaughter and the pillage, as I discovered at first hand traveling throughout the length and breadth of the land."

***

"The friends who think they know me know nothing about me for the reason that the real me changed hands countless times. Neither the men who thanked me, nor the men who cursed me, knew with whom they were dealing. Nobody ever got to a solid footing with me, because I was constantly liquidating my personality."

***

"I could afford to be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy. Envy was the one thing I was never a victim of. I have never envied anybody or anything."

***

"This caring too much -- I remember that it only developed with me about the time I first fell in love. And even then I didn't care enough. If I had really cared I wouldn't be here now writing about it; I'd have died of a broken heart, or I'd have swung for it."

***

"Supposing I do give her a fuck, what then? What have I got to say to a girl like that? What's a fuck when what I want is love? Yes, suddenly it comes over me like a tornado... Una, the girl I loved, the girl who lived there in this neighborhood, Una with big blue eyes and flaxen hair, Una who made me tremble just to look at her, Una whom I was afraid to kiss or even to touch her hand."

***

"She was the first of the other sex to admire me for being different. After Weesie it was the other way around. I was loved, but was hated too for being what I was."

***

"In the tomb which is my memory I see her buried now, the one I loved better than all else, better than the world, better than God, better than my own flesh and blood. I see her festering there in that bloody wound of love, so close to me that I could not distinguish her from the wound itself... I lose the memory of words, of her name even which I pronounce like a monomaniac. I forgot what she looked like, what she felt like, what she smelt like, what she fucked like, piercing deeper and deeper into the night of the fathomless cavern."

***

"Meanwhile the other one is waiting. I can see her again as she sat on the low stoop waiting for me, her eyes large and dolorous, her face pale and trembling with eagerness. Pity I always thought it was that brought me back, but now as I walk toward her and see the look in her eyes I don't know any more what it is, only that we will go inside and lie together and she will get half weeping, half laughing, and she will grow very silent and watch me, study me as I move about, and never ask me what is torturing me, never, never, because that is the one thing she fears, the one thing she dreads to know. I don't love you! Can't she hear me screaming it? I don't love you!... But the words never leave my lips. I look at her and I am tongue-tied. I can't do it... Time, time, endless time on our hands and nothing to fill it but lies."

***

"There will always be a cunt or a revolution around the corner."

***

"What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse. But fuck, the real thing, cunt, the real thing, seems to contain some unidentified element which is far more dangerous than nitroglycerin."

***

"There are cunts which laugh and cunts which talk; there are crazy, hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are planturous, seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of sap; there are cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow alive; there are also masochistic cunts which close up like the oyster and have hard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside; there are dithyrambic cunts which dance at the very approach of the penis and go well all over in ecstasy; there are the porcupine cunts which unleash their quills and wave little flags at Christmas time; there are telegraphic cunts which practice the morse code and leave the mind full of dots and dashes; there are the political cunts which are saturated with ideology and which deny even the menopause; there are vegetative cunts which make no response unless you pull them up by the roots; there are the religious cunts which smell like the Seventh Day Adventists and are full of beads, worms, clamshells, sheep droppings and now and then dried bread crumbs; there are the mammalian cunts which are lined with otter skin and hibernate during the long winter; there are cruising cunts fitted out like yachts, which are good for solitaries and epileptics; there are glacial cunts in which you can drop shooting stars without causing a flicker; there are miscellaneous cunts which defy category or description, which you stumble on once in a lifetime and which leave you seared and branded; there are cunts made of pure joy which have neither name nor antecedent and these are the best of all, but whither have they flown?"

***

"Suffering is futile, my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily. Suffering has never taught me a thing; for others it may still be necessary, but for me it is nothing more than an algebraic demonstration of spiritual inadaptability. The whole drama which the man of today is acting out through suffering does not exist for me: it never did, actually. All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten."