the books in my life (quotes from Henry Miller)

The following words were all scribbled down, rather in a frenzy, as I read an online pdf version of Henry Miller's  The Books in my Life.  I feel automatically hooked and invigorated by Miller's style of writing.  Something within me nods vigorously at the galvanizing turn of his phrases.  Miller's way of writing, the topics of interest to him, and the tone of his voice, are unique.  He resists being categorized.  He possesses the rare capacity, and desire, to give the entirety of himself in his writing.  He has a crazy kind of exuberance which he often manages to contain in carefully turned phrases of both poetic and intellectual acuity.  He has a tendencys to get carried away, and to exaggerate to make a point.  Other times his amour propre gets the better of him, and he divagates uninterestingly.  Intellectualism, like all of life, is seen by Miller as a game, to be played punctiliously, as well as with enjoyment.  His biggest affinity is with poetry, candid presentation of self and the expression of sheer joie de vivre through writing.  My lips cannot resist curling with repulsion as I read, in Miller's early writings, the insipid descriptions of his erotic encounters in Paris, but I read stoically on and retrospectively stomach them with the thought that Miller must be taken as a whole; it somehow happened that the Brooklyn boy needed to rebel, to break the taboos of his time, to desire to share the totality of his self, and at times push his self-sharing and ebullience beyond the bounds of good taste.  I know that I would have quite liked to have met Miller, but I also feel that I have already met him - through his books, as well as youtube videos and radio interviews.  I feel that Miller possessed to an unusual degree the capacity to transmit the experience of being himself through his writing.  Apart from an experience of reading, his writings gives me a mode of seeing, and being in, the world - consisting of attitudes I desire to emulate, as well as others I wish pointedly to avoid.  In copying out and paying attention to Millers quotes thus, I hope to internalize something of his spirit of prodigal candor.  Perhaps, I tell myself, in studying his peculiar way of wielding the word I will also glean something of the secret of writing.

Miller mentions in several places that one would probably be better off reading less; that the pure experiencing of life herself is the great book most worthy of being read (or that the people he has met have been the 'living books', who have taught him more than any paper book.)  The fact remains that Miller loves to express himself through the written word, and that this love of writing has been fed and cultivated by a voracious lifelong appetite of his for reading books.  Soon after reading The Books in my Life, I read Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, from which the final few excerpts here below were taken.

The books in my life begins with a quote from Amiel:

"All is marvelous for the poet, all is divine for the saint, all is great for the hero; all is wretched, miserable, ugly and bad for the sordid soul"

And, though reading may not at first blush seem like an act of creation, in a deep sense it is [ . . .] Whether he is aware of it or not, what [the enthusiastic reader] is doing is praising God's handiwork.  For, the good reader, like the good author, knows that everything stems from the same source.  He knows that he could not participate in the author's private experience were he not composed of the same substance through and through.  And when I say author I mean Author.  The writer is, of course, the best of all readers, for in writing or "creating" as it is called, he is but reading and transcribing the great message of creation which the Creator in his goodness has made manifest to him.

The important thing is not which books, which experiences, a man is to have, but what he puts into them of his own.

... to me the cardinal fact about a writer is his ability to "exploit" the vast silence which enwraps us all.  Of all artists he is the one who best knows that "in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God"  He has caught the spirit which informs all creation and he has rendered it in signs and symbols.  Pretending to communicate with his fellow creatures, he has unwittingly taught us to commune with the Creator.  Using language as his instrument he demonstrates that is is not language at all, but prayer.  A very special kind of prayer, too, since nothing is demanded of the Creator.  "Blessings on thee, O Lord!"   So it runs, no matter what the subject, what the idiom.  "Let me exhaust myself, O Lord, in singing thy praises"

As a philosophy of life the Tao Teh Ch'ing not only holds its own with the bulkier systems of thought propounded by other great figures in the past, but, in my mind, surpasses them in every respect.  It has one element which wholly sets it apart from other philosophies of life - humour.

Long before I had accepted Jesus Christ, I had embraced Lao-tse and Gautama the Buddha.  The Prince of Enlightenment!  Somehow, that appellation never seemed to fit Jesus.  A man of sorrow - that was more my conception of the gentle Jesus.  The word enlightenment struck a responsive chord in me;  it seemed to burn out those other words associated, rightly or wrongly, with the founder of Christianity.  I mean words such as sin, guilt, redemption, and so on.

To write one has to be possessed and obsessed.  What is it that possess and obsesses Cendrars?  Life.  He is a man in love with life - et c'est tout.  No matter if he denies this at times, no matter if he vilifies the times or excoriates his contemporaries in the arts, no matter if he compares his own recent past with the present and finds the latter lacking, no matter if he deplores the trends, the tendencies, the philosophies and behaviour of the men of our epoch, he is the one man of our time who has proclaimed and trumpeted the fact that today is profound and beautiful.

It is in Apocalypse that [D.H. Lawrence] has some of the most moving passages - on the withering of the "societal" instinct.  They create real anguish in us - for Lawrence.  They make us realise the tortures he suffered in trying to be "a man among men."  With Cendrars I detect no hint of such deprivation or mutilation.  In the ocean of humanity Cendrars swims as blithely as a porpoise or dolphin.  In his narratives he is always together with men, one with them in deed, one with them in thought.  If he is a solitary, he is nevertheless fully and completely a man.  He is also the brother of all men.  Never does he set himself up as a superior to his fellow man.  

Everything is so divinely connected, so beautifully interrelated - how could one possibly be at a loss to undertake the education of a child?  Whatever we touch, see, smell, or hear, from whatever point we begin, we are on velvet.  There is no need to "prepare" a child for his lesson:  the lesson itself is a kind of enchantment.  The child longs to know; he literally hungers and thirsts.  And so does the adult, if we could but dissipate the hypnotic thrall which subjugates him.

More that ever do I believe that at a certain age it becomes imperative to reread the books of childhood and youth.  Else we may go to the grave not knowing who we are or why we lived.

Only once is it given to experience the miracle of life.  The import of this dawns slowly, very slowly upon me.  Whoever has not become fully alive in this life will not become so through death.  I believe this to be the hidden note in all religious teachings.

The rebel, I firmly believe, is closer to God that the saint.  To him is given dominion over the dark forces which we must obey before we can receive the light of illumination.  The return to the source, the only revolution which has meaning for man, is the whole goal of man.  It is a revolution which can occur only in his being.  This is the true significance of the plunge into life's stream, of becoming fully alive, awakening, recovering one's complete identity.

Identity!  This is the word which [. . .]  has come to haunt me.  I began my writing career with the intention of telling the truth about myself.  What a fatuous task!  What can possibly be more fictive than the story of one's life?  We reveal nothing of ourselves by telling the truth, but do sometimes discover ourselves.  I who had thought to give something found that I had received something.  

. . . of what stupendous, unimaginable detours are our lives composed!  All is voyage, all is quest.  We are not even aware of the goal until we have reached it and become one with it.

To employ the word reality is to say myth and legend.  To speak of creation means to bury oneself in chaos.  We know not whence we come, nor whither we go, nor even who we are.

. . . the understanding of a language is not the same as the understanding of language.  It is always communion versus communication.

Giono's "Song of the world" is far more precious, far more stirring, far more poetic than the "Song of songs."  It is intimate, personal, cosmic, untrammeled - and ceaseless.  It contains the notes of the lark, the nightingale, the thrush; it contains the whir of the planets and the almost inaudible wheeling of the constellations;  it contains the sobs, shrieks and wails of wounded mortal souls as well as the laughter and ululations of the blessed.  It contains the serahphic music of the angelic hosts and howls of the damned.  In addition to this pandemonic music, Giono gives the whole gamut of colour, taste, smell and feel.  The most inanimate objects yield their mysterious vibrations.  The philosophy behind this symphonic production has no name:  its function is to liberate, to keep open all the sluices of the soul, to encourage speculation, adventure and passionate worship.  "Be what thou art, only be it to the utmost!"  That is what it whispers.

Certain books not only give a sense of life, sustain life, but, like certain rare individuals, augment life.

In youth, one's appetite, both for raw experience and for books, is uncontrolled.  Where there is excessive hunger, and not mere appetite, there must be vital reasons for it.  It is blatantly obvious that our present way of life does not offer proper nourishment.  If it did I am certain we would read less, work less, strive less.  We would not need substitutes, we would not accept vicarious modes of existence.  This applies to all realms:  food, sex, travel, religion, adventure.  

We have no definite goal or purpose, nor the freedom of being without goal or purpose.  We are, most of us, sleepwalkers, and we die without ever opening our eyes.

From early manhood on my whole activity revolved about, or was motivated by, the fact that I thought myself, first potentially, then embryonically, and finally manifestly, as a writer [. . . ] here is my genealogical line:  Boccaccio, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievsky, the ancient Greek dramatists, the Elizibethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare) , Theodore Dresier, Knut Hamsun, DH Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, Van Gogh, the dadaists and surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Caroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Celine, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the bible rather than its "message" which I got first and which I will never shake off.  

What were the subjects which make me seek the authors I love, which permitted me to be influenced, which formed my style, my character, my approach to life?  Broadly these: the love of life itself, the pursuit of truth, wisdom and understanding, mystery, the power of language, the antiquity and the glory of man, eternality, the purpose of existence, the oneness of everything, self-liberation, the brotherhood of man, the meaning of love, the relation of sex to love, the enjoyment of sex, humour, oddities and eccentricities in all life's aspects, travel, adventure, discovery, prophecy and magic (both black and white), art, games, confessions, revelations, mysticism, more particularly the mystics themselves, the varieties of faith and worship, the marvellous in all realms and under all aspects, for "there is only the marvellous and nothing but the marvellous"

. . . the struggle of the human being to emancipate himself, that is, to liberate himself from the prison of his own making, that is for me the supreme subject . . .

Perhaps that is why, in my works, I have given so much space to sheer experience of life.  Perhaps too that is why I am so powerfully drawn to the men of wisdom, the men who have experienced life to the full and who give life - artists, religious figures, pathfinders, innovator and iconoclasts of all sorts.  And perhaps - why not say it? - that is why I have so little respect for literature, so little regard for the accredited authors.  For me the only true revolutionaries are the inspirors and activators, figures like Jesus, Lao-tse, Gautama the Buddha, Akhnanton, Ramakrishna, Krishnamurti.  The yardstick I employ is life: how men stand in relation to life.  What distinguishes the men I have in mind is that they did not impose their authority on man; on the contrary, they sought to destroy authority.  Their aim and purpose was to open up life, to make man hungry for life, to exalt life - and to refer all questions back to life.  They exhorted man to realise that he had all the freedom in himself, that he was not to concern himself with the fate of the world (which is not his problem) but to solve his own individual problem, which is a question of liberation, nothing else.

[the painters'] signs and symbols are of another order than the writer's or thinker's.  They deal in forms and images, and images have a way of remaining fresh and vivid.  I feel that the painter looks at the world more directly.

[whereas the thought which haunts our youth] is - will this world be snuffed out before we have a chance to enjoy it? - there is no-one to tell them that even if the world were snuffed out tomorrow, or the day after, it would not really matter - since the life they crave to enjoy is imperishable.

The way one reads a book is the way one reads life.  Maeterlinck writes as profoundly and engagingly about insects, flowers, stars, even space itself, as he does about men and women.  For him the world is a continuous, interactive, interchanging whole.  There are no walls or barriers.  There is no death anywhere.  A moment of time is as rich and complete as ten thousand years.  Truly, a luxurious kind of thinking.  

. . .  besides, what could it possibly mean to a man like him to lose a game of chess, or ten games, or a hundred?  "I'll be playing it in paradise" he seemed to be saying, "Come on, let's have fun! Make a bold move, a rash move!"  The way he played chess was the way he played the game of life.

Sometimes, when the image of Lao-tse seated on the back of a water buffalo crosses my mind, when I think of that steady, patient, kindly, penetrating grin of his, that wisdom so fluent and benevolent, I think of Lou Jacobs sitting before me at the chessboard.  Ready to play the game any way you liked.  Ready to rejoice over his ignorance or to beam with pleasure at his own tomfoolery.  Never malicious, never petty, never envious, never jealous.  A great comforter, yet remote as the dog star.

Like Celine, Powys has the faculty of telling of his misfortunes with humour.  Powys, needless to say, had his own luminaries whom he raved about.  I use the word "raved" advisedly.  I had never before heard anyone rave in public, particularly about authors, thinkers, philosophers.  Powys fulminated with the fire and smoke of the soul, or the depths which cradle the soul.  Literature was for him like manna from above.

Fatidical, if I remember rightly, was one of his favourite adjectives.

All vital questions were of interest to him.  It was his broad yet passionate curiosity which enabled him to wrest from "dead" epochs and "dead" letters the universal human qualities which the scholar and pedant lose sight of.  To sit at the feet of a living man, a contemporary, whose thoughts, feelings and emanations were kindred in spirit to those of the glorious figures of the past was a great privilege.  

"You seek truth," says Krishnamurti, "as if it were the opposite of what you are"

If Krishnamurti has a mission, it is to strip men of their illusions and delusions, to knock away the false supports of ideals, fetishes, every kind of crutch and thus render back to man the full majesty, the full potency, of his humanity.

Alice, too, was in a quest for reality and proved her courage poetically by stepping through the looking-glass.

"Become as little children"  Everyone bows his head in silence when this utterance is repeated.  But no-one truly believes it.

. . . teachers in the true sense - those who open our eyes, those who lift us out of ourselves.  They are not interested in foisting upon us new beliefs but in aiding us to penetrate reality more deeply.  They proceed first by levelling all the superstructures of thought.  Second they point to something beyond thought, to the ocean of mind, let us say, in which thought swims.  Last they force us to think for ourselves.

"Now, today, as I write, I stand in exactly the same position as the Caveman.  Written tradition, systems of culture, modes of thought, have for me no existence."  [Miller here is quoting a French author, I remember not whom] That is a mighty utterance.  An heroic utterance.  Who can repeat it honestly and sincerely?  Who is there that even aspires to make such an utterance?

Aye, we must go full swing.  Home - where is it if not everywhere and nowhere at the same time?  When he is in possession of his soul, then will man be fully alive, caring nothing for immortality and knowing nothing of death.  To begin wholly fresh may mean coming alive at last!

It makes grand sense, one's life, even when it resembles a quagmire.  Certainly no Creator could have ordained the devious and manifold paths one treads, the choices and decisions one makes.  Can you imagine a ledger in which the vagaries of every single mortal that ever lived were recorded?

Dostoievsky was human in that "all too human" sense of Nietzsche.  He wrings our withers when he unrolls his scroll of life.  Whitman is impersonal by comparison; he takes in the crowd, the masses, the great swarms of humanity.  His eyes are constantly fixed on the potential, the divine potential in man.  He talks brotherhood.  Dostoievsky talks fellowship.  Dostoievsky stirs us to the depths, causes us to shudder and grimace, to wince, to close our eyes at times.  Not Whitman.  Whitman has the faculty of looking at everything, divine or demonic, as part of the ceaseless, Heraclitean stream.  No end, no beginning.  A lofty, sturdy wind blows through his poems.  There is a healing quality to his vision.  Compared to Dostoievsky Whitman is in a sense empty.  It is not the emptiness of the abstract either.  It is rather a divine emptiness.  It is the quality of the nameless void out of which sprang chaos, it is the emptiness which precedes creation,  Dostoievsky is chaos and fecundity. [ . . . He] seems to me to glow with a human light and he is thought of as a fanatic, as a demonic being; Whitman radiates a cool cosmic light, and he is thought of as the brother of all men, as the man in the midst of life.  Dostoievsky is all passion, Whitman compassion.  In Dostoievsy's work one has the feeling that the angel and the devil walk hand in hand; they understand one another and they are tolerant of one another.  Whitman's work is devoid of such entities; there is humanity in the rough, there is nature grandiose and eternal, and there is the breath of the Great Spirit.

Our destination is never a place but a new way of seeing things.

You will be very disappointed in heaven, for I think that it won't nearly be as nice there as it is here.

"I feel and know that death is not the ending, as we thought, but rather the real beginning - and that nothing ever is or can be lost, nor even die, nor soul, nor matter"

Whitman

"The world will be complete for him who is himself complete"

Whitman

How very Zen is this from Whitman:  "Is it lucky to be born?  It is just as lucky to die"

The questioning, the doubts, the denial which abound in Dostoievsky's works, revealing his obsession with the problem of certitude, stand in sharp contrast to Whitman's lifelong attitude.  In some respects, Dostoievsky reminds us of Job.  He arraigns the Creator and life itself.

"Unable to accept life spontaneously, [Dostoievsky] was compelled to take it up as a problem," writes Janko Lavrin, "but life as a problem demands a meaning which must satisfy our rational and irrational selves. At a certain stage the meaning of life may even become more important than life itself.  One can reject life altogether, unless its meaning answers to the highest demands of our consciousness."

Dostoievsky undertook, as far as it was humanly possible, to assume the problems, the tortures and the anguish of all men - and especially, as we know so well, the incomprehensible suffering of children.  Whitman answered man's problems, not by weighing them and examining them, but by a continuous chant of love, of acceptance, in which the answer was always implicit.

"Whitman's essential message," says Lawrence, "was the Open Road, the leaving of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and the loom of the open road.  Which is the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself"

Singing the song of the soul himself, Lawrence grows ecstatic.  He speaks of "a new morality, a morality of actual living, not of salvation."  Whitman's morality, he declares, "was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving herself . . . the soul living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road."

"fate leads the willing, drags the unwilling"

Lawrence was frightened, nay horrified, to think that his man Whitman, in accepting everything, rejecting nothing, lived with all his sluices open - like some monstrous creature of the deep.

But could there be a more salutary comforting image than this human net adrift in the stream of life?  Where would you have man anchor?  Where would you have him take root?  Is he not divinely poised - in the eternal flux?

"The revilers of war are like the revilers of thunder, storms and volcanoes," Amiel declares - and this is a line which must have sunk deep in me, for whenever I encounter it it resounds like a tocsin, "Catastrophes bring about a violent restoration of equilibrium; they put the world brutally to rights."

Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realise it, than to accept life unquestioningly.

[Miller describing his neighbours at Big Sur]
 [. . .] they have freedom in their blood and a recklessness for consequences which can only spring from a firm belief in the triumph of love [. . .] the extraordinary indulgence which they manifest [. . .] is born of superabundant spirit.  It is directed towards everything capable of growth, whether plant, creature, child, artist or idea.  In obeying this impulse to nurture and sustain the life spirit, they grow in like measure and are nurtured, sustained and fortified by the very powers they have called into play.

If there is a genuine need, it will be met.  First you will have to prove that your need is genuine.  These questions will be put to you: "How would you order the world if you were given the powers of the Creator?" and "What is it you desire that you do not already possess?"

The task of genuine love.   Sit down, wherever you are, and let your mind dwell on these words.  Ask yourself if, in all the years you have been dwelling on this planet, you have ever given a moment's thought to such a problem.

As for Jesus, by all accounts he didn't own a toothbrush, no baggage, no furniture, no change of linen, no handkerchief, no passport, no bank-book, no love letters, no wife, no children.  As far as we know, he never wrote a line.  Home was wherever he happened to be.  He had no wants, that's the thing.

The world problem, said Krishnamurti once, is the individual problem; if the individual is at peace, has happiness, has great tolerance, and an intense desire to help, then the world's problem as such ceases to exist.  

"I am convinced that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship, but a past-time, if we will live simply and wisely."  

Thoreau

     
It is only the poetic aspect of anything which really interests me.  In the ultimate there is only one language - the language of truth.