AND THE ASS SAW THE ANGEL @andredoinel - Tumblr Blog

I blew down the stairs and headed for the park. I was riled. It was silly to get all steamed up before Ulric. Always cool as a cucumber, that guy. How can you make another person understand what is really happening inside you? If I were to break a leg he would drop everything. But if your heart is breaking with joy—well, it's a bit boring, don't you know. Tears are easier to put up with than joy. Joy is destructive: it makes others uncomfortable. «Weep and you weep alone»—what a lie that is! Weep and you will find a million crocodiles to weep with you. The world is forever weeping. The world is drenched in tears. Laughter, that's another thing. Laughter is momentary—it passes. But joy, joy is a kind of ecstatic bleeding, a disgraceful sort of super−contentment which overflows from every pore of your being. You can't make people joyous just by being joyous yourself. Joy has to be generated by oneself: it is or it isn't. Joy is founded on something too profound to be understood and communicated. To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts

Henry Miller, Sexus

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[...]The tragic sense is gone: one lives on like a flower, a rock, a tree, on with Nature and against Nature at the same time. If your best friend dies you don't even bother to go to the funeral; if a man is run down by a street car right before your eyes you keep on walking just as though nothing had happened; if a war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but you yourself take no interest in the slaughter. And so on and so on. Life becomes a spectacle, and if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show. Loneliness is abolished, because all values, your own included, are destroyed. Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is not a human sympathy, a limited sympathy - it is something monstrous and evil. You care so little that you can afford to sacrifice yourself for anybody or anything. At the same time your interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous pace. This tool is suspect, since it is capable of attaching you to a collar button just as well as to a cause. There is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you will-nilly. One thing is certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about you.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

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If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. (I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a change to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man's doing, surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

#Henry Miller #Tropic of Capricorn