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Henry Miller
Aug. 20th, 2016 03:36 pmI have yet to read any of the books of Henry Miller, including "Tropic of Cancer", and now it's getting late enough that I doubt I ever will, but he is on my mountainous 'wanna read' stack. His novels are apparently autobiographical portraits of his life in its various stages, which is not really a big selling point, but he gives a good interview and keeps me interested in him.
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I wrote all these autobiographical books not because I think myself such an important person but—this will make you laugh—because I thought when I began that I was telling the story of the most tragic suffering any man had endured. As I got on with it I realized that I was only an amateur at suffering. Certainly I had my full share of it, but I no longer think it was so terrible. That’s why I called the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion. I discovered that this suffering was good for me, that it opened the way to a joyous life, through acceptance of the suffering. When a man is crucified, when he dies to himself, the heart opens up like a flower. Of course you don’t die, nobody dies, death doesn’t exist, you only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world. Just as you don’t know where you came from, so you don’t know where you’re going. But that there is something there, before and after, I firmly believe.
-- Henry Miller at The Paris Review
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I wrote all these autobiographical books not because I think myself such an important person but—this will make you laugh—because I thought when I began that I was telling the story of the most tragic suffering any man had endured. As I got on with it I realized that I was only an amateur at suffering. Certainly I had my full share of it, but I no longer think it was so terrible. That’s why I called the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion. I discovered that this suffering was good for me, that it opened the way to a joyous life, through acceptance of the suffering. When a man is crucified, when he dies to himself, the heart opens up like a flower. Of course you don’t die, nobody dies, death doesn’t exist, you only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world. Just as you don’t know where you came from, so you don’t know where you’re going. But that there is something there, before and after, I firmly believe.
-- Henry Miller at The Paris Review
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