Henry Miller went on a year-long road trip across the United States in 1939, after nearly a decade living in Paris. The result was The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. When I finished it, I thought, Thank God! I think he spent half the book talking about the condition of his car. But looking back at the highlights, I again appreciated what a great social critic he was and how much his views are eternally relevant to the maladies of modern living.

Excerpts: 

A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but to-day it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending débâcle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable. There is nothing brave, chivalrous, heroic or magnanimous about our attitude. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.

***

We are accustomed to think of ourselves as an emancipated people; we say that we are democratic, liberty-loving, free of prejudices and hatred. This is the melting-pot, the seat of a great human experiment. Beautiful words, full of noble, idealistic sentiment. Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous.

***

This world which is in the making fills me with dread. I have seen it germinate; I can read it like a blue-print. It is not a world I want to live in. It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress—but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.

***

The druggist, the doctor, the surgeon are all powerless to give health; money, power, security, authority do not give freedom. Education can never provide wisdom, nor churches religion, nor wealth happiness, nor security peace. What is the meaning of our activity then? To what end?

***

The Indians whom we dispossessed, decimated and reduced to the status of outcasts, just as the Aryans did with the Dravidians of India, had a reverent attitude towards the land. The forests were intact, the soil rich and fertile. They lived in communion with Nature on what we choose to call a low level of life. Though they possessed no written language they were poetic to the core and deeply religious. Our forefathers came along and, seeking refuge from their oppressors, began by poisoning the Indians with alcohol and venereal disease, by raping their women and murdering their children. The wisdom of life which the Indians possessed they scorned and denigrated. When they had finally completed their work of conquest and extermination they herded the miserable remnants of a great race into concentration camps and proceeded to break what spirit was left in them.

***

Not long ago I happened to pass through a tiny Indian reservation belonging to the Cherokees in the mountains of North Carolina. The contrast between this world and ours is almost unbelievable. The little Cherokee reservation is a virtual Paradise. A great peace and silence pervades the land, giving one the impression of being at last in the happy hunting grounds to which the brave Indian goes upon his death.

***

Think of Balboa, of Columbus, of Amerigo Vespucius! Men who dreamed, and then realized their dreams. Men filled with wonder, with longing, with ecstasy. Sailing straight for the unknown, finding it, realizing it, and then returning to the strait-jacket. Or dying of fever in the midst of a mirage. Cortez, Ponce de Leon, de Soto! Madmen. Dreamers. Fanatics. In search of the marvelous. In quest of the miracle. Murdering, raping, plundering. The Fountain of Youth. Gold. Gods. Empires. Splendour and magnificence, yes—but also fever, hunger, thirst, poisoned arrows, mirages, death. Sowing hate and fear. Spreading the white man’s poison. Spreading the white man’s fears and superstitions, his greed, his envy, his malice, his restlessness.

***

In less than two hundred years the land of liberty, home of the free, refuge of the oppressed has so altered the meaning of the Stars and Stripes that to-day when a man or woman succeeds in escaping from the horrors of Europe, when he finally stands before the bar under our glorious national emblem, the first question put to him is: “How much money have you?” If you have no money but only a love of freedom, only a prayer for mercy on your lips, you are debarred, returned to the slaughter-house, shunned as a leper. This is the bitter caricature which the descendants of our liberty-loving forefathers have made of the national emblem.

***

We have everything—everything it takes to make people happy. We have land, water, sky and all that goes with it. We could become the great shining example of the world; we could radiate peace, joy, power, benevolence. But there are ghosts all about, ghosts whom we can’t seem to lay hands on. We are not happy, not contented, not radiant, not fearless.

***

The most terrible thing about America is that there is no escape from the treadmill which we have created.

***

One of the things which impresses me about America, as I travel about, is that the men of promise, the men of joyous wisdom, the men who inspire hope in this most dismal period of our history, are either boys hardly out of their teens or else boys of seventy or over.

***

In France the old men, especially if of peasant stock, are a joy and an inspiration to behold. They are like great trees which no storm can dislodge; they radiate peace, serenity and wisdom. In America the old men are as a rule a sorry sight, particularly the successful ones who have prolonged their existence far beyond the natural term by means of artificial respiration, so to speak. They are horrible living examples of the embalmer’s art, walking cadavers manipulated by a retinue of handsomely paid hirelings who are a disgrace to their profession.

***

But there is a class of hardy men, old-fashioned enough to have remained rugged individuals, openly contemptuous of the trend, passionately devoted to their work, impossible to bribe or seduce, working long hours, often without reward or fame, who are motivated by a common impulse—the joy of doing as they please.

***

That is a gift which children possess in common with very wise people. The gift of forgetting. The gift of detachment.

***

Every time I see lions and tigers in the zoo I feel that we ought to have a cage for human beings too, one of each kind and each in his proper setting: the priest with his altar, the lawyer with his fat, silly law books, the doctor with his instruments of torture, the politician with his dough bag and his wild promises, the teacher with his dunce cap, the policeman with his club and revolver, the judge with his female robes and gavel, and so on. There ought to be a separate cage for the married couple, so that we could study conjugal bliss with a certain detachment and impartiality.

***

America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.

***

Is it that the great goal of American manhood is to become the successful business man? Or just a “success”, regardless of what form or shape, what purpose or significance, success manifests itself in and through?

***

There was one fairly young couple, in their thirties, I should say. The husband was a typical go-getter, one of those ex-football players who go in for publicity or insurance or the stock market, some clean all-American pursuit in which you run no risk of soiling your hands. He was a graduate of some Eastern University and had the intelligence of a high-grade chimpanzee.

***

I couldn’t even understand why God had the right to punish us for our sins. And of course, as I later realized, God doesn’t punish us—we punish ourselves.

***

The Bahai temple has been twenty years building and is not finished yet. The architect was Mr. Bourgeois, believe it or not. The interior of the temple, in its unfinished state, makes you think of a stage setting for Joan of Arc. The circular meeting place on the ground floor resembles the hollow of a shell and inspires peace and meditation as few places of worship do. The movement has already spread over most of the globe, thanks to its persecutors and detractors. There is no color line, as in Christian churches, and one can believe as he pleases. It is for this reason that the Bahai movement is destined to outlast all the other religious organizations on this continent.

***

… we go about our business or we take to dope, the dope which is worse by far than opium or hashish—I mean the newspapers, the radio, the movies. Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do.

***

There is one thing America has to give, and that they are all in agreement about: MONEY.

***

There were the skyscrapers, to be sure, and the dams and bridges and the concrete highways. All utilitarian. Nowhere in America was there anything comparable to the cathedrals of Europe, the temples of Asia and Egypt—enduring monuments created out of faith and love and passion. No exaltation, no fervor, no zeal—except to increase business, facilitate transportation, enlarge the domain of ruthless exploitation. The result? A swiftly decaying people…

***

Meanwhile the Indian lives very much as he has always lived, unconvinced that we have a better way of life to offer him. He waits stoically for the work of self-destruction to complete itself.

***

“The brain is everything,” he said. “If you keep your brain in condition your body will take care of itself. Age is only what you think. I feel just as young now, maybe younger, than I did twenty years ago. I don’t worry about things. The people who live the longest are the people who live the simplest. Money won’t save you. Money makes you worry and fret. It’s good to be alone and be silent. To do your own thinking. I believe in the stars, you know. I watch them all the time. And I never think too long about any one thing. I try not to get into a rut. We’ve all got to die sometime, so why make things hard for yourself? If you can be content with a little you’ll be happy. The main thing is to be able to live with yourself, to like yourself enough to want to be by yourself—not to need other people around you all the time. That’s my idea, anyhow. That’s why I live in the desert. Maybe I don’t know very much, but what I know I learned for myself.”

***

I stopped at a drug store and took a Bromo Seltzer—for “simple headaches”. The real California began to make itself felt. I wanted to puke. But you have to get a permit to vomit in public.

***

All our words are dead. Magic is dead. God is dead. The dead are piling up around us. Soon they will choke the rivers, fill the seas, flood the valleys and the plains. Perhaps only in the desert will man be able to breathe without being asphyxiated by the stench of death.

***

What we dream we become. We’ll get the knack of it soon. We’ll learn how to annihilate the whole planet in the wink of an eye—just wait and see.

***

We know only a small fraction of the history of man on this earth. It is a long, tedious, painful record of catastrophic changes involving the disappearance of whole continents sometimes. We tell the story as though man were an innocent victim, a helpless participant in the erratic and unpredictable revolutions of Nature. Perhaps in the past he was. But not any longer. Whatever happens to this earth to-day is of man’s doing. Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything—except his own nature. If yesterday he was a child of nature, to-day he is a responsible creature. He has reached a point of consciousness which permits him to lie to himself no longer. Destruction now is deliberate, voluntary, self-induced. We are at the node: we can go forward or relapse. We still have the power of choice.