Excerpts from Henry Miller's The Cosmological Eye: "This collection, first published in 1939, contains a number of Miller's most important shorter prose writings. As is usual with Miller, these pieces cannot be tagged with the label of any given literary category. Life, as no other modern author has lived it or can write it, bursts from these pages—the life of the mind and the body; of people, places and things; of ideas and the imagination."

Excerpts

When at last each man realizes that nothing is to be expected from God, or society, or friends, or benevolent tyrants, or democratic governments, or saints, or saviours, or even from the holiest of holies, education, when each man realizes that he must work with his own hands to save himself, and that he need expect no mercy, perhaps then … Perhaps!

***

As I say, one needs either a heaven or a hell in which to flourish—until one arrives at that Paradise of his own creation, that middle realm which is not a bread-and-butter Utopia of which the masses dream but an interstellar realm in which one rolls along his orbit with sublime indifference.

***

Everybody wants to right the world; nobody wants to help his neighbor.

***

Just as a piece of matter detaches itself from the sun to live as a wholly new creation so I have come to feel about my detachment from America. Once the separation is made a new orbit is established, and there is no turning back. For me the sun had ceased to exist; I had myself become a blazing sun. And like all the other suns of the universe I had to nourish myself from within.

***

Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

***

The age we live in is the age which suits us: it is we who make it, not God, not Capitalism, not this or that, call it by any name you like. The evil is in us—and the good too! But as the old bard said—“the good is oft interred with our bones.”

***

The point is that we are doomed. Maybe we are going to die to-morrow, maybe in the next five minutes. Let us take stock of ourselves. We can make the last five minutes worth while, entertaining, even gay, if you will, or dissipate them as we have the hours and the days and months and years and centuries. No god is coming to save us. No system of government, no belief will provide us with that liberty and justice which men whistle for with the death-rattle.

***

Back of the idea of progress, which is the false idea underlying all civilizations—and the reason why they perish—is the notion of conquering over Nature. Neither offers a way out. There is no way out, as a matter of fact. We must accept the dilemma, if we are to accept life itself.

***

Yes, the times are bad, permanently bad—unless one becomes immune, becomes God. Since I have become God I go the whole hog always. I am absolutely indifferent to the fate of the world: I have my own world and my own private fate. I make no reservations and no compromises. I accept. I am—and that is all.
***

The hero is he who raises himself above the crowd. He is not a hero because he lays down his life for his country, or for a cause or principle. Indeed, in making such a sacrifice he is often cowardly rather than heroic. To run with the herd, and die with the herd, is the natural animal instinct which man shares with other beasts. To be a pacifist is not necessarily heroic either. “For if a man,” to quote from the devil himself, “is unprepared or unable to fight for his life, just Providence has already decreed his end.” To fight for one’s life, though Herr Hitler did not mean it this way, usually means to lose one’s life. To get men to rally round a cause, a belief, an idea, is always easier than to persuade them to lead their own lives. We live in the swarm and our fine principles, our glorious ideas, are but blinders which we put over our eyes in order to make death palatable.

***

The distinguishing trait of the civilized man is that he kills en masse. Sadder than that, however, is the fact that he lives the life of the masses. His life is lived according to totem and taboo, as much now as in the past, even more, perhaps.

***

Men are struggling for the right to work! It sounds almost incredible but that is precisely what it amounts to, the great goal of the civilized man. What an heroic struggle! Well, for my part, I will say that whatever else I may want, I know I don’t want work. To live as an artist I stopped work some ten or twelve years ago. I made it extremely uncomfortable for myself. I cannot even say that it was a matter of choice, my decision. I had to do it, or die of boredom.

***

I am against revolutions because they always involve a return to status quo. I am against the status quo both before and after revolutions. I don’t want to wear a black shirt or a red shirt. I want to wear the shirt that suits my taste.

***

I think it is a piece of the most cruel deception to urge men to place their hopes of justice in some external order, some form of government, some social order, some system of ideal rights.

***

Well, I must confess, and very willingly, that I have never read a line of Karl Marx. I have never felt compelled to read him. And the more I listen to his disciples the more I realize that I have lost nothing. Karl Marx, so they say, explains the structure of our capitalistic society. I don’t need an explanation of our capitalistic society. Fuck your capitalistic society! Fuck your Communistic society and your Fascist society and all your other societies! Society is made up of individuals. It is the individual who interests me—not the society.

***

Everything of value that has been accomplished by man has been accomplished in spite of reason, in spite of logic, in spite of honor, justice and all other shibboleths. The marvellous, and only the marvellous, is what hypnotizes man. That is what makes him a gullible fool, an idiot, a criminal, a martyr, a saint, a hero, a death-eater.

***

The world is always in a wrong condition for the man who knows too much; as one becomes more ignorant one accepts more graciously. Knowledge makes everything finally incomprehensible. One only begins to comprehend when one begins to stop trying to know.

***

Man is happier when he is in a crowd; he feels safe and justified in what he is doing. But crowds have never accomplished anything, except destruction. The man who wants to organize a movement is invoking aid to help tear down something which he is powerless to combat single-handed.

***

Better a beggar in Paris than a millionaire in New York!

***

Every day, every hour, every minute America becomes more American. It’s as though the influx of immigrants, the great tidal waves of alien blood which bathed the great American organism, had proved ineffective against the disease. Now there is no new blood coming; the heart has stopped pumping. It’s a race between the quick and the dead. Now the germs have a clear field of it: the disease must run its course. And the disease is running its course. The whole world is rapidly becoming inoculated with the virûs of it. It’s impossible to escape, no matter where you go. Even the Chinese are infected. The whole world must be infected before there can be a let-up—if ever there will be a let-up.

***

I realize that had I never gone to Europe it would be the same for me now as it was then. I would be walking here unknown, unwanted, another piece of live junk for the scrap heap. Nothing here has value or durability, not even the skyscrapers. Sooner or later everything gets scrapped.

***

The faces I see! No anguish, no torment, no suffering registered in them. I feel as though I am walking through a lost world. What I saw years ago on the magazine covers I see now in actuality. The women’s faces more particularly. That sweet, vapid, virginal look of the American woman! So putridly sweet and virginal! Even the whores have these vapid, virginal faces. They correspond exactly to the titles of the books and magazines for sale. It’s a victory for the editors and publishers, for the cheap illustrators and the inventive advertising gentry. No more sales resistance. It’s a push-over. Palm Olive, Father John, Ex-Lax, Peruna, Lydia Pinkham—these have conquered!

***

The only odor which is recognized and admitted as an odor is halitosis, and of this all Americans live in mortal dread. Dandruff may be a myth, but halitosis is real. It is the genuine odor of spiritual decomposition. The American body, when dead, can be washed and fumigated; some corpses even achieve a distinct beauty. But the live American body in which the soul is rotting away smells bad and every American knows it and that is why he would rather be a hundred percent American, alone and gregarious at the same time, than live breast to breast with the tribe.

***

All day long I walk the streets, but I see no place to sit down—no place, I mean, that looks inviting. On my wall is the photograph of a chair in the Tuileries Gardens, a chair photographed by my friend Brassai. To me it’s a poem. I no longer see a wire chair with holes in the seat but an empty throne. If I had my way I would have this chair, this vacant seat, stamped on every silver dollar. We need to sit down somewhere, to rest, to contemplate, to know that we have a body—and a soul.

***

I have no interest in the life of the masses, nor in the intentions of the existing governments of the world. I hope and believe that the whole civilized world will be wiped out in the next hundred years or so. I believe that man can exist, and in an infinitely better, larger way, without “civilization.”

***

While we make the little trip to the corner, or to Dieppe, or to Newhaven, or wherever it may be, the earth too is making her little trip, where nobody knows, not even the astronomers. But all of us, whether we move from here to the comer or from here to China, are making a voyage with our mother the earth, and the earth is moving with the sun and with the sun the other planets too are moving … Mars, Mercury, Venus, Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus. The whole firmament is moving and with it, if you listen closely, you will hear “Bon Voyage!” “Bon Voyage!”