“If one isn’t crucified, if one manages to survive, go on living above and beyond the sense of desperation and futility, then another curious thing happens. One lives a super-normal life. That is to say one is unnaturally happy, unnaturally well, unnaturally indifferent. The tragic sense is gone, one 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 in the street you just keep on walking: if war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but 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 and anything. At the same time your interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous pace. This tool is suspect, as it is capable of attaching you to a collar button just as well 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 as hard as a diamond. And perhaps it is this hard magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you so easily. One thing is certain when you die, 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
The tropic of Capricorn is a book I started reading a couple of years ago that I consistently delve back into. With no chapters and barely any paragraphs, it is the overwhelming, depressing and terrifyingly honest stream of the constant thought of Henry Miller. Charting his early years especially as an adult he describes his disgust and filthy lust for almost everything around him, his morose marriage, his soul destroying job at a telegram office, his graphic sexual encounters with women and his ‘friendships’ with others that have become victim to a life they seem to have little control over.
The total disregard for the reader and the continuous stories of the past that lead on to other stories within themselves are both exhausting and exhilarating. Every thought, every feeling, every moment that meant anything to him is described in minute, scurrilous and beautiful detail.
I love this book, I love the honesty with which he describes his opinions and thoughts.
He talks about the fellow child they kill in a neighbourhood fight, how it was he who threw the final rock that struck the boy from which he never got up. How after, he went home to his aunt (that he wishes was his mother) and his rye bread never tasted better than it did that day, he tries to understand why this is, he makes you understand why this is.
The life he lead is harsh and the people he knew unscrupulous and scheming (including himself) and yet he was always searching for the beauty of life.
I am obsessed with the inner workings of others, the unabashed thoughts we have and why. Reading Miller makes me think of all the moments that I remember starkly and will forever, and why I remember them.
The realisations I had in those moments and how they changed me are almost haunting. Some of them are grotesque. Regularly I think about whether in their deepest, darkest and most beautiful moments others feel and react in kind. Obviously, these things don’t often come up in conversation and even the closest of friends rarely confess the true insecurities and madness of their minds.
How Miller brutally lays bare the truth about events of his early life is raucous and unrelenting.
Tropic of Capricorn has helped me to understand my own madness, as well as given me some extraordinary concepts to ponder.
Juliet Harshaw
www.julietharshaw.com
