Henry Miller, p.1, Passion for Living Comes Not From Me

"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive"

And it seems that he was the happiest man alive, which I found to be a shock because as Anais Nin said, "in (Henry) alone I have found the same swelling enthusiasm, the same quick rising of blood, the fullness. Before, I almost used to think something was wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on". He writes always about being a writer, and he savors everything about life. The dirty, grimy, awful things are to him diamonds.

There are passages where his passion becomes so clear it can be felt, and this passion is directed toward living. He doesn't live life to the fullest as a choice, but rather he was born "so damned well off" that it is the way he is. I feel so connected to him, because this is the way I have always felt. No matter what, I've been soaked through with joy almost as if I couldn't feel anything else. Henry Miller says, "I could afford to be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy". It wasn't that he was so terribly good, but he was so well off that the only sensible thing was to be good. The only interesting thing was to do good.

"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 chance 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, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of the idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself."
Tropic of Capricorn