/lit/ - Literature

Thoughts on Henry Miller?

Holy...i want more

Post what you’ve read

>let’s go boys

Is any Henry Miller novels worth reading besides Tropic of Cancer?

The other novels seem way more obsessed with sex as well...

When I try to explain what makes this book so incredible it never quite works. So occasionally I'll flip to any random page and read (the people I hang out w/ are pretentious as well)


>And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the more
delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out of which I
was being squeezed. In the measure that I became more and more metallic, in
the same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated. The state of
tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign
particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered
everything. For the fraction of a second perhaps I experienced that utter
clarity which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that moment I
lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama
simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of
hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely
justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and
wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in
blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with
pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty
handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there
is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and
drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute
that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine
freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of
this dung-heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want
roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish
it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will
reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close
his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured, disgrace,
humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui --in the belief that overnight
something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all
the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in
there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and
drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the
cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host
touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless
torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of
relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by
slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the
carcass is ripped open.

>>9754624
Hard to beat Lolita really but this is a good contender

What does /lit/ think of pic related? Just finished it. I thought the prose was pretty outstanding though over done in places

>>9618336
>pic related

>Henry Miller

What a cunt

But also

What a cunt

>>9408150
>hasn't read Woolf

>>9408143
Good taste. I have a hard time getting started on her books but when I finally do, it's very rewarding

>pic related
Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I
see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am
inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing
to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking
machinery of humanity -- I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow
and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all
those cracked forbears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging
me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with
their skulking skulls. I am inhuman! I say it with a mad, hallucinated
grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rains crocodiles. Behind my
words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and
grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lock-jaw, some grinning
with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always
going on. Clearer man all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton
dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated
pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my
madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean
vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on
endlessly through the minds of those ho come in the inexhaustible vessel that
contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs
another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by
unknown impulses, take the listless mass of humanity and by the fever and
ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the
bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert
slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of
individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their
feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always
clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying
everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their
vitals. I see that when they tear hair with the effort to comprehend, to
seize this, forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed
beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no other
path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high
place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and
just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening
spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less
intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The
rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.

>>9360393
Cunt

>>9349700
>related

Also be a goddamn person and you'll be fine

Henry Miller

Any thoughts or opinions?