miller is more mystic than pornographer. He uses the obscene to shock and awaken, but once we are awake, he wants to take us to the stars

Henry Miller's book SEXUS is challenging me like no book before, and I feel disturbed by these confrontations of truth, but energized to the point of explosion.
should I move I will die. but the time. and but I must not sleep anymore unless I am to die without it. the waste of it. Time, and my perception is all bound in impatience. Now. Now. Now. Let me not waste this blood. though I fear making choice, perhaps I will forgo deciding. Do instead. Learn from consequence. Live to exfoliate life's...

And then on the opposite hand I think of Fernando Pessoa. Perhaps just an anomaly. To sit and think and know by dream alone. Not my way? Man must make his own way...

"

Nobody, no principle, no idea has validity in itself. What is valid is only that much--of anything, God included--which is realized by all men in common. People are always worried about the fate of genius. I never worried about the genius: genius takes care of genius in a man. My concern was always for the nobody, the man who is lost in the shuffle, the man who is so common, so ordinary, that his presence is not even noticed. One genius does not inspire another. All geniuses are leeches, so to speak. They feed from the same source--the blood of life.

I definitely do not want to become the artist, in the sense of becoming something strange, something apart and out of the current of life.

"You don't write like you talk," he said. "You seem to be afraid of revealing yourself. If you ever open up and tell the truth it will be like Niagara Falls."

I don't know what I expected of my friends. The truth is I was so dissatisfied with myself, with my abortive efforts, that nothing or nobody seemed right to me.

Art can transform the hideous into the beautiful. Better a monstrous book than a monstrous life. Art is painful, tedious, softening. If you don't die in the attempt, your work may transform you into a sociable, charitable human being.

You love life even more than your own self.

You were meant to lead a dangerous life; you can take greater risks than others because you are protected.

You will always be alone. You want too much, more than life can offer...

Sure! What was I saying? Oh yes...in the middle of the book I would explode. Why not? There were plenty of writers who could drag a thing out to the end without letting go of the reins; what we needed was a man, like myself for instance, who didn't five a fuck what happened. Dostoevski hadn't gone quite far enough. I was for straight gibberish. One should go cuckoo! People have had enough of plot and character. Plot and character don't make like. Life isn't in the upper storey: life is here now, any time you say the word, any time you let rip. Life is four hundred and forty horsepower in a two-cylinder engine...

Suddenly he ventured to ask if I were not a writer? Why? Well from the way I looker arounf, the way I stoof, the expression about the mouth--little things, undefinable, a general impression of sensitivity and curiosity.

Tears are easier to put up with than joy. Joy is destructive: it makes others uncomfortable. "Weep and you weep alone"--what a lie that is! Weep and you will find a million crocodiles to weep with you. The world is forever weeping. The world is drenched in tears. Laughter, that's another thing. Laughter is momentary--it passes. But joy, joy is a kind of ecstatic bleeding, a disgraceful sort of supercontentment which overflows from every pore of your being. You can't make people joyous just by being yourself Joy has to be generated by oneself: it is or it isn't. Joy is founded on something too profound to be understood and communicated. To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.

The only time a writer receives his due reward is when someone comes to him burning with this flame which he fanned in a moment of solitude. Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

...the sunlight filtered through the hideous structure in shafts of powdered gold. She had on a dotted Swiss dress which made her figure seem even more opulent; the breeze blew lightly through her glossy black hair, teasing the heavy chalk-white face like spray dashing against a cliff. In that quick lithe stride, so sure, so alert, I sensed the animal breaking through the flesh with flowery grace and fragile beauty. This was her daytime self...

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written buy the hand of a masted and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers. our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open op, only to discover what is already there.
What happened to me was tantamount to revelation. It was revealed to me that I could say what I wanted to say--if I thought of nothing else, if I concentrated upon that exclusively--and if I were willing to bear the consequences which a pure act always involves.

A great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us, or let us say to set us dreaming, of all that is fluid and intangible. Which is to say, the Universe. It cannot be understood; it can only be accepted or rejected. If accepted we are revitalized; if rejected we are diminished. Whatever it purports to be it is not: it is always something more for which the last word will never be said. It is all that we put into it out of hunger for that which we deny every day of our lives. If we accepted ourselves as completely, the work of art, in fact the whole world of art, would die of malnutrition. Every man Jack of us moves without feet at least a few hours a day, when his eyes are closed and his body prone. The art of dreaming when wide awake will be in the power of every man one day. Long before that books will cease to exist, for when men are wide awake and dreaming their powers of communication (with one another and with the spirit that moves all men) will be so enhanced as to make writing seem like the harsh and raucous squawks of an idiot.

I dream a new blazingly magnificent world which collapsed as soon as the light is turned on. A world that vanishes but does not die, for I have only to become still again and stare wide-eyed into the darkness and it reappears...There is then a world in me which is utterly unlike any world I know of. I do not think it is my exclusive property--it is only the angle of my vision which is exclusive, in that it is unique. If I talk the language of my unique vision nobody understands; the most colossal edifice may be reared and yet remains invisible. The thought of that haunts me. What good will it do to make an invisible temple?

The moment was too full and neither past nor future seemed important.

Was it possible that in such a short span of time the world could take on such a different hue?

To love or be loved is no crime. The really criminal thing is to make a person believe that he or she is the only one you could ever love.

"