Tropico del cancro da Henry Miller/ Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 1934 COVER BOOK

Tropico del Cancro 

Tropico del Cancro è il primo romanzo scritto da Henry Miller, pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1934 dalla Obelisk Press a Parigi.

Trama

Il romanzo è ambientato nella Francia del 1930, principalmente a Parigi. È scritto in prima persona, con molti riferimenti autobiografici come altri romanzi di Miller, e spesso fluttua tra il passato ed il passato prossimo.
L'ambiente parigino, luogo rutilante e pieno di mollezze da intellettuali, è anche un mondo di lavoro, di preparazione alla guerra e di confronto politico.
Il protagonista sempre a caccia di qualche soldo, si muove però nel mondo degli artisti falliti e degli esiliati volontari; persone inaffidabili ed irresponsabili che vivono nelle strade, nei locali pubblici più infimi, nei postriboli, in tuguri, mangiando quando capita e stordendosi di alcool e fumo.
Alcuni capitoli spesso seguono un riferimento narrativo stretto agli amici di Miller, ai colleghi ed ai posti di lavoro; altri sono scritti come delle riflessioni a flusso di coscienza. Vi sono molti passaggi che esplicitamente descrivono gli incontri sessuali del narratore, anche se il libro non si focalizza soltanto su questi argomenti.
Negli Stati Uniti venne pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1961 dalla Grove Press, e portò ad un processo per oscenità che spinse ad applicare e/o rivedere le leggi americane sulla pornografia degli anni sessanta. Il romanzo divenne famoso, oltre che per la sua franca e spesso dettagliata descrizione del sesso, anche per la prosa colta ed elaborata che lo fanno considerare da molti come un importante capolavoro della letteratura del ventesimo secolo.

Edizioni in lingua italiana

La prima edizione in lingua italiana è stata curata da Feltrinelli nel 1962, con la traduzione di Luciano Bianciardi. Feltrinelli ha fatto risultare il libro come stampato in Francia, a Étampes, usando il marchio prestato da un editore svizzero e riportando in terza di copertina l'avvertenza: «Avvertenza importante. Questa edizione è destinata al mercato estero; l'Editore ne vieta l'importazione e la vendita in Italia», mentre in realtà il volume è stato stampato a Varese e venduto sottobanco in Italia. Dopo una lunga querelle giudiziaria l'opera è entrata ufficialmente nel mercato italiano nel 1967.

Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller that has been described as "notorious for its candid sexuality" and as responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature".^:22 It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the United States. Its publication in 1961 in the U.S. by Grove Press led to obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography in the early 1960s. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the book non-obscene. It is regarded as an important work of 20th-century literature.

 

Writing and publication

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead." -First passage excerpt

Miller wrote the book between 1930 and 1934 during his "nomadic life" in Paris.^:105–107 As Miller discloses in the text of the book, he first intended to title it "Crazy Cock". Miller gave the following explanation of why the book's title was Tropic of Cancer: "It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch.”^:38
Anaïs Nin helped to edit the book.^:109 In 1934, Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press published the book with financial backing from Nin, who had borrowed the money from Otto Rank.^:108:116

Emerson quotation, preface, and introduction

In the 1961 edition, opposite the novel's title page is a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies—captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.

The 1961 edition includes an introduction by Karl Shapiro written in 1960 and titled "The Greatest Living Author". The first three sentences are:

I call Henry Miller the greatest living author because I think he is. I do not call him a poet because he has never written a poem; he even dislikes poetry, I think. But everything he has written is a poem in the best as well as in the broadest sense of the word.^:v–xxx

Following the introduction is a preface written by Nin in 1934, which begins as follows:

Here is a book which, if such a thing were possible, might restore our appetite for the fundamental realities. The predominant note will seem one of bitterness, and bitterness there is, to the full. But there is also a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium.^{:xxxi–xxxiii}

Summary

Set in France (primarily Paris) during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Tropic of Cancer centers on Miller's life as a struggling writer. Late in the novel, Miller explains his artistic approach to writing the book itself, stating:

Up to the present, my idea of collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature. My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of the emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium.^:243

Combining autobiography and fiction, some chapters follow a narrative of some kind and refer to Miller's actual friends, colleagues, and workplaces; others are written as stream-of-consciousness reflections that are occasionally epiphanic. The novel is written in the first person, as are many of Miller's other novels, and does not have a linear organization, but rather fluctuates frequently between the past and present.

Themes

The book largely functions as an immersive meditation on the human condition. As a struggling writer, Miller describes his experience living among a community of bohemians in Paris, where he intermittently suffers from hunger, homelessness, squalor, loneliness and despair over his recent separation from his wife. Describing his perception of Paris during this time, Miller wrote:

One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. ... I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing.^:180–182

There are many passages explicitly describing the narrator's sexual encounters. In 1978, literary scholar Donald Gutierrez argued that the sexual comedy in the book was "undeniably low... [but with] a stronger visceral appeal than high comedy".^:22 The characters are caricatures, and the male characters "stumbl[e] through the mazes of their conceptions of woman".^:24
Michael Hardin made the case for the theme of homophobia in the novel. He proposed that the novel contained a "deeply repressed homoerotic desire that periodically surfaces".
Music and dance are other recurrent themes in the book. Music is used "as a sign of the flagging vitality Miller everywhere rejects". References to dancing include a comparison of loving Mona to a "dance of death", and a call for the reader to join in "a last expiring dance" even though "we are doomed".

Characters

Other than the first-person narrator "Henry Miller",^:108 the major characters include:

Boris

A friend who rents rooms at the Villa Borghese.^:22–23 The character was modeled after Michael Fraenkel, a writer who "had sheltered Miller during his hobo days" in 1930.^:103,176

Carl

A writer friend who complains about optimistic people, about Paris, and about writing.^:49–50 Miller helps Carl write love letters to "the rich cunt, Irene", and Carl relates his encounter with her to Miller.^:107–117 Carl lives in squalor and has sex with a minor. The inspiration for Carl was Miller's friend Alfred Perlès, a writer.^:10

Collins

A sailor who befriends Fillmore and Miller.^:194–208 As Collins had fallen in love with a boy in the past, his undressing a sick Miller to put him to bed has been interpreted as evidence of a homoerotic desire for Miller.

Fillmore

A "young man in the diplomatic service" who becomes friends with Miller.^:193 He invites Miller to stay with him; later the Russian "princess" Macha with "the clap" joins them.^:219–238 Fillmore and Miller disrupt a mass while hung over.^:259–263 Toward the end of the book, Fillmore impregnates and promises to marry a French woman named Ginette, but she is physically abusive and controlling, so Miller convinces Fillmore to leave Paris without her.^:292–315 Fillmore's real-life counterpart was Richard Galen Osborn, a lawyer.^:46

Mona

A character corresponding to Miller's estranged second wife June Miller.^:96–97 Miller remembers Mona, who is now in America, nostalgically.^{:17–21, 54, 152, 177–181, 184–185, 250–251}

Tania

A woman married to Sylvester.^:56–57 The character was modeled after Bertha Schrank, who was married to Joseph Schrank. It may also be noted that during the writing of the novel, Miller also had a passionate affair with Anais Nin; by changing the "T" to an "S", one can make out Anais from Tania by rearranging the letters. It may also be noted that in one of Nin's many passionate letters to Miller, she quotes his swoon found below. Tania has an affair with Miller, who fantasizes about her:

O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent.^:5–6

Van Norden

A friend of Miller’s who is "probably the most sexually corrupt man" in the book, having a "total lack of empathy with women".^:25–27 Van Norden refers to women using terms such as "my Georgia cunt", "fucking cunt", "rich cunt", "married cunts", "Danish cunt", and "foolish cunts".^:100–107 Miller helps Van Norden move to a room in a hotel, where Van Norden brings women "day in and out".^:117–146 The character was based on Wambly Bald, a gossip columnist.

Legal issues

United States

Upon the book's publication in France in 1934, the United States Customs Service banned the book from being imported into the U.S. Frances Steloff sold copies of the novel smuggled from Paris during the 1930s at her Gotham Book Mart, which led to lawsuits. A copyright-infringing edition of the novel was published in New York City in 1940 by "Medusa" (Jacob Brussel); its last page claimed its place of publication to be Mexico. Brussel was eventually sent to jail for three years for the edition.
In 1950, Ernest Besig, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco, attempted to import Tropic of Cancer along with Miller's other novel, Tropic of Capricorn, to the United States. Customs detained the novels and Besig sued the government. Before the case went to trial, Besig requested a motion to admit 19 depositions from literary critics testifying to the "literary value of the novels and to Miller's stature as a serious writer". The motion was denied by Judge Louis A. Goodman. The case went to trial with Goodman presiding. Goodman declared both novels obscene. Besig appealed the decision to the Ninth Circuit of Appeals, but the novels were once again declared "obscene" in a unanimous decision in Besig v. United States.
In 1961, when Grove Press legally published the book in the United States, over 60 obscenity lawsuits in over 21 states were brought against booksellers that sold it. The opinions of courts varied; for example, in his dissent from the majority holding that the book was not obscene, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Musmanno wrote Cancer is "not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity."
Publisher Barney Rosset hired lawyer Charles Rembar to help Rosset lead the "effort to assist every bookseller prosecuted, regardless of whether there was a legal obligation to do so". Rembar successfully argued two appeals cases, in Massachusetts and New Jersey, although the book continued to be judged obscene in New York and other states.
In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein, cited Jacobellis v. Ohio (which was decided the same day) and overruled state court findings that Tropic of Cancer was obscene.

Other countries

The book was banned outside the U.S. as well:

• In Canada, it was on the list of books banned by customs as of 1938. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police seized copies of the book from bookstores and public libraries in the early 1960s. By 1964, attitudes toward the book had "liberalized".
• Only smuggled copies of the book were available in the United Kingdom after its publication in 1934. Scotland Yard contemplated banning its publication in Britain in the 1960s, but decided against the ban because literary figures such as T. S. Eliot were ready to defend the book publicly.

Critical reception

Individual reviewers

In 1935, H. L. Mencken read the 1934 Paris edition, and sent an encouraging note to Miller: "I read Tropic of Cancer a month ago. It seems to me to be a really excellent piece of work, and I so reported to the person who sent it to me. Of this, more when we meet."
In a 1940 essay "Inside the Whale", George Orwell wrote the following:

I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read at least Tropic of Cancer. With a little ingenuity, or by paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it disgust you, it will stick in your memory. ... Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance....

Samuel Beckett hailed it as "a momentous event in the history of modern writing". Norman Mailer, in his 1976 book on Miller entitled Genius and Lust, called it "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century, a revolution in consciousness equal to The Sun Also Rises".
Edmund Wilson said of the novel:

The tone of the book is undoubtedly low; The Tropic of Cancer, in fact, from the point of view both of its happenings and of the language in which they are conveyed, is the lowest book of any real literary merit that I ever remember to have read... there is a strange amenity of temper and style which bathes the whole composition even when it is disgusting or tiresome.

In Sexual Politics, a book originally published in 1970, Kate Millett wrote that Miller "is a compendium of American sexual neuroses", showing "anxiety and contempt" toward women in works such as Tropic of Cancer.^:295–296 In 1980, Anatole Broyard described Tropic of Cancer as "Mr. Miller's first and best novel", showing "a flair for finding symbolism in unobtrusive places" and having "beautiful sentence[s]". Julian Symons wrote in 1993 that "the shock effect [of the novel] has gone", although "it remains an extraordinary document". A 2009 essay on the book by Ewan Morrison described it as a "life-saver" when he was "wandering from drink to drink and bed to bed, dangerously close to total collapse".

Appearances in lists of best books

The book has been included in a number of lists of best books, such as the following:

• In July 1998, the Board of the Modern Library ranked Tropic of Cancer 50th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
• In July 1998, students of the Radcliffe Publishing Course, at the request of the Modern Library editorial board, compiled their own list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, and the book was ranked 84th.
• Between July 1998 and October 1998, an online reader poll by the Modern Library placed the novel 68th among the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
• In a survey of librarians published in November 1998, the book was ranked 132nd in a list of 150 fiction books from the 20th century.
• Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
• The novel was listed in the 2006 book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.
• It was one of the "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read" in The Guardian in 2009.
• It was included in the list "The 75 Books Every Man Should Read" (2011) in Esquire.

Influences

Influences on Miller

Critics and Miller himself have claimed that Miller was influenced by the following in writing the novel:

• Louis-Ferdinand Céline, especially Journey to the End of the Night (1932), his semi-autobiographical first novel featuring a "comic, antiheroic character".^:109–110Nevertheless, Orwell wrote "Both books use unprintable words, both are in some sense autobiographical, but that is all."
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, especially his Notes from Underground (1864).
• James Joyce. Nevertheless, Orwell felt that the novel did not resemble Joyce's Ulysses.
• François Rabelais.
• Henry David Thoreau.
• Walt Whitman, who wrote in a similar style about common people. The poet is mentioned favorably in the novel several times, for example: "In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said."^:239–240

Novel's influence on other writers

Tropic of Cancer "has had a huge and indelible impact on both the American literary tradition and American society as a whole". The novel influenced many writers, as exemplified by the following:

• Lawrence Durrell's 1938 novel The Black Book was described as "celebrat[ing] the Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer as his [Durrell's] literary father".
• It has been claimed that the novel impressed the Beat Generation writers in the 1960s such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.
• Erica Jong wrote "...when I was searching for the freedom to write [the 1973 novel] Fear of Flying, I picked up Tropic of Cancer and the sheer exuberance of the prose unlocked something in me."^:14 In turn, Miller praised Fear of Flying in 1974, comparing it to Tropic of Cancer.

Adaptation

The novel was adapted for a film Tropic of Cancer (1970) directed by Joseph Strick and starring Rip Torn, James T. Callahan, and Ellen Burstyn. Miller was a "technical consultant" during the production of the movie; although he had reservations about the adaptation of the book, he praised the final movie.^:147 The film was rated X in the United States, which was later changed to an NC-17 rating.

References or allusions in other works

Literature

• In his 1948 autobiography, poet and writer Robert W. Service wrote a few comments about Tropic of Cancer, for example, "Of course the book shocked me but I could not deny a strange flicker of genius in its wildest fights.”
• In his 1960 short story "Entropy", Thomas Pynchon begins with a quote from this novel.
• In the 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut, Lila reads the book "as though... [it] were Heidi".
• In the 1969 novel The Seven Minutes by Irving Wallace, the book and the trial are mentioned.
• In the 1994 play Pterodactyls by Nicky Silver, the novel is mentioned by the character Emma: "She reads poems by Emily Bronté and I read chapters from the The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller."
• In Carl Hiaasen's 1995 Stormy Weather a character quotes a line from the novel.^{[citation needed]}
• In the 1998 nonfiction book Rocket Boys, Quentin shows Sonny a copy of Tropic of Cancer and asks him "You want to know about girls?"

Music

• Satirical songwriter and mathematics instructor Tom Lehrer stated that he intended to write a million-selling math book which he would call Tropic of Calculus.
• The 1980s British band The Weather Prophets was named after a line in the opening paragraph of the novel: "Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet."^{[citation needed]}
• Frontman Henry Rollins of the hardcore punk band Black Flag was heavily affected by the book as well and frequently made references to it in his songs, often taking lyrics directly from Tropic of Cancer. He would also read passages of it to his audiences mid-show.
• In the song "Delirium of Disorder" by punk band Bad Religion, the opening verse quotes the novel, "Life is a sieve through which my anarchy strains resolving itself into words. Chaos is the score on which reality is written...".
• In the song "Protest Song 68" by Refused, the opening verse quotes the novel, "To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs..."
• In the song "Ashes of American Flags" by Wilco, one phrase from the lyrics is taken from the novel: "A hole without a key."
• In 2012, the American grindcore band Pig Destroyer used a passage from the book on tape, read by Larry King, as the introduction to their song The Bug on their album entitled Book Burner.

Film and television

• In the 1963 film, Take Her, She's Mine, adapted from Phoebe and Henry Ephron's play of the same name, Jimmy Stewart, as Mr. Michaelson, reads the (soon to be banned by the mayor) book written by Henry Miller. Sandra Dee, Stewart's daughter in the film, has organized a sit-in style protest against banning the book.
• The novel is read and discussed in After Hours, a 1985 film by Martin Scorsese.
• In the 1991 version of Cape Fear, also directed by Scorsese, the characters of Max Cady and Danielle Bowden discuss the book briefly.
• In the 1991 Seinfeld episode "The Library", Jerry is accused of never returning a copy of the book to the public library after borrowing it many years before, during high school, in 1971.
• In the 1991 movie Henry & June the first draft of the book is referenced and discussed by Henry and friends.
• In the 2000 romantic comedy film 100 Girls, the characters Dora and Matthew read an excerpt from Tropic of Cancer together: "Your Sylvester! ... After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards."
• At the beginning of the 2000 movie Final Destination, Clear (Ali Larter) is reading Tropic of Cancer upon arrival at the airport.
• In the 2010 telenovela ¿Dónde Está Elisa? a copy of the book is found in Elisa's locker at school.

Typescript

The typescript of the book was auctioned for $165,000 in 1986. Yale University now owns the typescript, which was displayed to the public in 2001.

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 Tropique du Cancer (Tropic of Cancer) est un roman américain de Henry Miller paru en 1934 à Paris.

Résumé

Ce roman autobiographique se déroule dans les années 1930 en France, surtout à Paris. Le narrateur est un Américain âgé de 47 ans, qui a fait de nombreux métiers par le passé, et cherche à devenir un écrivain du vice. Certains chapitres racontent à la première personne sa vie en France parmi ses amis et ses collègues, d'autres suivent le cours de ses pensées à la manière du courant de conscience proche du monologue intérieur. Dans plusieurs passages, le narrateur décrit ses relations sexuelles de façon explicite.

Réception

Écrit en 1931, le roman est publié en 1934, à Paris, par Obelisk Press. Il ne sera publié aux États-Unis qu'en 1961 et sera aussitôt poursuivi pour obscénité. Le jugement sera cassé en 1964, et le livre restera un exemple d'ouvrage scandaleux.

 Abito a villa Borghese. Non un granello di polvere, non una sedia fuori posto. Siamo soli, e siamo morti.
Ieri sera Boris si è accorto di avere i pidocchi. Gli ho dovuto radere le ascelle, ma il prurito non ha smesso. Come si fa a prendere i pidocchi in un posto bello come questo? Ma non pensiamoci. Non ci saremmo mai conosciuti cosí intimamente, Boris ed io, se non fosse stato per i pidocchi.
Boris mi ha fornito poco fa un compendio di come la vede. È un profeta del tempo. Farà brutto ancora, dice. Ci saranno ancora calamità, ancora morte, disperazione. Non c'è il minimo indizio di cambiamento. Il cancro del tempo ci divora. I nostri eroi si sono uccisi, o s'uccidono. Protagonista, dunque, non è il Tempo, ma l'Atemporalità. Dobbiamo metterci al passo, passo serrato, verso la prigione della morte. Non c'è scampo. Non cambierà stagione.
[Henry Miller, Tropico del Cancro, traduzione di Luciano Bianciardi, Feltrinelli, 1987]

 Voi mi dareste fastidio? No, beati scarafaggi, non mi date fastidio. Voi mi nutrite. State seduti l'uno accanto all'altro e io so che fra voi c'è un abisso. La vostra vicinanza è la vicinanza dei pianeti. Io sono il vuoto in mezzo a voi. Se io me ne vado, non vi resta più vuoto in cui nuotare. (p. 39; 1987)

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

  

Je suis un homme libre-- et j'ai besoin de ma liberté. J'ai besoin d'être seul. J'ai besoin de méditer ma honte et mon désespoir dans la retraite; j'ai besoin du soleil et du pavé des rues, sans compagnons, sans conversation, face à face avec moi-même, avec la musique de mon coeur pour toute compagnie... que voulez-vous de moi? Quand j'ai quelque chose à dire je l'imprime. Quand j'ai quelque chose à donner, je le donne. Votre curiosité qui fourre son nez partout me fait lever le coeur. Vos compliments m'humilient. Votre thé m'empoisonne. Je ne dois rien à personne. Je veux être responsable devant dieu seul ... s'il existe!  

La madama è in piedi accanto al bidet e impreca e sputa. Ci sono anche le ragazze, con le salviette in mano. Ci siamo tutti e cinque, a guardare il bidet. Nell'acqua galleggiano due stronzi enormi. La madama si china e ci mette sopra una salvietta. "Terribile! Terribile!" geme. "Mai visto una cosa cosí! Maiale. Sporco porcello!"
Il ragazzo indù mi guarda con aria di rimprovero. "Dovevi dirmelo!" fa. "Non sapevo che non sarebbe passata. Ti ho chiesto dove andare e tu mi hai detto di farla lí." Sta quasi per piangere. (p. 97; 1987)

“Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

  

La même histoire partout. Si vous voulez du pain, il faut entrer sous le harnais, il faut marcher au pas de chaîne. Sur toute la terre s'étend un désert gris, un tapis d'acier et de ciment. Production ! Encore des écrous et des boulons, encore du fil de fer barbelé, encore des biscuits pour chiens, encore des faucheuses mécaniques pour pelouse, encore des roulements à billes, encore des explosifs à grande puissance, encore des tanks, des gaz asphyxiants, du savon, de la pâte dentifrice, des journaux, de l'éducation, des églises, des bibliothèques, des musées, encore, encore, encore ! En avant ! Le temps presse.  

Il mondo deve diventare carne; l'anima ha sete. Su qualunque crosta mi si fermi l'occhio, io voglio piombarci sopra, e divorare. Se vivere è il meglio che ci sia, allora voglio vivere, a costo di diventare cannibale. Finora ho cercato di salvare la mia pellaccia preziosa, ho cercato di conservare i pochi pezzi di carne che mi nascondono le ossa. Ne ho abbastanza. Ho raggiunto i limiti della sopportazione. Son con la schiena al muro; non posso ritrarmi più indietro. Per ciò che riguarda la storia sono morto. Se c'è qualcosa rimasto alle mie spalle, dovrà balzare all'indietro. Ho trovato Dio, ma è insufficiente. Io sono morto solo spiritualmente. Fisicamente sono vivo. Moralmente sono libero. Il mondo da cui mi son staccato è un serraglio. Erompe l'alba su di un mondo nuovo, una giungla in cui gli spiriti magri vagano con artigli aguzzi. Se io sono una iena, sono una iena magra e affamata: vado a ingrassarmi. (p. 103; 1987)

“And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap... it drive me nuts sometimes... I want to kick them out immediately... I do now and then. But that doesn't keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women... they're all masochists at heart.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Côte à côte avec la race humaine, coule une autre race d'individus, les inhumains, la race des artistes qui, aiguillonnés par des impulsions inconnues, prennent la masse amorphe de l'humanité et, par la fièvre et le ferment qu'ils lui infusent, changent cette pâte détrempée en pain et le pain en vin et le vin en chansons. De ce compost mort et de ces scories inertes ils font lever un chant qui contamine. Je vois cette autre race d'individus mettre l'univers à sac, tourner tout sens dessus dessous, leurs pieds toujours pataugeant dans le sang et les larmes, leurs mains toujours vides, toujours essayant de saisir, d'agripper l'au-delà, le dieu hors d'atteinte : massacrant tout à leur portée afin de calmer le monstre qui ronge leurs parties vitales. Je vois que lorsqu'ils s'arrachent les cheveux de l'effort de comprendre, de saisir l'à-jamais inaccessible, je vois que lorsqu'ils mugissent comme des bêtes affolées et qu'ils éventrent de leurs griffes et de leurs cornes, je vois que c'est bien ainsi, et qu'il n'y a pas d'autre voie. Un homme qui appartient à cette race doit se dresser sur les sommets, le charabia à la bouche, et se déchirer les entrailles. C'est bien et c'es juste, parce qu'il le faut! Et tout ce qui reste en dehors de ce spectacle effrayant, tout ce qui est moins terrifiant, moins épouvantable, moins fou, moins délirant, moins contaminant, n'est pas de l'art. Tout le reste est contrefaçon. Le reste est humain. Le reste appartient à la vie et à l'absence de vie. 

  

"Va bene, se è così, la chiavo, se non la vuoi chiavare tu. Diglielo. Ma sii accorto però. Con una donna così bisogna andarci piano. Portami da quelle parti e lascia che le cose si combinino da sé. Fammi un mucchio di elogi. Fai anche il geloso... Merda, magari la si chiava insieme… andiamo nei bei posti e si mangia insieme... si va in macchina e a caccia, coi bei vestiti addosso. Se vuole andare al Borneo, facciamoci portare. Nemmeno io so sparare, ma questo non conta. Non importa nemmeno a lei. Lei vuole soltanto farsi chiavare, e basta. Tu seguiti a parlare delle sue braccia. Mica c'è bisogno di guardarle di continuo le braccia, no? […]." (p. 117; 1987)

“To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I count that something of a miracle.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Dans la lumière bleuâtre d'une aube métallique, les coquilles des cacahouètes ont l'air blêmes et froissées; le long de la grève à Montparnasse, les nénuphars se penchent et cassent. Lorsque la vague reflue et qu'il ne reste que quelque sirènes syphilitiques échouées dans le limon, le Dôme à l'air d'un stand de tir ravagé par un cyclone. Tout dégouline lentement à nouveau vers l'égout. Pendant une bonne demi-heure, il y règne un calme de mort, et l'on éponge les vomissures. Soudain les arbres se mettent à ululer. D'un bout du boulevard à l'autre, se lève une chanson démentielle. C'est comme le signal qui annonce la fermeture de la Bourse. Tous les espoirs qui restent sont balayés. L'heure est venue de vider la dernière poche d'urine. Le jour entre en scène, à la dérobée comme un lépreux...   

In Whitman tutto il mondo americano prende vita, il passato e il futuro, la nascita e la morte. Tutto quel che c'è di valido in America, l'ha espresso Whitman, e non c'è altro da dire. Il futuro appartiene alla macchina, ai robot. Egli, Whitman, fu il Poeta del Corpo e dell'Anima. Il primo e l'ultimo poeta. Oggi è quasi indecifrabile, un monumento coperto di rozzi geroglifici, per i quali non c'è chiave. (p. 227; 1987)

“I have found God, but he is insufficient.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

L'homme qui porte la dive bouteille à ses lèvres, le criminel qui s'agenouille sur la place du marché, l'innocent qui découvre que tous les cadavres sans exception puent, le fou qui danse le tonnerre entre les mains, le moine qui soulève les pans de son froc pour pissoter sur le monde, le fanatique qui met les bibliothèques à sac afin de trouver le Verbe -- tous sont fondus en moi, tous produisent ma confusion, mon extase. Si je suis inhumain, c'est parce que mon univers à débordé par dessus ses frontières humaines, parce que n'être qu'humain me parait une si pauvre, une si piètre, une si misérable affaire, limitée par les sens, restreinte par les systèmes moraux et les codes, définie par les platitudes et les "ismes". Je verse le jus de la grappe au fond de mon gosier et j'y trouve la sagesse, mais ma sagesse n'est pas née de la grappe, mon ivresse ne doit rien au vin...

Goethe era un rispettabile cittadino, un pedante, un noioso, uno spirito universale, ma segnato col marchio di fabbrica tedesco, l'aquila bicipite. La serenità di Goethe, la sua tranquilla, olimpica disposizione, non è altro che il sonnolento stupore di una divinità borghese tedesca. (p. 228; 1987)

“Words are loneliness.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Pure, non riesco levarmi di mente lo scarto che c'è fra idee e vita. Uno scarto permanente, per quanto noi cerchiamo di celarlo con lucida tenda. E non va. Le idee debbono sposarsi all'azione; se in loro non vi è sesso, non vita, non c'è azione. Le idee non possono esistere da sole nel vuoto del pensiero. Le idee sono in rapporto con la vita: idee di fegato, idee di reni, idee interstiziali, ecc. Se fosse stato sol per amore di un'idea, Copernico non avrebbe infranto il macrocosmo esistente e Colombo non avrebbe dato alla fonda nel Mar dei Sargassi. L'estetica dell'idea produce vasi di fiori e i fiori si mettono alla finestra. Ma se non c'è né pioggia né sole a che serve mettere i fiori alla finestra? (p. 230; 1987)

“I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

  

Se un umano mai osasse tradurre tutto quello che ha nel cuore, mettere giù quella che è la sua vera esperienza, quel che è veramente verità, io credo che allora il mondo andrebbe infranto, che si sfascerebbe in frantumi, e né dio, né accidente, né volontà potrebbe mai radunare i pezzi, gli atomi, gli elementi indistruttibili che componevano il mondo. (p. 236; 1987)

“Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Una volta pensavo che essere umano fosse la maggior meta dell'uomo, ma oggi vedo che questo significa distruggermi. Oggi mi vanto di poter dire che sono disumano, che appartengo non agli uomini e ai governi, che non ho nulla a che fare coi credi e coi principî. Non ho nulla a che fare con la cigolante macchina dell'umanità – io appartengo alla terra! (p. 240; 1987)

“I’m an egotist, but I’m not selfish. There’s a difference. I’m a neurotic, I guess. I can’t stop thinking about myself. It isn’t that I think myself so important... I simply can’t think about anything else, that’s all. If I could fall in love with a woman that might help some. But I can’t find a woman who interests me.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

  

[Riferendosi a Un uomo finito] Occorreva qualcosa per rimettermi in accordo con me stesso. Ieri sera l'ho scoperta: Papini. A me non importa se è sciovinista, o un meschino bigotto o un pedante di vista corta. Come fallito è una meraviglia.

“She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me, embraces me passionately--- a thousand eyes, noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers all glaring at us an we in each other's arm oblivious. I sit down beside her and she talks--- a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Le creature umane formano una strana fauna, una strana flora. Da lontano paiono trascurabili; da vicino possono sembrare brutte e cattive. Ma soprattutto occorre che abbiano intorno aria, spazio sufficiente – spazio, anche più che tempo.

  

“I've lived out my melancholy youth. I don't give a fuck anymore what's behind me, or what's ahead of me. I'm healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today!”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer  

Il sole tramonta. Sento questo fiume che scorre dentro di me, il suo passato, la terra antica, il clima mutevole. Le colline gli fan dolce corona: il suo corso è stabilito.

“People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. ”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer  

 Entro un cerchio ristretto (la vita familiare e forse anche i sindacati e la politica locale) egli si sente padrone del proprio destino, benché di fronte ad eventi più grandi sia inerme come contro gli elementi. Ben lungi dal tentare di plasmare il futuro egli lascia semplicemente che le cose accadano. (George Orwell)

“I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer  

“I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer  

“On the meridian of time, there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer  

“An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.”
  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
  

“You must be life for me to the very end," so he writes. "That is the only way in which to sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It's hard to talk of one's self so intimately”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it’s painful gall-stones, it’s gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul...”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Well, I'll take these pages and move on. Things are happening elsewhere. Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch, until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want every one to scratch himself to death.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“...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.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love―just enough to feed the birds.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down ― the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow, it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of our time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. ”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“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!”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. ”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I am a free man―and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company. What do you want of me? When I have something to say, I put it in print. When I have something to give, I give it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your compliments humiliate me! Your tea poisons me! I owe nothing to any one. I would be responsible to God alone―if He existed!”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn't have to have brains. They're better without brains. But an old cunt, even if she's brilliant, even if she's the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn't put meat on their arms or juice between their legs.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 

  

“As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If a am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“All I ask of life, he says, is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The cancer of time is eating us away”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Your nearness is the nearness of planets. I am the void between you. If I withdraw there will be no void for you to swim in.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Only a rich cunt can save me now,' he says with an air of utmost weariness. 'One gets tired of chasing after new cunts all the time. It gets mechanical. The trouble is, you see, I can't fall in love. I'm too much of an egoist. Women only help me to dream, that's all. It's a vice, like drink or opium. I've got to have a new one every day; if I don't I get morbid. I think too much. Sometimes I'm amazed at myself, how quick I pull it off — and how little it really means. I do it automatically like. Sometimes I'm not thinking about a woman at all, but suddenly I notice a woman looking at me and then, bango! it starts all over again. Before I know what I'm doing I've got her up to the room. I don't even remember what I say to them. I bring them up to the room, give them a pat on the ass, and before I know what it's all about it's over. It's like a dream.... Do you know what I mean?”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Great God! What have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know?”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The essential thing is to WANT to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Day by day. No yesterdays and no tomorrows. The barometer never changes, the flag is always at half-mast.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Show me a man who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man! What is called their 'overelaboration' is my meat: it is the sign of struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambiance of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am unattracted . . . I miss the cloying qualities. When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse . . .

To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“For the moment I can think of nothing— except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus Christ today.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown...”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“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 lifeless 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.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I haven't any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds, any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I'm neither for nor against. I'm a neutral.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I used to think a bird couldn't fly if its wings got wet.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“A world without hope, but no despair”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“When I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper's skull. If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man that would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I felt free and chained at the same time - like one feels just before election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to vote for the right man.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“For seven years I went about, day and night, with only one thing on my mind – her.
Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus
Christs today.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Still I can't get it out of my mind what a discrepancy there is between ideas and living. A permanent dislocation, though we try to cover the two with a bright awning. And it won't go. Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living: liver ideas, kidney ideas, interstitial ideas, etc. If it were only for the sake of an idea Copernicus would have smashed the existent macrocosm and Columbus would have foundered in the Sargasso Sea. The aesthetics of the idea breeds flowerpots and flowerpots you put on the window sill. But if there be no rain or sun of what use putting flowerpots outside the window?”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he
hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you
can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death.
We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the
moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day. Potentially every man is Presidential timber. Here it's different. Here every man is potentially a zero. If you become something or somebody it is an accident, a miracle.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space―space even more than time.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 

“Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
 

“The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential that only the drains function adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty that has us by the balls in America, is finished.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes out, but you can’t permanently get deloused. Everywhere I go, people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It’s in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch - until there is no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamaties, for grader failures. I want the whole world to be out of wack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“I didn't give a fuck whether I found anything or not. The thing is, never to be too anxious. Everything comes in due time.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“At night when I look at Boris' goatee lying on the pillow I get hysterical. O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent. Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels something, does he? He feels the remnants of my big prick. I have set the shores a little wider. I have ironed out the wrinkles. After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris' chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces...”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“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.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“...God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humbles mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise....it [is] the the intimacy with which his eye rests upon the scene. It [is] his Paris. A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people - the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth... And yet they give the illusion of being at home. It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all other metropolitan souls.

When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glisttering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit...Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“(...)I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed but my illusions(...)”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung. The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is an enameled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: “Be sure to close the door.” Why close the door? I can’t make it out. I look again at the sign but it is removed; in it’s place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean out the window and the Eiffle Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurgling furiously. There are nothing but roofs everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“There’s something depraved about screwing a woman who doesn’t give a fuck about it. It heats your blood…” And then, after a moment’s meditation— “Can you imagine what she’d be like if she had any feelings?”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse....
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you cold. They sang too beautifully, or not beautifully enough.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“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.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany – "Fay ce que vouldras!… fay ce que vouldras!"; Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and the door of the womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust, crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my adored ones, the words they left behind them, the words they left unfinished; the good they dragged after them and the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancor, the strife they created. But above all, the ecstasy!”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“One can see now how the idea of heaven takes hold of men's consciousness, how it gains ground even when all the props have been knocked from under it. There must be another world beside this swamp in which everything is dumped pell-mell. It's hard to imagine what it can be like, this heaven that men dream about.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
 

“No quiero ser razonable ni lógico. ¡Los detesto! Quiero reventar de risa, quiero divertirme. Quiero hacer algo. Quiero sentarme en un café y pasarme el día hablando. Dios, nosotros tenemos nuestros defectos...pero tenemos entusiasmo. Es mejor cometer errores que no hacer nada.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“It is the obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look like a crater. It is this great yawning gulf of nothingness which the creative spirits and mothers of the race carry between their legs.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“For her were meant those terrible words of Louis-Philippe, "and a night comes when all is over, when so many jaws have closed upon us that we no longer have the strength to stand, and our meat hangs upon our bodies, as though it had been masticated by every mouth.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“He looks about the room at the few sticks of furniture, at the dirty bed sheets and the wash basin with the dirty water still in it, and he says: "I am a slave!" Every day he says it, not once, but a dozen times. And then he takes his guitar from the wall and sings.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“So quietly flows the Seine that
one hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great
artery running through the human body. In the wonderful peace that fell over me
itseemed as if I had climbed to the top of a high mountain; for a little while I would be
able to look around me, to take in the meaning of the landscape.
Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear
negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they
need to be surrounded with sufficient space – space even more than time.
The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through meits past, its ancient soil, the
changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Estoy muerto espiritualmente. Físicamente, estoy vivo. Moralmente, soy libre.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Today 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!”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“I was alive. But I was alive without a memory, without a name; I was cut off from hope as well as from remorse or regret. I had no past and would probably have no future; I was buried alive in a void which was the wound that had been dealt me. I was like the wound itself.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
 

“Such a healthy, simple, approving glance as if he were saying to himself: “Ah, spring is coming!” And God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“It is getting toward dinner time and people are straggling back to their rooms with that weary, dejected air which comes from earning a living honestly.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“A valise without straps. A hole without a key. She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian ass. Cunt international. When the flag waved it was red all the way back to the throat. You entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came out at the Porte de la Villette. You dropped
your sweetbreads into the tumbrils – red tumbrils with two wheels, naturally. At the confluence of the Ourcq and Marne, where the water sluices through the dikes and lies like glass under the
bridges.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer  

“More and more the world resembles an entomologist's dream. The earth is moving out of its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow blows down in huge knife-blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the fetal world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch by inch the deltas are drying out and the river beds are smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a metallurgical day, when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow ore. As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis there still is, and here and there articulation, but at the periphery the veins are all varicose, at the periphery the light waves bend and the sun bleeds like a broken rectum.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me hack again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The world is a cancer eating itself away... I am think that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“[...]as Sylvester says, a man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of suffering.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“All the men she's been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Well, fuck a duck.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“We have no need for genius - genius is dead. We have need for strong hands, for spirits who are willing to give up the ghost and put on flesh...”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on [. . .]If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“One never thinks of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and long afterward, when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells like, you wake up one day with gold leaf choking you and the broken pieces of punk waft back their pungent odor and the bright red wrappers give you a nostalgia for a people and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood, mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time or space, a fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and more as you get old, which you try to seize with your mind, but ineffectually, because in everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“In this chthonian world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation. It doesn't matter what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“A beautiful nap this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Куда бы я ни пришел, везде будут люди со своими драмами. Люди как вши-они забиваются под кожу и остаются там.Вы чешетесь и чешетесь-до крови, но вам никогда не избавиться от этих вшей. Куда бы я ни сунулся, везде люди, делающие ералаш из своей жизни. Несчастье, тоска, грусть, мысли о самоубийстве-это сейчас у всех в крови. Катастрофы, бессмыслица, неудовлетворенность носятся в воздухе. Чешись сколько хочешь, пока не сдерешь кожу. На меня это производит бодрящее впечатление. Ни подавленности, ни разочарования-напротив, даже некоторое удовольствие. Я жажду новых аварий, новых потрясающих несчастий и чудовищных неудач. Пусть мир катится в тартарары. Пусть человечество зачешется до смерти.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Te quiero…te adoro –dice–. Iré adonde digas: Estambul, Singapur, Honolulú. Pero ahora tengo que irme…se está haciendo tarde.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Every time I pass the concierge's window and catch the full icy impact of her glance I have an insane desire to throttle all the birds in creation. At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love – just enough to feed the birds.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The earth is parched and cracked. Men and women come together like broods of vultures over a stinking carcass, to mate and fly apart again. Vultures who drop from the clouds like heavy stones. Talons and beak, that's what we are! A huge intestinal apparatus with a nose for dead meat. Forward! Forward without pity, without compassion, without love, without forgiveness. Ask no quarter and give none! More battleships, more poison gas, more high explosives! More gonococci! More streptococci! More bombing machines! More and more of it--until the whole fucking works is blown to smithereens, and the earth with it!”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Deep in the blood the pull of paradise. The beyond. It must have all started with the navel. They cut the umbilical cord, give you a slap in the ass, and presto! you're out in the world, adrift. You look at the stars and then you look at your navel. You grow eyes everywhere -in the armpits, between the lips, in the roots of your hair, on the soles of your feet. What is distant becomes near, what is near becomes distant. Inner-outer, a constant flux, a shedding of skins, a turning inside out.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Alone, with tremendous empty longing and dread. The whole room for my thoughts. Nothing but myself and what I think, what I fear. Could think the most fanastic thoughts, could dance, grimace, curse, wail-nobody would ever know, nobody would ever hear. The thought of such absolute privacy is enough to drive me mad. It's like a clean birth. Everything cut away. Separate, naked, alone. Bliss and agony simultaneously. Time on your hands. Each second weighing on you like a mountain. You drown in it. Deserts, seas, lakes, oceans. Time beating away like a meat ax. Nothingness. The world. The me and the not-me. Oomaharumooma. Everything has to have a name. Everything has to be learned, tested, experencied.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered with blood, fragments of the past detached themselves and floated listlessly before my eyes, taunting me with the direst forebodings [...] My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It's no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity – you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender. as soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the lose. In America she'd starve to death if she had nothing to recommend her but a mutilation. Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose eaten away or a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural homeliness of the female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“They move about listlessly and apparently without much purpose; they might just as well be lunatics.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“She wouldn’t remember that at a certain corner I had stopped to pick up her hairpin, or that, when I bent down to tie her laces, I remarked the spot on which her foot had rested and that it would remain there forever, even after the cathedrals had been demolished and the whole Latin civilization wiped out forever and ever.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“No, there's fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn about anymore and which nobody is going to get in the end anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of things and rather than listen to one's own voice, rather than walk out on the primal cause, one surrenders to the situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bearers pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on their chest.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“It’s like a man in the trenches
again: he doesn’t know any more why he should go on living, because
if he escapes now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on just
the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has
admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even just
his bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he’d
slaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“A man, when he's burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants to see everything, even how they make water. And while it's all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The universe has dwindled; it is only a block long and there are no stars, no trees, no rivers. The people who live there are dead; they make chairs which other people sit on in their dreams. In the middle of the street is a wheel and in the hub of the wheel a gallows is fixed. People already dead are trying frantically to mount the gallows, bu the wheel is turning too fast”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“this book has begun to grow inside me. I am carrying it around with me everywhere. I walk through the streets big with child and the cops escort me across the street. Women get up to offer me their seats. Nobody pushes me rudely any more. I am pregnant. I waddle awkwardly, my big stomach pressed against the weight of the world.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 

“Nada podrá contrarrestar ese virus que está envenenando el mundo entero. América es la encarnación de la fatalidad. Va a arrastrar al mundo entero hasta el abismo sin fondo.”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“El arte consiste en llegar hasta la últimas consecuencias. Si comienzas con tambores, tienes que acabar con dinamita o TNT.”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“L'America è meglio tenerla così, sempre sullo sfondo, una specie di cartolina postale a cui guardare nei momenti di debolezza. Così, tu t'immagini che sia sempre là ad attenderti, immutata, intatta, un grande spazio aperto patriottico con vacche, pecore e uomini dal cuore buono, pronti a fottersi tutto quello che vedono, uomo donna o bestia. Non esiste l'America. E' un nome che si dà a un'idea astratta.
Parigi è come una puttana. Da lontano pare incantevole, non vedi l'ora di averla fra le braccia. E cinque minuti dopo ti senti vuoto, schifato di te stesso. Ti senti truffato.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Os veo sentados ahí juntos, y sé que os separa un abismo. Vuestra cercanía es la de los planetas. Yo soy el vacío entre vosotros. Si me retiro, no tendréis vacío en que flotar. ”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“Esto no es un libro. Es un libelo, una calumnia, una difamación. No es un libro, en el sentido ordinario de la palabra. No, es un insulto prolongado, un escupitajo a la cara del arte, una patada en el culo a Dios, al hombre, al destino, al tiempo, al amor, a la belleza... a lo que os parezca.”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“Not a single object seems to possess a practical use. The antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a barn, It is exactly the same sort of sensation I get when I enter the Comedie-Francaise or the Palaise- Royal Theatre; ; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in armor, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass cases. Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it's like finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there's no room in the valise.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“«Tienes que ser vida para mí hasta el final», según escribe. «Esa es la única forma de sostener mi idea de ti. Porque, como puedes ver, has quedado ligado a mí con algo tan vital, que no creo que pueda desembarazarme de ti. Ni tampoco lo deseo. Quiero que vivas cada día más vivamente, puesto que yo estoy muerto. Por eso es por lo que, cuando hablo de ti con otros, me siento un poco avergonzado. Es difícil hablar de un mismo tan íntimamente. »”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“When a desperate, hungry spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs squeal it is because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that never heals.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“And again that big, bushy thing of hers worked its bloom and magic. It began to have an independent existence for me too. There was Germaine and there was that rose bush of hers.. I liked them separately and I liked them together.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“And her delicacy offended. Who wants a delicate whore! Claude would even ask you to turn your face away when she squatted over the bidet. All wrong! A man, when he's burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants to see everything, even how they make water.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap...it drives me nuts sometimes... I want to kick them out immediately... I do now and then. But that doesn't keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“It is a duet, and like most duets moreover in that one listens attentively only for the signal which announces the advent of one's own voice.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The word in your mouth is anarchy.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“He’s like a hero come back from the
war, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.
Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door he
enters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves a
bad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; the
elements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.
Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,
his body was stolen.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The sun is setting fast. The colors die. They shift from purple to dried blood, from nacre to bister, from cool dead grays to pigeon shit.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“In Europe one gets used to doing nothing. You sit on your ass and whine all day. You get contaminated. You rot.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The other night I took her on-out of pity-and what do you think the crazy bitch had done to herself? She had shaved it clean ... not a speck of hair on it. Did you ever have a woman who shaved her twat? It's repulsive, ain't it? And it's funny, too. Sort of mad like. It doesn't look like a twat any more: it's like a dead clam or something." He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight. "I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me ... it was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I'm not an American any more, nor a New Yorker, and even less a European, or a Parisian. I haven't any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds, any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I'm neither for nor against. I'm a neutral.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Who am I? What am I doing here? I fall between the cold walls of human malevolence, a white figure fluttering, sinking down through the cold lake, a mountain of skulls above me. I settle down to the cold latitudes, the chalk steps washed with indigo. The earth in its dark corridors knows my step, feels a foot abroad, a wing stirring, a gasp and a shudder.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It’s no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity—you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Revolutions are nipped in the bud or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d'habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation. In the study of entomology, or of deep sea life, or cellular activity, we derive more...”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Germaine, on the other hand, was a whore from the cradle; she was thoroughly satisfied with her role, enjoyed it in fact, except when her stomach pinched or her shoes gave out, little surface things of no account, nothing that ate into her soul, nothing that created torment. Ennui! That was the worst she ever felt. Days there were, no doubt, when she had a bellyful, as we say – but no more than that! Most of the time she enjoyed it – or gave the illusion of enjoying it. It made a difference, of course, whom she went with – or came with. But the principal thing was a man. A man! That was what she craved. A man with something between his legs that could tickle her, that could make her writhe in ecstasy, make her grab that bushy twat of hers with both hands and rub it joyfully, boastfully, proudly, with a sense of connection, a sense of life. That was the only place where she experienced any life – down there where she clutched herself with both hands.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Her words imbued it with a peculiar fragrance; it was no longer just her private organ, but a treasure, a magic, potent treasure, a God-given thing--and none the less so because she traded it day and day out for a few pieces or silver.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“But about the smell of rancid butter... There are good associations too. When I think of this rancid butter I see myself standing in a little, old world courtyard, a very smelly, very dreary courtyard. Through the cracks in the shutters strange figures peer out at me.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Su voz suena preciosa por teléfono...preciosa. Por un momento, siento auténtico pánico. No sé qué decirle. Me gustaría decirle: «Oiga, Irene, creo que es usted hermosa...Creo que es usted maravillosa.» Me gustaría decirle algo que fuera cierto, por ridículo que fuese, porque, ahora que he oído su voz, todo ha cambiado.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“‎"...arka planda,zayıf anlarında baktığın bir kartpostal gibi.Böylece seni her zaman orada beklediğini hayal edebilirdin;değişmemiş,bozulmamış,....”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Mientras falte esa chispa de pasión, la actuación carecerá de significado humano.”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer  

“It's beautiful to have a smoking jacket, a good cigar and a wife who plays the piano. So relaxing. So lenitive. Between the acts you go out for a smoke and a breath of fresh air.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“That’s the first thing that strikes an
American woman about Europe – that it’s unsanitary. Impossible for
them to conceive of a paradise without modern plumbing. If they
find a bedbug they want to write a letter immediately to the
chamber of commerce.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“There’s something obscene in this love of the past which ends in breadlines and dugouts. Something obscene about this spiritual racket which permits an idiot to sprinkle holy water over Big Berthas and dreadnoughts and high explosives. Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“, dijo Emerson, . Si es así, mi vida, no es más que un gran intestino. No sólo pienso en la comida todo el día, sino que, además, sueño con ella por la noche. ”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“Las personas son como los piojos: se te meten bajo la piel y se entierran en ella.”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“Nothing better between five and seven than to be pushed around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to move along with the tide and everything whirling in your brain. A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Usred svojih sanjarija iznenada se zaustavlja i grabeći me uzbuđeno za ruku pokazuje jednog kita od žene, koja upravo sjeda na stolicu. »Eno moje danske pičke«, gunđa on. »Vidiš li to dupe? Dansko. Kako ta žena to voli! Ona me naprosto moli da je okinem. Dođi ovamo... Pogledaj je sad, sa strane! Pogledaj to dupe, molim te. Golemo je. Kažem ti, kad se ona popne na mene, jedva mogu da ga obuhvatim rukama. Zakloni mi vidik na cijeli svijet. Osjećam se kao mala buba, koja gmiže u njoj. Ne znam sam zašto na nju padam — valjda zbog tog dupeta. Toliko je nezgrapno. A kakve ima samo nabore! Takvo dupe ne možeš zaboraviti. Stvarnost... opipljiva stvarnost. Druge ti mogu dodijati ili ti mogu dati trenutačnu iluziju, ali ova — s tim svojim dupetom! — ta je neuništiva... To je kao da u postelju ideš s kakvim spomenikom na sebi.«
Str 111
”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Real wisdom is being stored away in the subcellars by the misers of learning.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“In the four hundred years since the last devouring soul appeared; the last man to know the meaning of ecstasy, there has been a constant and steady decline of man in art, in thought, in action. The world is pooped out: there isn’t a dry fart left.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Now we shall have a vessel in which to pour the vital fluid, a bomb which, when we throw it, will set off the world. We shall put into it enough to give the writers of tomorrow their plots, their dramas, their poems, their myths, their sciences. The world will be able to feed on it for a thousand years to come. It is colossal in its pretentiousness. The thought of it almost shatters us.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Amo todo lo que fluye, todo lo que contiene el tiempo y el porvenir, que nos devuelve al comienzo donde nunca hay fin.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“he saw that it wasn’t just a circus, but an arena, just like everywhere.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“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. Today I am proud to say I
am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have
nothing to do with creeds and principles. . . . I belong to the earth! . . .
And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness,my ecstasy to the great
circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. . . . Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists. . . . Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates.
. . . “I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of
our times [Joyce]. I was thinking of him this morning . . . of his rivers
and trees and all that world of night that he is exploring. Yes, I said to
myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen,
blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out
of the bag. . . . I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“We have so many points in common that it is like looking at myself in a cracked mirror.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I am a man who would live an heroic life and make the world more endurable in his own sight. If, in some moment of weakness,of relaxation, of need, I blow off steam-a bit of red-hot rage cooled off in words-a passionate dream, wrapped and tied in imagery_well, take it or leave it...but don't bother me!”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even if it’s not a masterpiece you’re doing. Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I tried to look earnest, but I only succeeded in looking pathetic.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“When one spends what he has on himselef, when one has a thoroughly good time with his own money, people are apt to say "he doesn't know what to do with his money.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Everything is endured—disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui—in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is—the afflictions of Job.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“We need good titles.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Beni ancak zengin bir kancık kurtarır,’ diyor büyük bir yılgınlıkla. ‘Sürekli yeni kancıklar peşinde koşmaktan yoruluyor insan. Mekanikleşiyor. Aşık olamıyorum, asıl sorun bu, anlıyor musun? Fazlasıyla bencilim. Kadınlar düş kurmama yardımcı oluyor sadece, hepsi bu. Kötü bir alışkanlık gibi, alkol gibi, afyon gibi. Her gün yeni bir am bulmayılıyım kendime; yoksa hastalıklı bir hal alıyorum. Fazla düşünüyorum. Bazen kendime, işi ne kadar çabuk bitirdiğime şaşıyorum - ve aslında ne kadar az anlamı olduğuna. Otomatiğe bağlamışım sanki. Bazen kadın filan düşünmüyorum ama birden kadının tekinin bana baktığını fark ediyorum ve küt! Yeniden başlıyor. Ne yaptığımı anlamadan bir bakıyorum ki odamdayız. Ne dediğimi bile hatırlamıyorum. Onları odama getiriyorum, kıçlarına bir şaplak atıyorum ve göz açıp kapayınaya değin bir bakıyorum ki iş bitmiş. Düş gibi.. Anlıyor musun ne demek istediğimi?”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“We are all alone here and we are dead.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“When one spends what he has on himself, when one has a thoroughly good time with his own money, people are apt to say “he doesn’t know what to do with his money.” For my part, I don’t see any better use to which one can put money. About such individuals one can’t say that they’re generous or stingy. They put money into circulation—that’s the principal thing.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“It’s hard to know, when you’re in such a jam, which is worse—not having a place to sleep or not having a place to work. One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even if it’s not a masterpiece you’re doing. Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

  

“It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil: one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk. Vienna is never more Vienna than in Paris. Everything is raised to apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their places. You can read here on the walls where Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other.Nobody dies here...”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“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.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“He falls on her lap and lies there quivering like a toothache”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“إن فكرة جيرمين هي الأصوب: كانت جاهلة وشبقة، تضع قلبها وروحها في عملها. كانت عاهرة قلباً وقالباً وهذه هي فضيلتها.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“When you get an erection you think you're passionate.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“منذ أكثر من مائة عام، والعالم، عالمنا، يموت. وخلال هذه المائة عام أو نحوها لم يظهر رجل واحد يكون من الجنون ما يجعله بحشر قنبلة في طيز الخليقة وينسفها. العالم يتعفّن، يموت على مهل. لكنه يحتاج إلى Coup de grase الضربة القاضية، يحتاج إلى أن يُنسَف شذر مذر. ليس بيننا واحد سليم، ومع ذلك نحمل داخلنا كل القارات والبحار التي تفصل بينها وطيور الجو. سندوّنه -أقصد تطور العالم الذي مات ولم يُدفن بعد. نحن نسبح على سطح الزمن وكل ما عدانا غرق، أو يغرق، أو سيغرق. سيكون الكتاب هائلاً. ستكون هناك محيطات من الفراغ نتجوّل فيها، نجتاز المسافات، نغني، نرقص، نتسلق، نستحم، نتشقلب، ننتحب، نغتصب، نقتل. سيكون كاتدرائية، كاتدرائية حقيقية، داخل بنائها يساعد الجميع كل من فقد ذاته. ستكون قداديس تٌقام على أرواح الأموات، وصلوات، واعترافات، وتراتيل، أنين وثرثرة، نوع من اللامبالاة الإجرامية، ستكون هناك نوافذ وردية وغارغويلات وقندلفتات وحاملو بساط الرحمة. وبإمكانك أن تُدخِل أحصنتك وتخبّ بها متجولاً بين الأجنحة. بإمكانك أن تنطح رأسك الجدران -فلن تتهدّم. بإمكانك أن تصلي بأية لغة تختارها، أو أن تلتف حول نفسك وتستغرق في النوم. هذه الكاتدرائية ستخلد ألف عام، على الأقل، ولن تكون هناك نسخة مطابقة لها، فسيكون البناؤون قد ماتوا كذا التصمامي. وسنطبع بطاقات بريدية وننظم جولات سياحية. وسنبني بلدة حولها وننشئ كوميونا حرًا. لا حاجة لنا إلى العبقرية -فالعبقرية قد فنيت. نحن بحاجة إلى أيد قوية، إلى أنس يتخلّون عن الروح ليستبدلوها باللحم.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The life which, if i were still a man with pride, honor, ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of degredation. It's a negative reality, just like death -- a sort of heaven without the pain and terror of dying.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“There's only one good aspect to it," says Joe. "You may get his job. And if you have any luck, maybe you'll fall down the elevator shaft and break your neck too. We'll buy you a nice wreath, I promise you that.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Yeah, I picked up a book and I read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad book ... but a cunt, it's just sheer loss of time. . . .”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“That's the first thing that strikes an American woman about Europe-that it's unsanitary. Impossible for them to conceive of a paradise without modern plumbing.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected. In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambience which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends.

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 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.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“‎Se houvesse um homem que ousase dizer tudo quanto pensa deste mundo,
não lhe restaria um palmo quadrado de terra onde ficar.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I suddenly recalled that it was here in the squalor and gloom of this sunken street, terrorized perhaps by a premonition of the future, that Mona clung to me and with a quivering voice begged me to promise that I would never leave her, never, no matter what happened. And, only a few days later, I stood on the platform of the Gare St. Lazare and I watched the train pull out, the train that was bearing her away; she was leaning out of the window, just as she had leaned out of the window when I left her in New York, and there was that same, sad, inscrutable smile on her face, that last-minute look which is intended to convey so much, but which is only a mask that is twisted by a vacant smile.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“That which makes me shudder when at the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is written: "Mondays and Thursdays tuberculosis; Wednesdays and Fridays syphilis." In every Metro station there are grinning skulls that greet you with "De f endez-vous contre la syphilis!" Wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“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 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.

And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly,
and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit. That, I believe would be more miraculous than anything which man has looked forward to. It would be miraculous because it would be undreamed of.
It would be more miraculous than even the wildest dream because anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever has, and probably nobody ever again will.

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of
everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let
myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself
was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone
than at this very moment.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of
everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment.

I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to
the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one single element of man's nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history?

By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb
my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Naktis kybojo virš žemės, aštri kaip durklas, girta kaip pamišėlė.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea…”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Everybody is giving birth to something - everybody but the lesbian in the upper tier. Her head is uptilted, her throat wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the shower of sparks that burst from the radium symphony. Jupiter is piercing her ears.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The trouble with Irene is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She wants
fat letters to shove in her valise.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“In every room there is a mirror before which he stands attentively and chews his rage, and from the constant chewing, from the grumbling and mumbling and the muttering and cursing his jaws have gotten unhinged and they sag badly and, when he rubs his beard, pieces of his jaw crumble away and he's so disgusted with himself that he stamps on his own jaw, grinds it to bits with his big heels.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“When I look down into this fucked out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper's skull.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Μονάχα οι φονιάδες μοιάζουν ν' αποσπούν απ'τη ζωή κάποιο ικανοποιητικό μέτρο αυτού με το οποίο καταπιάνονται. Η εποχή μας απαιτεί βία, αλλά εμείς δεν παίρνουμε παρά μονάχα κάτι εκτρωματικές μικροεκρήξεις. Οι επαναστάσεις τσακίζονται από τα γεννοφάσκια τους, ή πετυχαίνουν υπερβολικά γρήγορα. Το πάθος εξαντλείται πριν περάσει πολύς καιρός. Οι άνθρωποι ξεμένουν από ιδέες, comme d' habitude. Τίποτα δεν προτείνεται που να μπορεί ν' αντέξει παραπάνω από είκοσι τέσσερις ώρες. Ζούμε ένα εκατομμύριο ζωές στο διάστημα μιας γενιάς.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Είμαι ένας άνθρωπος ελεύθερος - και την έχω ανάγκη την ελευθερία μου. Έχω ανάγκη να στοχαστώ για την αισχύνη και την απόγνωσή μου, απομονωμένος - έχω ανάγκη το ηλιόφωτο και τους λιθόστρωτους δρόμους δίχως συνοδούς, δίχως συνομιλίες, ενώπιος ενωπίω με τον εαυτό μου, μονάχα με της καρδιάς μου τη μουσική για συντροφιά. Όταν έχω κάτι να δώσω, το δίνω. Η ληστρική περιέργειά σας μου γυρίζει τα έντερα! Οι φιλοφρονήσεις σας με εξευτελίζουν! Το τσάι σας με δηλητηριάζει! Δεν χρωστάω τίποτε και σε κανέναν. Μονάχα απέναντι στον Θεό θα ήμουν υπεύθυνος, σ' Αυτόν μονάχα θα λογοδοτούσα - εάν Αυτός υπήρχε!”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Tudo se suporta...a desgraça, humilhação, pobreza, guerra, crime, ennui...em nome da crença de que, de um dia para o outro, algo ocorrerá, um milagre que fará com que a vida se torne tolerável.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grâce, it needs to be blown to smithereens.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time - bitten mummies stuck in a quagmire.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Сега Лона е полегнала там, а каналът е пълен със стъкло и отломки; мимозите плачат, а по прозорците е полепнала влажна, мъглива пръдня.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“And while it’s all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed. Germaine had the right idea: she was ignorant and lusty, she put her heart and soul into her work. She was a whore all the way through—and that was her virtue!”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The other night I took her on—out of pity—and what do you think the crazy bitch had done to herself? She had shaved it clean… not a speck of hair on it. Did you ever have a woman who shaved her twat? It’s repulsive, ain’t it? And it’s funny, too. Sort of mad like. It doesn’t look like a twat any more: it’s like a dead clam or something.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“He wakes up cursing himself, or cursing the job, or cursing life.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“He wakes up utterly bored and discomfited, chagrined to think that he did not die overnight.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Words are loneliness. I left a couple of words for you on the tablecloth last night—you covered them with your elbows.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Klasikleri sindirmiş olan herkes, düşmandır insanlığa”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Yürüyordum ekvator boyunca, yeşil çeneli sırtlanın iğrenç kahkahasını duydum, ipek kuyruklu çakalı ve benekli leoparı gördüm; Cennet bahçesinde unutulmuşlardı hepsi. Sonra Mona'nın hüznü zırhlı bir geminin baş tarafı gibi genişledi, batışının ağırlığı taştı kulaklarımdan. Çamur suyu, seken safirler çalkalanıyor parlak sinir hücrelerinin arasında; tayf birleşmiş ve borda tirizi batmakta. Aslan pençesi kadar yumuşaktı top arabalarının dönüş sesi; kustuklarını salyalarını akıttığını gördüm: gök kube çöktü ve tüm yıldızlar karardı. Kara okyanuslar kanıyor, derin düşüncelere dalmış yıldızlar henüz yutulmuş et parçaları soluyorlar başlarının üzerinde kuşlar dönerken; havan, tokmak ve adaletin örtülü gözleriyle birlikte terazi düşüyor sanrılanmış gökyüzünden aşağı. İlintili olan her şey sanal ayaklarla ölü bir yörüngenin enlemleri üzerinde yürüyor; boş oyuklardan görülen her şey yeşeren çim gibi çıkıyor dışarı. Sonsuzluğun simgesi hiçlikten türüyor; durmaksızın yükselen sarmalların altında boş delik yavaşça aşağı iniyor. Toprak ve su rakamları birbirine ekliyor, kanla yazılmış, çelikten ve granitten daha sert bir şiir. Sonsuz gece boyunca bilinmeyen bir evrene doğru dönüyor dünya”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“To think that he can lie beside that furnace I stoked for him and do nothing but make water!”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Aquellos dos hablaban de especie de jerga matemática superior. Nunca entraba en ella nada de carne y hueso: era extraña, fantasmal, espantosamente abstracta. ”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d’habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation. In the study of entomology, or of deep sea life, or cellular activity, we derive more…”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Por una razón u otra, el hombre busca el milagro y para lograrlo es capaz de abrirse paso entre la sangre”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“Amo tutto ciò che scorre, tutto ciò che ha in sé tempo e divenire, che ci riporta al principio dove non c’è mai fine: la violenza dei profeti, l’oscenità che è estasi, la saggezza del fanatico, il prete con la sua gommosa litania, le parole sozze della puttana, lo sputo portato via nella fogna, il latte della mammella e l’amaro miele che si riversa dall’utero, tutto ciò che è fluido, fuso, dissoluto e dissolvente, tutto il pus e il sudiciume che scorrendo si purifica, che perde il suo senso originario, che fa il grande circuito verso la morte e la dissoluzione. Il grande desiderio incestuoso è scorrere all’unisono col tempo, fondere la grande immagine dell’aldilà con quella dell’hic et nunc. Un desiderio fatuo, suicida, reso stitico dalle parole e paralizzato dal pensiero.”
 Henry Miller, Tropico del Cancro

“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 Guatama 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.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Debería ser rico para tener una secretaria a la que dictar, mientras camino, porque las mejores ideas se me ocurren siempre cuando estoy lejos de la máquina.”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“La ciudad retoña como un enorme organismo todo él enfermo y las avenidas hermosas son algo menos repulsivas sólo porque les han drenado el pus.”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“Dormir se puede casi en cualquier parte, pero hay que tener un sitio para trabajar. Hasta una novela mala requiere una silla para sentarse y un poquito de intimidad. ”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“Recuerdo muy bien cómo disfrutaba con mi sufrimiento. Era como llevarse un cachorro a la cama. De vez en cuando te arañaba... y entonces sentías auténtico espanto. Por lo general, no sentías miedo: siempre podías soltarlo o cortarle la cabeza.”
 Henry Miller, Trópico de Cancer

“Kad se bližila zora, sjedili smo na terasi Domea. Već smo odavno zaboravili jadnog Peckovera. Doživjeli smo nešto uzbuđenja u Bal Negre i Joeov se duh vratio nijegovoj vječnoj zaokupljenosti: pički. Upravo u ovo vrijeme, kad se njegovo slobodno veče bliži kraju, njegov nemir se penje do grozničavog vrhunca. On misli na ženske, kraj kojih je prošao ranije u toku večei, i o stalnim ženskama, koje je mogao imati, samo da ih pita, i samo da ih nije već sit. Neizbježivo se podsjetio na svoju pičku iz Georgije — ona ga u posljednje vrijeme opsjeda, moleći ga da je uzme na stan, barem dok ne uspije da nađe ikakav posao. »Nije mi krivo ako je svako malo nahrainim«, kaže on, »ali ne mogu je uzeti za stalno... ona bi mi pokvarila posao s drugira mojim pičkama«. Kod nje ga najviše nervira, da se ona nimalo ne deblja. »Kao da uzimaš kostur u posteIju«, kaže. Neki dan sam je primio — od samilosti — i šta misliš, šta je ta luđakinja učinila sebi? Obrijala ju je do gola... Ni dlačice na njojl Da li si kad imao ženu, koja je obrijala minđu? Odvratno, jelda? Ali i smiješno. Nekako šašavo. Više mi ne izgleda kao minđa, prije kao crknuta školjka ili nešto slično.« On mi opisuje kako je od radoznalosti ustao iz postelje i potražio ručnu svjetiljku. »Natjerao sam je da je rastvori i upravio sam ručnu svjetiljtku ravno na nju. Trebao si me vidjeti... Bilo je komično. Toliiko sam se na to usredotočio, da sam na žensku potpuno zaboravio. Nikad u životu nisam pizdu gledao tako ozbiljno. Čovjek bi pomislio, da je nikad prije nisam vidio. I što sam je više gledao, to mi je bila manje zanimljiva. To služi samo da ti pokaže, da u svemu tome na kraju krajeva nema ništa, naročito kad je obrijana. Dlaka je čini tajanstvenom. Zbog toga te nekakaiv kip nimalo ne uzbuđuje. Jednom sam vidio pravu pravcatu pizdu na kipu — kip je Rodinov. Moraš ga jedanput pogledati... Ona je širom razmaknula noge... čini mi se, da uopće i nema glave. Moglo bi se reći, sama pizda. Isuse, sablasno je izgledala. Stvar i jest u tome — sve izgledaju jednako. Kad ih gledaš odjevene, onda zamišljaš svakakve stvari: na stanoviti način im daješ individualnost, što one naravno nemaju. Ima samo pukotinu između nogu, i zbog nje se sav zapjeniš — a većinom je uopće ni ne gledaš. Znaš da je tamo, i samo misliš kako da uguraš svog jarana unutra, kao da penis misli mjesto tebe. Ali to je aluzija! Sav si se zapalio, a ni zbog čega... Zbog pukotine s malo dlake, ili bez dlake. To je toliko besmisleno, da sam fasciniran zurio u nju. Mora da sam je proučavao bar deset minuta. Kad je tako gledaš, nekako iz daljine, smiješne ti se misli vrte po glavi. Toliko tajanstvenosti oko seksa, a onda otkriješ da to nije ništa, samo praznina. Zar ne bi bilo zgodno kad bi unutra našao kakvu harmoniku... ili kalendar? Ali unutra nema ništa... ama baš ništa. Odvratno. Gotovo sam poludio... Čuj, što misliš što sam kasnije učinio? Na brzinu •sam joj opalio metaik, a onda joj okrenuo leđa. Da uzeo sam knjigu i čitao. U knjizi se može nešto naći, čak i u lošoj knizi... ali pizda je naprosto čist gubitak vrmena... «
Str 144-146
”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap... it drives me nuts sometimes... I want to kick them out immediately... I do now and then. But that doesn't keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women... they're all masochists at heart.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“(...) decidí dejarme llevar por la corriente, no oponer la menor resistencia al destino, como quiera que se presentase. Nada de lo que me había ocurrido hasta entonces había bastado para destruirme, nada había quedado destruido, salvo mis falsas ilusiones (...)”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Ah, Tania, nerede şimdi senin o sıcak yarığın, o kalın ve ağır jartiyerlerin, yumuşak ve dolgun uylukların? On beş santim uzunluğunda bir kemik var kamışımda. Dölümle doldurup ütüleyeceğim amındaki her kırışıklığı, Tania. Karnında sancıyla ve rahmin ters yüz edilmiş halde göndereceğim seni Sylvester’a.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Seni düzüyorum Tania, düzülmüş kalasın diye.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Thyroid eyes. Michelin lips. Voice like pea soup.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“In niets onderscheidden ze zich van de heikneuters waar ze later hun voeten op zouden vegen. Het waren nullen in elke betekenis van het woord, nullen die de kern vormen van een fatsoenlijk en jammerlijk burgerdom. Ze sliepen best en klaagde nooit; ze waren niet vrolijk en niet ongelukkig. De onverschilligen die Dante naar het voorportaal van de Hel heeft verwezen. De lui van de bovenlaag.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer  

“Zeven jaar lang heb ik dag en nacht met slechts een gedachte voor mijn geest rongelopen - haar. Als er maar een christen was die zo trouw aan zijn God was als ik aan haar, dan zouden we vandaag allemaal Jezus Christus zijn. Dag en nacht dacht ik aan haar, zelfs als ik haar bedroog.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“De wiegen der beschaving zijn de verpestende riolen van de wereld, het knekelhuis waarin de stinkende baarmoeders hun bloederige pakjes vlees en been toevertrouwen.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Europe – medieval, grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B-mol.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Eens heb ik gemeend dat menselijk zijn het hoogste doel was dat een mens kon nastreven, maar nu zie ik in dat dit bedoeld was om me vernietigen. Nu ga ik er trots op te zeggen dat ik onmenselijk ben, dat ik niet tot mensen en regeringen behoor, dat ik niets met geloofsbelijdenissen en principes te maken heb. Ik heb niets uitstaande met de krakende machine der mensheid - ik behoor tot de aarde!”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Naast dit mensenras bestaat nog een ras van wezens, de onmenselijken, het ras der kunstenaars die, door onbekende impulsen geprikkeld, de levenloze massa van de mensen nemen en door de koortshitte en gisting die zij daarin verwekken dit kleffe deeg in brood veranderen en het brood in wijn en de wijn in zang. Uit dit dode compost en de inerte sintels brengen zij een lied voort dat besmet.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Zo iemand doet niet aan bommen gooien, aan opstanden; hij wil niet meer reageren, niet uit traagheid en niet uit wreedheid. Van alle mensen ter wereld wenst deze persoon dat de daad een manifestatie van het leven is. En zo hij, om deze verschrikkelijke behoefte te kunnen verwerkelijken, niet vooruit maar achteruit werkt, zo hij onmaatschappelijk wordt, begint te stammelen en te stotteren, zo volkomen onaangepast blijkt te zijn dat hij zijn boterham niet kan verdienen, dan kan men ervan op aan dat deze man de weg heeft gevonden die hem weer in de schoot en de bron van het leven terugvoert.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Beni hayati olarak ilgilendiren tek şey var artık, o da kitaplarda bugüne kadar yazılmamış olan her şeyi kayda geçirmek. Gördüğüm kadarıyla kimse hayata yön veren ve onu hareketlendiren unsurları kullanmıyor. Sadece katiller ortaya koyduklarının karşılığını alıyorlar hayatta. Çağ şiddet gerektiriyor ama yarım kalmış patlamalardan fazlası yok elde. Devrim filizlenirken kesiliyor ya da başarıya fazla hızla ulaşıyor. Tutku kendini çabucak tüketiyor. İnsanlar fikirlerinden taviz veriyor, alışılageldiği üzere. Yirmidört saatten fazla dayanacak hiçbir şey tasarlanmıyor. Bir neslin uzamında milyonlarca hayat yaşıyoruz. Böcekbilimden, derin deniz ya da hücre araştırmalarından daha çok fayda sağlıyoruz.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Eres cáncer y delirio" me dijo el otro día por teléfono”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“There are days, nevertheless, when the sun is out and I get off the beaten path and think about her hungrily. Now and then, despite my grim satisfaction, I get to thinking about another way of life, get to wondering if it would make a difference having a young, restless creature by my side. The trouble is I can hardly remember what she looks like nor even how it feels to have my arms around her. Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like timebitten mummies stuck in a quagmire. If I try to recall my life in New York I get a few splintered fragments, nightmarish and covered with verdigris. It seems as if my own proper existence had come to an end somewhere, just where exactly I can’t make out. I’m not an American any more, nor a New Yorker, and even less a European, or a Parisian. I haven’t any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds, any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I’m neither for nor against. I’m a neutral.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“¡Hay algo venenoso en eso! Es tan fantástico que parece convincente”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Я хочу в мир мужчин и женщин, деревьев, которые молчат (в мире слишком много разговоров!), в мир рек, течение которых несет вас к иным берегам, но не тех рек, которые превратились в легенды, а рек, которые связывают вас с людьми, с архитектурой, религией, с растительным и животным миром, рек, где плавают лодки и тонут люди — тонут не в мифах и легендах старых пыльных книг, а во времени, пространстве и истории. Я мечтаю о реках, которые создают такие океаны, как Шекспир и Данте, о реках, которые не пересыхают в пустоте прошлого. Да, океаны!”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Oro es una palabra nocturna correspondiente a la mente crónica: en ella hay sueño y mito.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Ik ga voor je zingen, een beetje vals misschien, maar ik zing toch. Ik zing terwijl jullie creperen, ik dans op je gore lijk...”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Miro al mar, al cielo, a lo ininteligible y distantemente cercano.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love—just enough to feed the birds.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Ninguna luna plateará nunca su apatía.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I will sing while you croak.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Out of nothingness arises the sign of infinity; beneath the ever-rising spirals slowly sinks the gaping hole. The land and the water make numbers joined, a poem written with flesh and stronger than steel or granite. Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown…”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
 

“البؤس ساكن داخلها كالحجر، ولا مكان لأي أفكار أخرى..”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Светът все повече и повече наподобява сън на ентомолог. Земята се отклонява от своята орбита, измества своите оси, от север огромни облаци от стоманеносиви парцали сняг фучат надолу. Настъпва нова ледникова епоха, напречните шевове на черепите се затварят и навсякъде по цялото протежение на зърнопроизводителния район ембрионалният свят измира, приема формата на мъртво зърно на цица. Делтите пресъхват сантиметър по сантиметър, коритата на реките стават гладки като стъкло. Идва нов ден, металургичен ден, когато по земята ще затрополи дъжд от яркожълта руда. Температурата пада, мъгла обвива очертанията на земята; все още има тук-там осмоза и членоразделна реч, но в периферията всички вени са разширени, светлинните вълни са пречупени и слънцето кърви подобно на разпран ректум.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
 

“Pour une raison ou pour une autre, l'homme cherche le miracle, et pour l'accomplir, il pataugera dans le sang. Il se gorgera d'une débauche d'idées, il se réduira à n'être qu'une ombre, si, pour une seule seconde de sa vie, il peut fermer les yeux sur la hideur de la réalité. Il endure tout -disgrâce, humiliation, pauvreté, guerre, crime, ennui- croyant que demain quelque chose arrivera, un miracle! qui rendra la vie tolérable.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Понякога лежа и мечтая за миналото и то е тъй живо, че трябва да се разтърся, за да осъзная къде съм. Особено когато има жена с мен; една жена може да успокои по-добре от всичко друго. Това само искам от тях- да забравям себе си. От време на време тъй се оплитам в моите блянове, че забравям името на путката, или къде съм я забърсал. Смешно, нали? Приятно е, когато отвориш очи сутрин, до теб да лежи едно свежо, топло тяло. Дава ти усещане за чистота. Един вид, тъй да се каже, ставаш по-духовен... докато не почнат да плямпат техните сантиментални глупости за любов и тъй нататък. Абе можеш ли да ми кажеш защо всички путки говорят толкова много за любов? Явно едно хубаво ебане не им стига... искат и душата ти също...”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“لا يقوى على الهروب من السجن الذي بناه لنفسه”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
 

“The kangaroo has a double penis - one for week days and one for holidays.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Думите са самота. Снощи оставих за теб две думи на масата – ти ги покри с лактите си.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“порой я вспоминаю Мону, но не как личность в определенном разрезе времени и пространства, а как что-то отвлеченное, самостоятельное, как если бы она стала огромным облаком из совершенно забытого прошлого. Я не могу позволить себе долго думать о ней, иначе мне останется только прыгнуть с моста. Странно. Ведь я совершенно примирился с мыслью, что проживу свою жизнь без Моны, но даже мимолетное воспоминание о ней пронзает меня до мозга костей, отбрасывая назад в ужасную грязную канаву моего безобразного прошлого. Вот уже семь лет день и ночь я хожу с одной только мыслью – о ней. Если бы христианин был так же верен своему богу, как я верен ей, мы все были бы Иисусами. Днем и ночью я думал только о ней, даже когда изменял. Мне казалось, что я наконец освободился от нее, но это не так иногда, свернув за угол, я внезапно узнаю маленький садик несколько деревьев и скамеек, где мы когда-то стояли и ссорились, доводя друг друга до исступления дикими сценами ревности. И всегда это происходило в пустынном, заброшенном
месте на площади Эстрапад или на занюханных и никому не известных улочках
возле мечети или авеню Бретей, зияющей, как открытая могила, где так темно и
безлюдно уже в десять часов вечера, что у вас является мысль о самоубийстве
или убийстве, о чем-то, что могло бы влить хоть каплю жизни в эту мертвую
тишину. Когда я думаю о том, что она ушла, ушла, вероятно, навсегда, передо
мной разверзается пропасть и я падаю, падаю без конца в бездонное черное
пространство. Это хуже, чем слезы, глубже, чем сожаление и боль горя; это та
пропасть, в которую был низвергнут Сатана. Оттуда нет надежды выбраться, там
нет ни луча света, ни звука человеческого голоса, ни прикосновения
человеческой руки.
Бродя по ночным улицам, тысячи раз я задавал себе вопрос, наступит ли
когда-нибудь время, когда она будет опять рядок со мной; все эти голодные,
отчаянные взгляды, которые я бросал на дома и скульптуры, стали теперь
невидимой частью этих скульптур и домов, впитавших мою тоску. Я не могу
забыть, как мы бродили вдвоем по этим жалким, бедным улочкам, вобравшим мои
мечты и мое вожделение, а она не замечала и не чувствовала ничего: для нее
это были обыкновенные улочки, может быть, более грязные, чем в других
городах, но ничем не примечательные. Она не помнила, что на том углу я
наклонился, чтобы поднять оброненную ею шпильку, а на этом -- чтобы завязать
шнурки на ее туфлях. А я навсегда запомнил место, где стояла ее нога. И это
место сохранится даже тогда, когда все эти соборы превратятся в развалины, а
европейская цивилизация навсегда исчезнет с лица Земли.
Однажды ночью, когда в припадке особенно болезненной тоски и
одиночества я шел по улице Ломон, некоторые веши открылись мне с необычайной
ясностью...”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“لا فائدة من إحاطة النهاية بشيء من الجلال، فعليك أن تكون كذابا لتكتشف أي شيء مأساوي في رحيلهم ..”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Quando io vedo le figure di uomini e donne che si muovono inquieti dietro le mura della loro prigione, riparati, reclusi per poche ore, mi atterriscono le cariche drammatiche che ancora si contengono in questi deboli corpi. Dietro le grigie mura ci sono scintille umane , eppure nemmeno una conflagrazione. Sono questi uomini e donne, mi chiedo, o sono ombre, ombre di marionette mosse da fili invisibili? Apparentemente si muovono in libertà, ma non hanno dove andare. In un regno soltanto sono liberi e vi si muovono a volontà- ma non hanno ancora imparato a spiccare il volo.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 

 

“Derrière ces murs gris, se trouvent les étincelles humaines, et pourtant jamais un incendie ne se déclare. Sont-ce là des hommes et des femmes, me demandé-je, ou bien sont-ce des ombres, des ombres de marionettes tirées par d'invisibles ficelles? Elles se meuvent apparemment sans contrainte, mais n'ont nulles part où aller. Dans un seul royaume elles sont libres et peuvent vagabonder en liberté - mais elles n'ont pas encore appris à prendre l'essor. Jusqu'à présent, il n'est point de rêve qui ait pris l'essor.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Sedam kraj nje i ona priča - cela poplava rači. Divlje sušičave note histerije, perverzije, gube. Ne čujem ni reč, zato što je lepa i ja je volim, i sada sam srećan i želim umreti.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer 
 

“Pure, non riesco a levarmi di mente lo scarto che c'è fra idee e vita. Uno scarto permanente, per quanto noi cerchiamo di celarlo con una tenda colorata. E non va. Le idee debbono sposarsi all'azione; e se in loro non vi è sesso, non vita, non c'è azione. Le idee non possono esistere da sole nel vuoto del pensiero. Le idee sono in rapporto con la vita : idee di fegato, idee di reni, idee interstiziali ecc. Se fosse stato sol per amore di un'idea, Copernico avrebbe infranto il macrocosmo esistente e Colombo si sarebbe disperso nel Mar dei Sargassi.”
 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer  

...A SUIVRE!