Contentment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “DO YOU LIKE ALWAYS moving around?” Lori asked me. “Of course I do!” I said. “Don’t you?” “Sure,” she said. It was late afternoon, and we were parked outside of a bar in the Nevada desert. It was called the Bar None Bar. I was four and Lori was seven. We were on our way to Las Vegas. Dad had decided it would be easier, as he put it, to accumulate the capital necessary to finance the Prospector if he hit the casinos for a while. We’d been driving for hours when he saw the Bar None Bar, pulled over the Green Caboose—the Blue Goose had died, and we now had another car, a station wagon Dad had named the Green Caboose—and announced that he was going inside for a quick nip. Mom put on some red lipstick and joined him, even though she didn’t drink anything stronger than tea. They had been inside for hours. The sun hung high in the sky, and there was not the slightest hint of a breeze. Nothing moved except some buzzards on the side of the road, pecking over an unrecognizable carcass. Brian was reading a dog-eared comic book. “How many places have we lived?” I asked Lori. “That depends on what you mean by ‘lived,’” she said. “If you spend one night in some town, did you live there? What about two nights? Or a whole week?” I thought. “If you unpack all your things,” I said. We counted eleven places we had lived, then we lost track. We couldn’t remember the names of some of the towns or what the houses we had lived in looked like. Mostly, I remembered the inside of cars. “What do you think would happen if we weren’t always moving around?” I asked. “We’d get caught,” Lori said. • • • When Mom and Dad came out of the Bar None Bar, they brought us each a long piece of beef jerky and a candy bar. I ate the jerky first, and by the time I unwrapped my Mounds bar, it had melted into a brown, gooey mess, so I decided to save it until night, when the desert cold would harden it up again.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Looks like you hit the jackpot and got something extra,” she’d say with a wink. We always left the Owl Club so stuffed we could hardly walk. “Let’s waddle home, kids,” Dad would say. The barite mine where Dad worked had a commissary, and the mine owner deducted our bill and the rent for the depot out of Dad’s paycheck every month. At the beginning of each week, we went to the commissary and brought home bags and bags of food. Mom said only people brainwashed by advertising bought prepared foods such as SpaghettiOs and TV dinners. She bought the basics: sacks of flour or cornmeal, powdered milk, onions, potatoes, twenty-pound bags of rice or pinto beans, salt, sugar, yeast for making bread, cans of jack mackerel, a canned ham or a fat slab of bologna, and for dessert, cans of sliced peaches. Mom didn’t like cooking much—“Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour,” she’d ask us, “when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?”—so once a week or so, she’d fix a big cast-iron vat of something like fish and rice or, usually, beans. We’d all sort through the beans together, picking out the rocks, then Mom would soak them overnight, boil them the next day with an old ham bone to give them flavor, and for that entire week, we’d have beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If the beans started going bad, we’d just put extra spice in them, like the Mexicans at the LBJ Apartments always did. We bought so much food that we never had much money come payday. One payday Dad owed the mine company eleven cents. He thought it was funny and told them to put it on his tab. Dad almost never went out drinking at night like he used to. He stayed home with us. After dinner, the whole family stretched out on the benches and the floor of the depot and read, with the dictionary in the middle of the room so we kids could look up words we didn’t know. Sometimes I discussed the definitions with Dad, and if we didn’t agree with what the dictionary writers said, we sat down and wrote a letter to the publishers. They’d write back defending their position, which would prompt an even longer letter from Dad, and if they replied again, so would he, until we stopped hearing from the dictionary people. Mom read everything: Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Pearl Buck. She even read James Michener—apologetically—saying she knew it wasn’t great literature, but she couldn’t help herself. Dad preferred science and math books, biographies and history. We kids read whatever Mom brought home from her weekly trips to the library. Brian read thick adventure books, ones written by guys like Zane Grey. Lori especially loved Freddy the Pig and all the Oz books.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I finally got out of that shitty gay life.” Yet it didn’t seem so shitty just now. We maintained, of course, the premise that we were sick, that our experience was limited, that we were missing out on the good things of life, and that our old age would be lonely. Worse, we anticipated a steady effeminization with the years. I knew I’d end up a seventy-year-old waiter, hair peroxided, camping with my gay customers and eyeing with hatred all the women customers I didn’t already know and share beauty secrets with, a wizened old bird lined from excessive dieting and unwilling to go out at night for fear of hoodlums. But just now that seemed a long way off. With Sean, of course, I pretended to be very studious and serious and even unfamiliar with gay life, but on nights when I was free I went out cruising. After the World’s Fair cleanup, gay bars started opening again, every month a new one. The Village gay life, which until now had collected along Greenwich Avenue, began to seep slowly down Christopher Street. Spring came, and boys were sitting on stoops almost all the way down to the Hudson. Every day I’d arrive at work later and later. We were supposed to be there at ten, but I never arrived before eleven. No one said anything. I had my captions to write, then whole paragraphs, but the company was so overstaffed that we were given two weeks to write a hundred lines. We typed on lined paper that gave the exact character count, but it didn’t matter, since every textblock was rewritten by all those idle editors over us. I closed my door and fell asleep on my desk, called all my friends, took two-hour lunches, had my shoes shined by a man who went from floor to floor with his kit and who once even offered to bump off anyone I wanted for two hundred dollars. I lived for my nights. I’d rush home and fall asleep in my clothes. Hours later I’d awaken, eat cottage cheese out of the carton and a whole tomato, then I’d dress for cruising and head out into the night. The appeal of gay life for me was that it provided so many glancing contacts with other men. At the gym I was becoming an old hand, and now I was the one to show the new guys how to work the lat machine or do heavy squats without injuring the back, but I never knew their names. At the bar I would buy drinks for “friends” and they for me, but again we seldom knew each other’s names.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  By three in the morning the President’s Punch had been delivered as the coup de grace to the few survivors. On every buttoned leather couch, unconscious men sprawled, as “totaled” as the cars they liked to wreck. Some of the brothers sat bolt upright, mouths open, ties and shoelaces undone. Their snoring bleated and gasped antiphonally from room to room. The lights on all four floors were blazing. I was the only one awake. No. There was one other person, another pledge, Mick, a guy who grinned too much and who talked about weapons and physical fitness with a creepy enthusiasm, as though everyone must agree that hacking through the ice to swim in Lake Michigan was a self-evident pleasure as was the prospect of parachuting out of a plane into enemy-occupied territory. Like certain religious fanatics who supply their own chorus of assent (“That’s right, by golly, Lord knows”), he murmured to himself all the affirmation he needed. Mick was from the South. Everything about him was glossy. Each hair on his head looked as though it had been individually dipped and twirled in hot mink oil. His prominent temples, his bony jaw, the machine-tooled grooves of his ears, his sealskin eyebrows all threw off highlights, and his big black eyes looked like the reservoirs of that lubrication, just as his shiny black nipples looked like the controls. He wasn’t “masculine” with the full pachydermal weight that word carried back then. He was more like a ferret—quick, intent. And a loner. He was always alone, backing out of rooms with a grin and that nearly subvocal chorus of yea-saying (“Yessiree, better get crackin’ if I’m going to make ROTC”). He’d hang on the witticisms of the older guys with that huge grin. It was hard to look at it since there was no scrim over it, and only if someone teased him (“Stop eatin’ shit, Mick”) did he become conscious of his smile. Then he used it defensively; he’d dial it bigger and brighter, rotate and beam it into every corner. The brothers didn’t think he was a “face man” only because he wasn’t given to an eye-batting awareness of his own beauty. But he did have the sort of good regular looks that go with a parade uniform. One could picture his features under a helmet, deep-set eyes sunk into the shadow cast by the brim. He had a girlfriend whom he never stopped touching when he was with her—fingering her sash, stroking her hair, massaging her neck, guiding her through the door by patting her shoulder. They were always the first to hit the dimmed make-out room at a dance and the last to leave in complete dishevelment. She wasn’t a “Greek.” In fact, she had no distinction in our eyes except as Mick’s girl. Mick seemed much less complicated than everyone else about sex; he didn’t talk about cunnilingus for hours and didn’t vomit on his date.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  One must not love in this wide, indiscriminate way. One must not have friends who also happen to be traitors, thieves or what not. One must not enjoy a bad movie as much as a good movie. And so on. Clear? Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn’t matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one. Then you stop writing, of course. You don’t need to play at God or Devil any longer. You’ve seen through, and the world is always at the level of your vision, of the stuff of your vision. It’s when you discover that light is not a manifestation of some physical law but one of the infinite aspects of spirit itself. And there is no light on earth which matches the inner light. I was going to speak about Homer and the gods, Homer and carnage, Homer and his last-minute introductions, Homer the exoskeletonized psychologist … but some other time. I am nearly finished with the Iliad . But not with Homer. One thing I am tempted to say in parting … at this writing there isn’t one character, one god, in the Iliad whom I truly like or admire. Certainly not the two magnificent ones—Hector and Achilles. I know no author who has filled his characters with so many faults—unlovable, unforgivable faults. Enough! Make what you can of all this! And don’t wobble, what! Cheers! Henry * “Ah! blissful and never-to-be-forgotten age! when everything was better than it has ever been since, or ever will be again—when Buttermilk Channel was quite dry at low water—when the shad in the Hudson were all salmon, and when the moon shone with a pure and resplendent whiteness, instead of that melancholy yellow light which is the consequence of her sickening at the abominations she every night witnesses in this degenerate city!” (Washington Irving) III The Author at Work Work Schedule, 1932-1933—Henry Miller MiscellaneaCOMMANDMENTS1. Work on one thing at a time until finished. 2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.” 3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand. 4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! 5. When you can’t create you can work . 6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers. 7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it. 8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only. 9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude . 10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. 11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards. DAILY PROGRAMMORNINGS: If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus. If in fine fettle, write.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Here and there the odor of cigarettes or coffee scorched through the blanket smell of oil paint. An atmosphere prevailed of intellectual and manual labor, of frustrated but hopeful solitude—something serious, unrebukable. That was when I had my first look at Maria. I didn’t yet know who she was. I just glanced into a studio and saw her there, paintbrush in hand, eyes closed, waltzing slowly around the room. The radio was playing the waltz from Der Rosenkavalier . Paul greeted me with his Martian approximation of a smile but no handshake. “Am I disturbing you?” I asked. “No,” he said, cocking his head to one side as though to test the accuracy of his reply. And that was that. He pointed to a canvas-backed director’s chair. I slid into it. He pressed a cup of coffee into my cold hands. Then he regained his high stool and we both looked and looked at his painting. People say that painting is an instantaneous not a temporal art, but for me the contemplation of Paul’s work unfolded thickly in time. What does he want me to say? What words of mine would please him, even help him? Should I say nothing? Those were the social questions that alternated with my slighter but quite real curiosity about his work. Then I’d sneak a glance at him, at his powerful jaw propped up by his hand as though its very weight solicited support, at his smudged glasses, at the tiny spume of blond hair on his Adam’s apple that the razor had missed for several days. I tried to imagine kissing those dry lips, wrapping my arms around that tall skinny body, but I couldn’t thread that particular loop of film through the projector. As half-consciously I inched toward my desires for men, I clung to my official goal of stifling these desires. I wanted to be a heterosexual—perhaps with a bohemian girl? Back to Paul’s canvas and its lipstick colors crosshatched by charcoal stabs, scene of a crime not yet committed. I feared Paul attributed powers of observation to me that weren’t there. We listened to an old scratchy recording of a Bach unaccompanied cello suite. The music, so spare, so passionate, seemed at any moment about to break into speech. It cut with precision into the big soft folds of time that nearly smothered us. In this studio with the bluish light reflected off the late-afternoon snow and the sound of outdoor voices traveling easily as over water, I felt a new form of comfort. Paul was beside me, blinking and thinking, a bird on spindly legs regarding his own gaudily cerebral paintings. A year before I’d wanted to be a Buddhist monk, but now I thought I’d prefer to be an artist of some sort. I wondered what Paul was thinking. Was he busily proposing and rejecting solutions, or was he staring into a void of indecision, of fear about going on with the work?

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  clung to my official goal of stifling these desires. I wanted to be a heterosexual—perhaps with a bohemian girl? Back to Paul’s canvas and its lipstick colors crosshatched by charcoal stabs, scene of a crime not yet committed. I feared Paul attributed powers of observation to me that weren’t there. We listened to an old scratchy recording of a Bach unaccompanied cello suite. The music, so spare, so passionate, seemed at any moment about to break into speech. It cut with precision into the big soft folds of time that nearly smothered us. In this studio with the bluish light reflected off the late-afternoon snow and the sound of outdoor voices traveling easily as over water, I felt a new form of comfort. Paul was beside me, blinking and thinking, a bird on spindly legs regarding his own gaudily cerebral paintings. A year before I’d wanted to be a Buddhist monk, but now I thought I’d prefer to be an artist of some sort. I wondered what Paul was thinking. Was he busily proposing and rejecting solutions, or was he staring into a void of indecision, of fear about going on with the work? I couldn’t tell, since he did not like to talk. His silences were enough like my father’s to fill me with grave anticipation. But he himself was completely different—as thin as my father was fat, as deferential as my father was overbearing, as open to new ideas as my father was closed. On the particle-board partition that separated his cubicle from the next, Paul had thumbtacked things that might inspire him: a reproduction from Time of an Arshile Gorky drawing; a National Geographic photo of neon-bright tropical fish darting through dun-colored fans of coral; a pencil sketch he had scrawled on a paper place mat from Howard Johnson’s. I glanced at my watch and realized I had to hurry back to school for the ringing of the next bell—I was on waiter duty at supper time. “How wonderful it must be to have long hours of freedom,” I said. Behind the glinting, anarchist’s glasses Paul’s eyes looked exhausted: “Someday you’ll have more freedom than you’ll want.” I could see his freedom was glued to him like a leech. Every day he looked thinner, older, more fragile, almost like someone recently dead who appears in our dreams, unshaved and reproachful. At the party in Jim Coburn’s studio (he made stained glass) I started talking to Maria. I’d never before been to a grown-up party as a grown-up and I’m sure I took it more seriously than anyone else there—I must be the only one alive who still remembers that casual event, a birthday drink in the middle of the afternoon. Maria was wearing a man’s shirt of white Oxford cloth; the button-down collar was unbuttoned and tipped up in back, so that it framed her long pale neck.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  I wonder if I make myself clear? All I mean is that I am truly humble in the presence of art, whether on a cultural level, a primitive level or a child’s level. Spirit can shine through an idiot as well as through a saint, what! I never turned my back on art; I may have been defiant, nothing more. I may only have believed (naively) that art is capable of more than men have dared hope for. In the same way that I might say God is capable of far worse crimes than any we mortals can imagine. Praising Him all the while. But never pretending to know Him. “Let me sing thy praises, O Lord!” In that spirit. But the poison I spoke of…. The poison was that anybody or anything could unseat me from my happiness, my deep, natural inner happiness. I did not want to be a wobbly, as other men. To sway from joy to despair. The day I came upon that passage in Nijinsky where he says: “I want everyone to be like me,” I nearly jumped out of my skin. They could have been my own words. Must one be a complete solipsist or a madman to speak thus? Often I have asked myself the question. Naturally it wasn’t identity that Nijinsky wanted; he didn’t want to see ten billion Nijinskys all about him. No. He wanted them to be filled with his divine, radiant, out-going spirit. Is that not it? Was there any harm in that? All my rebelliousness, all this crazy tampering with the world, the divine set-up, or rather the man-made set-up, for it was the human, never the cosmic woes, which disturbed me, spring from my failure to comprehend what people meant—and by people I mean parents, sweethearts, friends, counselors—when they urged me to do this or that, become this or that. Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am. Why is it that at this moment, and I have thought it a thousand times to myself, I always summon as proof of the foregoing this image—of myself as a little boy going down into the street to play, having no fixed purpose, no particular direction, no especial friend to seek out, but just divinely content to be going down into the street to meet whatever might come. In the most bitter arguments, with women, something like this thought always crept in. As though I was yelling my head off to put this simple thought into their heads—“I find life so simple, so good, so easy … why must you complicate it?” Or if they said, as they often did—“But how do I know you love me?”—I would become tongue-tied. Such a preposterous accusation to make against me. As if I did not love them! Only, I also loved others too…. Not in the way they meant, but in a natural wholesome easy way. Like one loves garlic, honey, wild strawberries.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  That is why I can live on now and record it fully with no suffering involved. I can recount the most heartbreaking events almost joyously. I am telling about another man in another life. I do not need to tell it any more—I do it gratuitously. I could now lead a life entirely apart from books, from writing, from this sort of self-expression. I could lead a life without sex, if need be. I could live without human companionship. I can live with myself alone, that is what I mean. And yet I am going to write this book, and perhaps other books too. It seems like a contradiction, and undoubtedly it is. I leave it at that. At the same time it is also true that I am going to write still more about sex. I am describing my life in the world of sex. I am recording the death of that world, just as certain mystics have recorded the disappearance of continents and races of men. People will draw conflicting conclusions from my work. That is none of my affair. I too have drawn conflicting conclusions from the experiences I have had. At one and the same moment in time men are living on a thousand different planes. We speak of evolution, as if it were continuous and all-embracing. But in reality we are each of us absolutely isolate and moving within different orbits and developing within definite, unique frames or spheres. Sex galvanizes the individual spheres of being which clash and conflict. It makes the external world in which we are wrapped shed its death-like folds. It affords us glimpses of that stark, durable reality which is neither beneficent nor cruel. We go along thinking the world to be thus and so. We are not thinking, of course, or the picture would be different every moment. When we go along thus we are merely preserving a dead image of a live moment in the past. However … let us say we meet a woman. We enter into her. Everything is changed. What changed? We do not know precisely. It seems as if everything had changed. It might be that we never see the woman again, or it might be that we never separate. She may lead us to hell or she may open the doors of the world for us. Or she may give us the itch to know other women, thousands of women, millions of women. In rare cases she can stop us dead, make us live in her and wish to never look at another woman. Once I saw a picture of Rubens as he looked when he married his young wife. They were portrayed together, he standing beside or behind her as she sat for the portrait. I shall never forget the emotion it inspired in me. I had one long deep look into the world of contentment, a world of mutual understanding, of love, of mature bliss.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  At about nine in the morning the earl and his charges finally arrived at the palace. The people ran over to see the two children, and to marvel at the richness of their retinue and their apparel. Then for the first time they said among themselves that Walter was no fool, after all, and that he had chosen his second wife well. The young girl was much prettier than Griselda, according to common opinion, and a much better age for child-bearing. She and the marquis would have good progeny, especially since this young girl was - unlike Griselda - of proper lineage. The people also marvelled at the beauty of the young boy beside her; seeing sister and brother together, they all praised the marquis for his judgement. Oh fickle people, people of the wind, unsteady and unfaithful! You are as ever changing as a weathervane. You delight only in novelty. You wax and wane as does the moon. You gape and chatter, much to your own cost. Your opinions are worthless, and your behaviour proves that you are never to be trusted. Only a fool would believe anything you say. The more thoughtful knew this to be true, even as they watched the others running up and down and gawping at the fine dresses. The silly folk were so pleased with the novelty of this new maiden that they could speak, and think, about nothing else. Well, enough of this. I will turn now to Griselda, and see how she is coping with the situation. She was as busy as ever. She was doing what was expected of her by Walter, and attending to all the details of the great feast. She did not care at all about the tattered state of her own clothing, but with cheerful spirit she hurried with the others towards the great gate where she could see the young bride advancing. Then she went back to work. She greeted all the guests of the marquis with due deference and propriety. No one could fault her in anything and in fact she behaved with such decorum that everyone wondered who she might be. Who was this woman, dressed so unbecomingly, who was yet the soul of tact and cheerfulness? All of them commended her. In the meantime Griselda praised the young brother and sister with such warmth and affection that no one could have equalled it. The time came when the whole company was about to sit down at the feast. At that moment, as she was supervising the preparations, the marquis called out to her. ‘Griselda,’ he said to her playfully, ‘how do you like my new wife? Isn’t she a beauty?’ ‘She is indeed, my lord. I have never seen a lovelier woman in my life. God send her good fortune. And I hope he will send both of you peace and prosperity until the end of your lives.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [Ps 37:11 , 18 , 19 ; Is 3:10 , 11 ; Matt 25:34 ] 13 But it will not be well for the evil man, nor will he lengthen his days like a shadow, because he does not fear God. [Matt 25:41 ] 14 There is a meaningless and futile thing which is done on the earth: that is, there are righteous men whose gain is as though they were evil, and evil men whose gain is as though they were righteous. I say that this too is futility (meaningless, vain). 15 Then I commended pleasure and enjoyment, because a man [without God] has no better thing under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be merry, for this will stand by him in his toil through the days of his life which God has given him under the sun. 16 When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to see the activities [of mankind] that take place upon the earth—how some men seem to sleep neither day nor night— 17 and I saw all the work of God, I concluded that man cannot discover the work that is done under the sun. Even though man may labor in seeking, he will not discover; and [more than that], though a wise man thinks and claims he knows, he will not be able to find it out. [Deut 29:29 ; Rom 11:33 ] Ecclesiastes 9 Men Are in the Hand of God 1 F OR I have taken all this to heart, exploring and examining it all, how the righteous (those in right standing with God) and the wise and their deeds are in the hands of God. No man knows whether it will be love or hatred; anything awaits him. 2 It is the same for all. There is one fate for the righteous and for the wicked; for the good, for the clean and for the unclean; for the man who offers sacrifices and for the one who does not sacrifice. As the good man is, so is the sinner; as he who swears an oath is, so is he who is afraid to swear an oath . 3 This evil is in all that is done under the sun, that one fate comes to all. Also, the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and afterwards they go to the dead. 4 [There is no exemption,] but whoever is joined with all the living, has hope; surely a live dog is better than a dead lion. 5 For the living know that they will die; but the dead know nothing, and they no longer have a reward [here], for the memory of them is forgotten. 6 Indeed their love, their hatred and their zeal have already perished, and they will no longer have a share [in this age] in anything that is done under the sun.

• From Vox (1992)

  No teaspoons at all. One of the dinner forks from my great aunt’s set fell into the dishwasher once when I was visiting her and it got badly notched by that twirly splasher in the bottom, and someone at work was telling me he knew a jeweler who fixed hurt silverware, so I’m planning to have that fixed, it’s all ready to go. And I even got together all my broken sets of beads—I sorted them all out—the sight of all those beads jumbled together on my bedside table was making me unhappy every morning, and now they’re ready to be restrung, the pink ones in one envelope, and the green ones in one envelope, and the parti-colored Venetian ones in one envelope—and I have them on my dining-room table too, ready to go.” “The same jeweler who fixes silverware restrings beads?” he asked. “Yes!” “How did your beads get broken?” “They seem to break in the morning when I’m rushing to get dressed. They catch on something. The jade ones, my favorite set, which my father gave me, caught on the open door of the microwave when I was standing up too quickly after picking a piece of paper up off the floor. That was the latest tragedy. And of course my sister’s babe yanked one set off my neck. But they can all be repaired and they will all be repaired.” “Good going.” “Anyway, this apartment is transformed, I mean it, not just superficially but with new hidden pockets of order in it, and I waited until the midafternoon to have a shower, and I did not masturbate, because the illicitness of calling in sick without justification made me want to be pure and virtuous all day long, and I had an early dinner of Carr’s Table Water crackers with cream cheese and sliced pieces of sweet red kosher peppers on them, just delicious, and I did not turn on the TV but instead I turned on the stereo, which I haven’t used much lately. It’s a very fancy stereo.” “Yes?” “I think I spent something like fourteen hundred dollars on it,” she said. “I bought it from someone who was buying an even fancier system. It was true insanity. I had a crush on this person. He liked the Thompson Twins and the S.O.S. Band and, gee, what were the other groups he liked so much? The Gap Band was one. Midnight Star. And Cameo. This was a while ago. He was not a particularly intelligent man, in fact in a way he was a very dimwitted narrow-minded man, but he was so infectiously convinced that what he liked everyone would like if they were exposed to it. And good-looking. For about four months, while I was in his thrall, I really listened to that stuff.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  5 “Then I will come near you for judgment; I will be a swift witness against sorcerers, against adulterers, against perjurers, and against those who oppress the laborer in his wages and widows and the fatherless, and against those who turn away the alien [from his right], and those who do not fear Me [with awe-filled reverence],” says the LORD of hosts. [Deut 24:17 ] 6 “For I am the LORD , I do not change [but remain faithful to My covenant with you]; that is why you, O sons of Jacob, have not come to an end. 7 “Yet from the days of your fathers you have turned away from My statutes and ordinances and have not kept them. Return to Me, and I will return to you,” says the LORD of hosts. “But you say, ‘How shall we return?’ You Have Robbed God 8 “Will a man rob God? Yet you are robbing Me! But you say, ‘In what way have we robbed You?’ In tithes and offerings [you have withheld]. 9 “You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing Me, this whole nation! [Lev 26:14–17 ] 10 “Bring all the tithes (the tenth) into the c storehouse, so that there may be d food in My house, and test Me now in this,” says the LORD of hosts, “if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you [so great] a blessing until there is no more room to receive it. [Mal 2:2 ] 11 “Then I will rebuke the e devourer (insects, plague) for your sake and he will not destroy the fruits of the ground, nor will your vine in the field drop its grapes [before harvest],” says the LORD of hosts. 12 “All nations shall call you happy and blessed, for you shall be a land of delight,” says the LORD of hosts. 13 “Your words have been harsh against Me,” says the LORD . “But you say, ‘What have we spoken against You?’ 14 “You have said, ‘It is useless to serve God. What profit is it if we keep His ordinances, and walk around like mourners before the LORD of hosts? 15 ‘So now we call the arrogant happy and blessed. Evildoers are exalted and prosper; and when they test God, they escape [unpunished].’ ” The Book of Remembrance 16 Then those who feared the LORD [with awe-filled reverence] spoke to one another; and the LORD paid attention and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before Him of those who fear the LORD [with an attitude of reverence and respect] and who esteem His name. 17 “They will be Mine,” says the LORD of hosts, “on that day when I publicly recognize them and openly declare them to be My own possession [that is, My very special treasure].

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  The structural element of things reveals itself more readily to my eye. I eschew all clear-cut interpretations: with increasing simplification the mystery heightens. What I know tends to become more and more unstateable. I live in certitude, a certitude which is not dependent upon proofs or faith. I live completely for myself, without the least egotism or selfishness. I am living out my share of life and thus abetting the scheme of things. I further the development, the enrichment, the evolution and the devolution of the cosmos, every day in every way. I give all I have to give, voluntarily, and take as much as I can possibly ingest. I am a prince and a pirate at the same time. I am the equals sign, the spiritual counterpart of the sign Libra which was wedged into the original Zodiac by separating Virgo from Scorpio. I find that there is plenty of room in the world for everybody—great interspatial depths, great ego universes, great islands of repair, for whoever attains to individuality. On the surface, where the historical battles rage, where everything is interpreted in terms of money and power, there may be crowding, but life only begins when one drops below the surface, when one gives up the struggle, sinks and disappears from sight. Now I can as easily not write as write: there is no longer any compulsion, no longer any therapeutic aspect to it. Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy: I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of it is not my concern. I am not establishing values: I defecate and nourish. There is nothing more to it. This condition of sublime indifference is a logical development of the egocentric life. I lived out the social problem by dying: the real problem is not one of getting on with one’s neighbor or of contributing to the development of one’s country, but of discovering one’s destiny, of making a life in accord with the deep-centered rhythm of the cosmos. To be able to use the word cosmos boldly, to use the word soul, to deal in things “spiritual”—and to shun definitions, alibis, proofs, duties. Paradise is everywhere and every road, if one continues along it far enough, leads to it. One can only go forward by going backward and then sideways and then up and then down. There is no progress: there is perpetual movement, displacement, which is circular, spiral, endless. Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it lead him. I haven’t the slightest idea what my future books will be like, even the one immediately to follow. My charts and plans are the slenderest sort of guides: I scrap them at will, I invent, distort, deform, lie, inflate, exaggerate, confound and confuse as the mood seizes me. I obey only my own instincts and intuitions. I know nothing in advance.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Spare us further instruction! Are we to make green lawns as we advance from trench to trench? Are we landscape artists as well as butchers? Must we storm to victory perfumed like whores? For whom are we mopping up? How fortunate that I had only one reader! Such an indulgent one, too. Every time I sat down to write a page for him I readjusted my skirt, primped my hair-do and powdered my nose. If only he could see me at work, dear Pop! If only he knew the pains I took to give his novel the proper literary cast. What a Marius he had in me! What an Epicurean! Somewhere Paul Valéry has said: “What is of value to us alone (meaning the poets of literature) has no value. This is the law of literature.” Iss dot so now? Tsch, tsch! True, our Valéry was discussing the art of poetry, discussing the poet’s task and purpose, his raison d’être . Myself, I have never understood poetry as poetry. For me the mark of the poet is everywhere, in everything. To distill thought until it hangs in the alembic of a poem, revealing not a speck, not a shadow, not a vaporous breath of the “impurities” from which it was decocted, that for me is a meaningless, worthless pursuit, even though it be the sworn and solemn function of those midwives who toil in the name of Beauty, Form, Intelligence, and so on. I speak of the poet because I was then, in my blissful embryonic state, more nearly that than ever since. I never thought, as did Diderot, that “my ideas are my whores.” Why would I want whores? No, my ideas were a garden of delights. An absent-minded gardener I was, who, though tender and observing, did not attach too much importance to the presence of weeds, thorns, nettles, but craved only the joy of frequenting this place apart, this intimate domain peopled with shrubs, blossoms, flowers, bees, birds, bugs of every variety. I never walked the garden as a pimp, nor even in a fornicating frame of mind. Neither did I invest it as a botanist, an entomologist or a horticulturist. I studied nothing, not even my own wonder. Nor did I christen any blessed thing. The look of a flower was enough, or its perfume. How did the flower come to be? How did anything come to be? If I questioned, it was to ask, “Are you there, little friend? Are the dewdrops still clinging to your petals? ” What could be more considerate—better manners!—than to treat thoughts, ideas, inspirational flashes, as flowers of delight? What better work habits than to greet them with a smile each day or walk among them musing on their evanescent glory? True, now and then I might make so bold as to pluck one for my buttonhole. But to exploit it, to send it out to work like a whore or a stockbroker—unthinkable.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Maria laughed at herself, teased me, and liked it when I made jokes at my own expense. The sudden shift of perspective that the long shot of humor required became habitual to me, something I’ve kept, though with less satisfaction than the practice is supposed to bring. That summer, Maria went to Solitaire, an artists’ colony in the Michigan woods, and in August my father let me join her for a week. All of June and July I’d worked as a stockboy for my father’s haberdasher—boxing and mailing garments, waiting on customers when things got busy, making deliveries, and endlessly repolishing showcases and restacking shirts and stockings. Now riding a train by myself through the hot, flat countryside seemed a rare freedom. I was free to eat, read, and doze when I wanted, to watch the afternoon light burn on silver grain elevators, to swoop past airless fields of luxuriant green and gaunt farmhouses or dilapidated barns painted long ago with now-faded Bull Durham chewing tobacco signs. The train hurtled through towns where cars waited at the crossing and a collie peered down its long nose at an alley cat and the sun found over there a single small window to dazzle—just as I imagined God, if He existed, might find in a whole crowd only one soul turned at the right angle to reflect His glory. And there, bordering that two-lane highway, was planted a row of signs that, word by word, asked a question, gave the joking answer, and ended with the name of a shaving soap, Burma Shave. Those were the years, in the late 1950s, when serious literature was teaching the few serious readers that communication between any two individuals is impossible, that we are all isolated and that this isolation is no accident but due to the “human condition” itself. And yet I, who had been isolated, now found such perfect communion with Maria that I couldn’t detect a single gap between us, and I exalted in our closeness. Of course, there were many differences and omissions, but now during the hot windless evening they were forgotten. We went wandering through the woods, great forests of shabby birches unspooling themselves, until we reached the dunes, climbed them, and looked out at the late afternoon sun reflected by Lake Michigan. We took off our shoes and sat on the beach, digging our feet down into a layer of cold, root-thick marl so much blacker than the hot surface sand. We stared into the sun and talked, our words overlapping, our laughter ringing out across the still, orange water. A loon flew overhead, then dove for a fish. We held hands. I was wearing my suit for the train (for in those days Americans still dressed up for travel), but Maria had on white shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers, nothing more, so for once I felt the older, graver one. I was pale from my shopkeeper’s summer, she as tan as she ever became.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The dawn from vermeil began to grow orange-tawny, at the approach of the sun, when on the Sunday the queen arose and caused all her company rise also. The seneschal had a great while before despatched to the place whither they were to go store of things needful and folk who should there make ready that which behoved, and seeing the queen now on the way, straightway let load everything else, as if the camp were raised thence, and with the household stuff and such of the servants as remained set out in rear of the ladies and gentlemen. The queen, then, with slow step, accompanied and followed by her ladies and the three young men and guided by the song of some score nightingales and other birds, took her way westward, by a little-used footpath, full of green herbs and flowers, which latter now all began to open for the coming sun, and chatting, jesting and laughing with her company, brought them a while before half tierce,[149] without having gone over two thousand paces, to a very fair and rich palace, somewhat upraised above the plain upon a little knoll. Here they entered and having gone all about and viewed the great saloons and the quaint and elegant chambers all throughly furnished with that which pertaineth thereunto, they mightily commended the place and accounted its lord magnificent. Then, going below and seeing the very spacious and cheerful court thereof, the cellars full of choicest wines and the very cool water that welled there in great abundance, they praised it yet more. Thence, as if desirous of repose, they betook themselves to sit in a gallery which commanded all the courtyard and was all full of flowers, such as the season afforded, and leafage, whereupon there came the careful seneschal and entertained and refreshed them with costliest confections and wines of choice. Thereafter, letting open to them a garden, all walled about, which coasted the palace, they entered therein and it seeming to them, at their entering, altogether[150] wonder-goodly, they addressed themselves more intently to view the particulars thereof. It had about it and athwart the middle very spacious alleys, all straight as arrows and embowered with trellises of vines, which made great show of bearing abundance of grapes that year and being then all in blossom, yielded so rare a savour about the garden, that, as it blent with the fragrance of many another sweet-smelling plant that there gave scent, themseemed they were among all the spiceries that ever grew in the Orient. The sides of these alleys were all in a manner walled about with roses, red and white, and jessamine, wherefore not only of a morning, but what while the sun was highest, one might go all about, untouched thereby, neath odoriferous and delightsome shade.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  As I poured a thimbleful of the fiery green liqueur into my glass, I said: “There’s only one thing missing now: a harem .” “Pop supplied the Chartreuse,” she said. “He was so delighted with those pages.” “Let’s hope he’ll like the next fifty pages as much.” “You’re not writing the book for him, Val. You’re writing it for us .” “That’s true,” I said. “I forget that sometimes.” It occurred to me then that I hadn’t told her anything yet about the outline of the real book. “There’s something I have to tell you,” I began. “Or should I? Maybe I ought to keep it to myself a while longer.” She begged me not to tease. “All right, I’ll tell you. It’s about the book I intend to write one day. I’ve got the notes for it all written out. I wrote you a long letter about it, when you were in Vienna or God knows where. I couldn’t send the letter because you gave me no address. Yes, this will really be a book … a huge one. About you and me.” “Didn’t you keep the letter?” “No. I tore it up. Your fault! But I’ve got the notes. Only I won’t show them to you yet.” “Why?” “Because I don’t want any comments. Besides, if we talk about it I may never write the book. Also, there are some things I wouldn’t want you to know about until I had written them out.” “You can trust me,” she said. She began to plead with me. “No use,” I said, “you’ll have to wait.” “But supposing the notes got lost?” “I could write them all over again. That doesn’t worry me in the least.” She was getting miffed now. After all, if the book was about her as well as myself … And so on. But I remained adamant. Knowing very well that she would turn the place upside down in order to lay hands on the notes, I gave her to understand that I had left them at my parents’ home. “I put them where they’ll never find them,” I said. I could tell from the look she gave me that she wasn’t taken in by this. Whatever her move was, she pretended to be resigned, to think no more of it. To sweeten the atmosphere I told her that if the book ever got written, if it ever saw the light of day, she would find herself immortalized. And since that sounded a bit grandiloquent I added, “You may not always recognize yourself but I promise you this, when I get through with your portrait you’ll never be forgotten.” She seemed moved by this. “You sound awfully sure of yourself,” she said. “I have reason to. This book I’ve lived . I can begin anywhere and find my way around. It’s like a lawn with a thousand sprinklers: all I need do is turn on the faucet.” I tapped my head.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Often I put down things which I do not understand myself, secure in the knowledge that later they will become clear and meaningful to me. I have faith in the man who is writing, who is myself, the writer. I do not believe in words, no matter if strung together by the most skillful man: I believe in language, which is something beyond words, something which words give only an inadequate illusion of. Words do not exist separately, except in the minds of scholars, etymologists, philologists, etc. Words divorced from language are dead things, and yield no secrets. A man is revealed in his style, the language which he has created for himself. To the man who is pure at heart I believe that everything is as clear as a bell, even the most esoteric scripts. For such a man there is always mystery, but the mystery is not mysterious, it is logical, natural, ordained, and implicitly accepted. Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it. I would like my words to flow along in the same way that the world flows along, a serpentine movement through incalculable dimensions, axes, latitudes, climates, conditions. I accept a priori my inability to realize such an ideal. It does not bother me in the least. In the ultimate sense, the world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure. In the realization of this, failure is itself eliminated. Like the primal spirit of the universe, like the unshakable Absolute, the One, the All, the creator, i.e., the artist, expresses himself by and through imperfection. It is the stuff of life, the very sign of livingness. One gets nearer to the heart of truth, which I suppose is the ultimate aim of the writer, in the measure that he ceases to struggle, in the measure that he abandons the will. The great writer is the very symbol of life, of the non-perfect. He moves effortlessly, giving the illusion of perfection, from some unknown center which is certainly not the brain center but which is definitely a center, a center connected with the rhythm of the whole universe and consequently as sound, solid, unshakable, as durable, defiant, anarchic, purposeless, as the universe itself. Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life. The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary. If I am a revolutionary, as has been said, it is unconsciously. I am not in revolt against the world order. “I revolutionize,” as Blaise Cendrars said of himself. There is a difference. I can as well live on the minus side of the fence as on the plus side.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  I am as much a part of the present order as any man alive. I have been molded and formed by it; I have revolted against it; and finally I have been forced to accept it or die of a broken heart. But to accept the condition of life in which I happen to find myself does not mean that I believe in or approve of it. I have always endeavored, and I still endeavor, to live my own life in my own way. I have no desire to kill my fellow-man nor to rob him of his possessions nor to persecute him for thinking or behaving other than I do. I am a man of peace whose sole aim is to enjoy life to the utmost. Simple and banal as it sounds, it has nevertheless taken me the greater part of a lifetime to make this a reality. To become a writer was not easy for me. It was not until my thirty-third year that I ventured it. Even then I did not really begin. From the year 1924, when I resolved never again to work for any man but to be my own master absolute, from that year when I began practicing the art, as they say, until the year 1934, nothing I wrote was ever published excepting three or four short texts in magazines of no importance. It was in Paris, in the year 1934, that my first published book was brought out by the Obelisk Press: Tropic of Cancer . It was in Paris, I may add, that I found myself, as a man and as an artist. During those ten years in which I was acquiring mastery over my medium I remained unpublished not because my work was larded with pornography or obscenity but, as I am now convinced, because I had yet to discover my own identity. It was in writing the Tropic of Cancer that I found my own voice. The critics have coined all sorts of images to reveal the supposed character of this work. It could be described very simply, in my opinion, by saying that it was an attempt to blow off steam. If it was not a pleasant, conventional or decorous piece of literature it was at least normal and natural, given the circumstances which made its birth inevitable. After twenty years the critics, most of them at any rate, have conceded that it is a serious work, even a work of art. In the intervening years I have written over twenty-five books, all of them published, and most of them translated into various languages.