Despair

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.

Page 197 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Into that crack I would like to penetrate up to the eyes, make them waggle ferociously, dear, crazy, metallurgical eyes. When the eyes waggle then will I hear again Dostoevski’s words, hear them rolling on page after page, with minutest observation, with maddest introspection, with all the undertones of misery now lightly, humorously touched, now swelling like an organ note until the heart bursts and there is nothing left but a blinding, scorching light, the radiant light that carries off the fecundating seeds of the stars. The story of art whose roots lie in massacre. 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 who 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. 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. Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have the slightest regard for these existent governments, laws, codes, principles, ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos?

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Carl knows all his tricks by now, and so when Marlowe suddenly claps his hands to his temples and begins to act it out Carl gives him a boot in the ass and says: “Come out of it, you sap! You don’t have to do that with me!” Whether it is a cunning piece of revenge or not, I don’t know, but at any rate Marlowe is paying Carl back in good coin. Leaning over us confidentially he relates in a hoarse, croaking voice a piece of gossip which he picked up in the course of his peregrinations from bar to bar. Carl looks up in amazement. He’s pale under the gills. Marlowe repeats the story with variations. Each time Carl wilts a little more. “But that’s impossible!” he finally blurts out. “No it ain’t!” croaks Marlowe. “You’re gonna lose your job… I got it straight.” Carl looks at me in despair. “Is he shitting me, that bastard?” he murmurs in my ear. And then aloud—“What am I going to do now? I’ll never find another job. It took me a year to land this one.” This, apparently, is all that Marlowe has been waiting to hear. At last he has found someone worse off than himself. “They be hard times!” he croaks, and his bony skull glows with a cold, electric fire. Leaving the Dôme Marlowe explains between hiccups that he’s got to return to San Francisco. He seems genuinely touched now by Carl’s helplessness. He proposes that Carl and I take over the review during his absence. “I can trust you, Carl,” he says. And then suddenly he gets an attack, a real one this time. He almost collapses in the gutter. We haul him to a bistro at the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and sit him down. This time he’s really got It—a blinding headache that makes him squeal and grunt and rock himself to and fro like a dumb brute that’s been struck by a sledge hammer. We spill a couple of Fernet-Brancas down his throat, lay him out on the bench and cover his eyes with his muffler. He lies there groaning. In a little while we hear him snoring. “What about his proposition?” says Carl. “Should we take it up? He says he’ll give me a thousand francs when he comes back. I know he won’t, but what about it?” He looks at Marlowe sprawled out on the bench, lifts the muffler from his eyes, and puts it back again. Suddenly a mischievous grin lights up his face. “Listen, Joe,” he says, beckoning me to move closer, “we’ll take him up on it. We’ll take his lousy review over and we’ll fuck him good and proper.” “What do you mean by that?” “Why we’ll throw out all the other contributors and we’ll fill it with our own shit—that’s what!” “Yeah, but what kind of shit?” “Any kind… he won’t be able to do anything about it. We’ll fuck him good and proper.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The body electric! The democratic soul! Flood tide! Holy Mother of God, what does this crap mean? 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! Stepping off the train I knew immediately that I had made a fatal mistake. The Lycée was a little distance from the station; I walked down the main street in the early dusk of winter, feeling my way toward my destination. A light snow was falling, the trees sparkled with frost. Passed a couple of huge, empty cafés that looked like dismal waiting rooms. Silent, empty gloom—that’s how it impressed me. A hopeless, jerkwater town where mustard is turned out in carload lots, in vats and tuns and barrels and pots and cute-looking little jars. The first glance at the Lycée sent a shudder through me. I felt so undecided that at the entrance I stopped to debate whether I would go in or not. But as I hadn’t the price of a return ticket there wasn’t much use debating the question. I thought for a moment of sending a wire to Fillmore, but then I was stumped to know what excuse to make. The only thing to do was to walk in with my eyes shut. It happened that M. le Proviseur was out—his day off, so they said. A little hunchback came forward and offered to escort me to the office of M. le Censeur, second in charge. I walked a little behind him, fascinated by the grotesque way in which he hobbled along. He was a little monster, such as can be seen on the porch of any halfassed cathedral in Europe. The office of M. le Censeur was large and bare. I sat down in a stiff chair to wait while the hunchback darted off to search for him. I almost felt at home. The atmosphere of the place reminded me vividly of certain charity bureaus back in the States where I used to sit by the hour waiting for some mealy-mouthed bastard to come and cross-examine me. Suddenly the door opened and, with a mincing step, M. le Censeur came prancing in. It was all I could do to suppress a titter. He had on just such a frock coat as Boris used to wear, and over his forehead there hung a bang, a sort of spitcurl such as Smerdyakov might have worn. Grave and brittle, with a lynxlike eye, he wasted no words of cheer on me.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Above all, as Philippe Datz says— “NO DISCOURAGEMENT!” These are sunny thoughts inspired by a vermouth cassis at the Place de la Trinité. A Saturday afternoon and a “misfire” book in my hands. Everything swimming in a divine mucopus. The drink leaves a bitter herbish taste in my mouth, the lees of our Great Western civilization, rotting now like the toenails of the saints. Women are passing by—regiments of them—all swinging their asses in front of me; the chimes are ringing and the buses are climbing the sidewalk and bussing one another. The garçon wipes the table with a dirty rag while the patronne tickles the cash register with fiendish glee. A look of vacuity on my face, blotto, vague in acuity, biting the asses that brush by me. In the belfry opposite the hunchback strikes with a golden mallet and the pigeons scream alarum. I open the book—the book which Nietzsche called “the best German book there is”—and it says: “MEN WILL BECOME MORE CLEVER AND MORE ACUTE; BUT NOT BETTER, HAPPIER, AND STRONGER IN ACTION—OR, AT LEAST, ONLY AT EPOCHS. I FORESEE THE TIME WHEN GOD WILL HAVE NO MORE JOY IN THEM, BUT WILL BREAK UP EVERYTHING FOR A RENEWED CREATION. I AM CERTAIN THAT EVERYTHING IS PLANNED TO THIS END, AND THAT THE TIME AND HOUR IN THE DISTANT FUTURE FOR THE OCCURRENCE OF THIS RENOVATING EPOCH ARE ALREADY FIXED. BUT A LONG TIME WILL ELAPSE FIRST, AND WE MAY STILL FOR THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF YEARS AMUSE OURSELVES ON THIS DEAR OLD SURFACE.” Excellent! At least a hundred years ago there was a man who had vision enough to see that the world was pooped out. Our Western world!—When I see the figures of men and women moving listlessly behind their prison walls, sheltered, secluded for a few brief hours, I am appalled by the potentialities for drama that are still contained in these feeble bodies. Behind the gray walls there are human sparks, and yet never a conflagration. Are these men and women, I ask myself, or are these shadows, shadows of puppets dangled by invisible strings? They move in freedom apparently, but they have nowhere to go. In one realm only are they free and there they may roam at will—but they have not yet learned how to take wing. So far there have been no dreams that have taken wing. Not one man has been born light enough, gay enough, to leave the earth! The eagles who flapped their mighty pinions for a while came crashing heavily to earth. They made us dizzy with the flap and whir of their wings. Stay on the earth, you eagles of the future! The heavens have been explored and they are empty. And what lies under the earth is empty too, filled with bones and shadows. Stay on the earth and swim another few hundred thousand years!

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  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. As I watch Van Norden tackle her, it seems to me that I’m looking at a machine whose cogs have slipped. Left to themselves, they could go on this way forever, grinding and slipping, without ever anything happening. Until a hand shuts the motor off. The sight of them coupled like a pair of goats without the least spark of passion, grinding and grinding away for no reason except the fifteen francs, washes away every bit of feeling I have except the inhuman one of satisfying my curiosity. The girl is lying on the edge of the bed and Van Norden is bent over her like a satyr with his two feet solidly planted on the floor. I am sitting on a chair behind him, watching their movements with a cool, scientific detachment; it doesn’t matter to me if it should last forever. It’s like watching one of those crazy machines which throw the newspaper out, millions and billions and trillions of them with their meaningless headlines. The machine seems more sensible, crazy as it is, and more fascinating to watch, than the human beings and the events which produced it. My interest in Van Norden and the girl is nil; if I could sit like this and watch every single performance going on at this minute all over the world my interest would be even less than nil. I wouldn’t be able to differentiate between this phenomenon and the rain falling or a volcano erupting. As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance. The machine is better to watch. And these two are like a machine which has slipped its cogs. It needs the touch of a human hand to set it right. It needs a mechanic. I get down on my knees behind Van Norden and I examine the machine more attentively. The girl throws her head on one side and gives me a despairing look. “It’s no use,” she says. “It’s impossible.” Upon which Van Norden sets to work with renewed energy, just like an old billy goat. He’s such an obstinate cuss that he’ll break his horns rather than give up. And he’s getting sore now because I’m tickling him in the rump. “For God’s sake, Joe, give it up! You’ll kill the poor girl.” “Leave me alone,” he grunts.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  No hotels in the past participle, no subjunctive modes, no conjunctivitis. Everything is hoary, grisly, bristling with merriment, swollen with the future, like a gumboil. Drunk with this lecherous eczema of the future, I stagger over to the Place Violet, the colors all mauve and slate, the doorways so low that only dwarfs and goblins could hobble in; over the dull cranium of Zola the chimneys are belching pure coke, while the Madonna of Sandwiches listens with cabbage ears to the bubbling of the gas tanks, those beautiful bloated toads which squat by the roadside. Why do I suddenly recollect the Passage des Thermopyles? Because that day a woman addressed her puppy in the apocalyptic language of the slaughterhouse, and the little bitch, she understood what this greasy slut of a midwife was saying. How that depressed me! More even than the sight of those whimpering curs that were being sold on the Rue Brancion, because it was not the dogs which filled me so with pity, but the huge iron railing, those rusty spikes which seemed to stand between me and my rightful life. In the pleasant little lane near the Abattoir de Vaugirard (Abattoir Hippophagique), which is called the Rue des Périchaux, I had noticed here and there signs of blood. Just as Strindberg in his madness had recognized omens and portents in the very flagging of the Pension Orfila, so, as 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. I saw my own blood being spilled, the muddy road stained with it, as far back as I could remember, from the very beginning doubtless. 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. 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. Passing under the viaduct along the Rue Broca, one night after I had been informed that Mona was ill and starving, 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.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  He’s such an obstinate cuss that he’ll break his horns rather than give up. And he’s getting sore now because I’m tickling him in the rump. “For God’s sake, Joe, give it up! You’ll kill the poor girl.” “Leave me alone,” he grunts. “I almost got it in that time.” The posture and the determined way in which he blurts this out suddenly bring to my mind, for the second time, the remembrance of my dream. Only now it seems as though that broomstick, which he had so nonchalantly slung under his arm, as he walked away, is lost forever. It is like the sequel to the dream— the same Van Norden, but minus the primal cause. 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. He’s like a machine throwing out newspapers, millions and billions of them every day, and the front page is loaded with catastrophes, with riots, murders, explosions, collisions, but he doesn’t feel anything. If somebody doesn’t turn the switch off he’ll never know what it means to die; you can’t die if your own proper body has been stolen. You can get over a cunt and work away like a billy goat until eternity; you can go to the trenches and be blown to bits; nothing will create that spark of passion if there isn’t the intervention of a human hand. Somebody has to put his hand into the machine and let it be wrenched off if the cogs are to mesh again. Somebody has to do this without hope of reward, without concern over the fifteen francs; somebody whose chest is so thin that a medal would make him hunchbacked. And somebody has to throw a feed into a starving cunt without fear of pushing it out again. Otherwise this show’ll go on forever. There’s no way out of the mess. ... After sucking the boss’s ass for a whole week—it’s the thing to do here—I managed to land Peckover’s job. He died all right, the poor devil, a few hours after he hit the bottom of the shaft. And just as I predicted, they gave him a fine funeral, with solemn mass, huge wreaths, and everything. Tout compris. And after the ceremonies they regaled themselves, the upstairs guys, at a bistro. It was too bad Peckover couldn’t have had just a little snack—he would have appreciated it so much to sit with the men upstairs and hear his own name mentioned so frequently.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon. I think it was the Fourth of July when they took the chair from under my ass again. Not a word of warning. One of the big muck-a-mucks from the other side of the water had decided to make economies; cutting down on proofreaders and helpless little dactylos enabled him to pay the expenses of his trips back and forth and the palatial quarters he occupied at the Ritz. After paying what little debts I had accumulated among the linotype operators and a goodwill token at the bistro across the way, in order to preserve my credit, there was scarcely anything left out of my final pay. I had to notify the patron of the hotel that I would be leaving; I didn’t tell him why because he’d have worried about his measly two hundred francs. “What’ll you do if you lose your job?” That was the phrase that rang in my ears continually. Ça y est maintenant! Ausgespielt! Nothing to do but to get down into the street again, walk, hang around, sit on benches, kill time. By now, of course, my face was familiar in Montparnasse; for a while I could pretend that I was still working on the paper. That would make it a little easier to bum a breakfast or a dinner. It was summertime and the tourists were pouring in. I had schemes up my sleeve for mulcting them. “What’ll you do. ...?” Well, I wouldn’t starve, that’s one thing. If I should do nothing else but concentrate on food that would prevent me from falling to pieces. For a week or two I could still go to Monsieur Paul’s and have a square meal every evening; he wouldn’t know whether I was working or not. The main thing is to eat. Trust to Providence for the rest! Naturally, I kept my ears open for anything that sounded like a little dough. And I cultivated a whole new set of acquaintances—bores whom I had sedulously avoided heretofore, drunks whom I loathed, artists who had a little money, Guggenheim-prize men, etc. It’s not hard to make friends when you squat on a terrasse twelve hours a day. You get to know every sot in Montparnasse. They cling to you like lice, even if you have nothing to offer them but your ears. Now that I had lost my job Carl and Van Norden had a new phrase for me: “What if your wife should arrive now?” Well, what of it? Two mouths to feed, instead of one. I’d have a companion in misery. And, if she hadn’t lost her good looks, I’d probably do better in double harness than alone: the world never permits a good-looking woman to starve.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  That’s why she threw herself in the Seine. She babbled on this way about how crazy she was and then suddenly she had an idea. “Let’s go to Bricktop’s!” There was a man there whom she knew... he had promised her a job once. She was certain he would help her. “What’s it going to cost?” asked Fillmore cautiously. It would cost a lot, she let him know that immediately. “But listen, if you take me to Bricktop’s, I promise to go home with you.” She was honest enough to add that it might cost him five or six hundred francs. “But I’m worth it! You don’t know what a woman I am. There isn’t another women like me in all Paris. ...” “That’s what you think!” His Yankee blood was coming to the fore. “But I don’t see it. I don’t see that you’re worth anything. You’re just a poor crazy son- of-a-bitch. Frankly, I’d rather give fifty francs to some poor French girl; at least they give you something in return.” She hit the ceiling when he mentioned the French girls. “Don’t talk to me about those women! I hate them! They’re stupid... they’re ugly... they’re mercenary. Stop it, I tell you!” In a moment she had subsided again. She was on a new tack. “Darling,” she murmured, “you don’t know what I look like when I’m undressed. I’m beautiful!” And she held her breasts with her two hands. But Fillmore remained unimpressed. “You’re a bitch!” he said coldly. “I wouldn’t mind spending a few hundred francs on you, but you’re crazy. You haven’t even washed your face. Your breath stinks. I don’t give a damn whether you’re a princess or not... I don’t want any of your high-assed Russian variety. You ought to get out in the street and hustle for it. You’re no better than any little French girl. You’re not as good. I wouldn’t piss away another sou on you. You ought to go to America—that’s the place for a bloodsucking leech like you. ...” She didn’t seem to be at all put out by this speech. “I think you’re just a little afraid of me,” she said. “Afraid of you? Of you?” “You’re just a little boy,” she said. “You have no manners. When you know me better you will talk differently. ... Why don’t you try to be nice? If you don’t want to go with me tonight, very well. I will be at the Rond-Point tomorrow between five and seven. I like you.” “I don’t intend to be at the Rond-Point tomorrow, or any other night! I don’t want to see you again... ever. I’m through with you. I’m going out and find myself a nice little French girl. You can go to hell!” She looked at him and smiled wearily. “That’s what you say now. But wait! Wait until you’ve slept with me.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  He would borrow his father-in-law’s car, for example, and tear about the countryside all by himself; if he saw a town that he liked he would plank himself down and have a good time until Ginette came searching for him. Sometimes the father-in-law and he would go off together—on a fishing trip, presumably—and nothing would be heard of them for days. He became exasperatingly capricious and exacting. I suppose he figured he might as well get what he could out of it. When he returned to Paris with Ginette he had a complete new wardrobe and a pocketful of dough. He looked cheerful and healthy, and had a fine coat of tan. He looked sound as a berry to me. But as soon as we had gotten away from Ginette he opened up. His job was gone and his money had all run out. In a month or so they were to be married. Meanwhile the parents were supplying the dough. “Once they’ve got me properly in their clutches,” he said, “I’ll be nothing but a slave to them. The father thinks he’s going to open up a stationery store for me. Ginette will handle the customers, take in the money, etc., while I sit in the back of the store and write—or something. Can you picture me sitting in the back of a stationery store for the rest of my life? Ginette thinks it’s an excellent idea. She likes to handle money. I’d rather go back to the château than submit to such a scheme.” For the time being, of course, he was pretending that everything was hunky-dory. I tried to persuade him to go back to America but he wouldn’t hear of that. He said he wasn’t going to be driven out of France by a lot of ignorant peasants. He had an idea that he would slip out of sight for a while and then take up quarters in some outlying section of the city where he’d not be likely to stumble upon her. But we soon decided that that was impossible: you can’t hide away in France as you can in America. “You could go to Belgium for a while,” I suggested. “But what’ll I do for money?” he said promptly. “You can’t get a job in these goddamned countries.” “Why don’t you marry her and get a divorce, then?” I asked. “And meanwhile she’ll be dropping a kid. Who’s going to take care of the kid, eh?” “How do you know she’s going to have a kid?” I said, determined now that the moment had come to spill the beans. “How do I know?” he said. He didn’t quite seem to know what I was insinuating. I gave him an inkling of what Yvette had said. He listened to me in complete bewilderment. Finally he interrupted me. “It’s no use going on with that,” he said. “I know she’s going to have a kid, all right. I’ve felt it kicking around inside.

• From The Girls (2016)

  The city. She was not in the city, and thank god for that. It was Dom, of course, but not only Dom. Even before Dom, something had soured. In March she had turned twenty-two without fanfare. She had a recurring stye that drooped her left eyelid unpleasantly. The makeup she applied to cover it only made it worse: she reinfected herself, the stye pulsing for months. Finally she’d gotten an antibiotic prescribed at a walk-in clinic. Every night she tugged on her lids and squeezed a line of medicated ointment straight into the socket. Involuntary tears streamed only from her left eye. On the subway, or on the sidewalks, woolly with new snow, Alex had started to notice strangers giving her a certain look. Their gaze lingering. A woman in a plaid mohair coat studied Alex with unnerving focus, her expression twisted with what seemed like mounting concern. A man, his wrists white under the strain of many plastic bags, stared at Alex until she finally got off the train. What were people seeing in her aura, what stink was emanating? Maybe she was imagining it. But maybe not. She’d been twenty when she first arrived in the city. Back when she still had the energy to use a fake name and still believed gestures like that had value, meant the things she was doing weren’t actually happening in her real life. Back when she kept lists: The names of the places she went with the men. Restaurants that charged for bread and butter. Restaurants that refolded your napkin when you went to the bathroom. Restaurants that only served steak, pink but flavorless and thick as a hardcover book. Brunches at mid-range hotels, with unripe strawberries and too-sweet juice, slurry with pulp. But the appeal of the lists wore off quickly or something about them started to depress her, so she stopped. Now Alex was no longer welcome in certain hotel bars, had to avoid certain restaurants. Whatever charm she had was losing its potency. Not fully, not totally, but enough that she began to understand it was a possibility. She’d seen it happen to others, the older girls she’d known since moving here. They defected for their hometowns, making a grab at a normal life, or else disappeared entirely. In April: A manager had, in low tones, threatened to call the police after she’d tried to charge dinner to an old client’s account. Too many of her usuals stopped reaching out, for whatever reason— ultimatums eked

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  endless possibilities of language, to which I could once safely abandon myself, became a conglomeration of the most inane phrases. There was not an expression in the sentence but it proved to be a miserable crutch, not a word but it sounded false and hollow. And in this dreadful state of mind I sat for hours, for days on end with my face to the wall, tormenting myself and gradually discovering the horror of finding that even the smallest task or duty, for instance arranging assorted objects in a drawer, can be beyond one’s power. It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me and would gradually paralyze my entire system. I already felt in my head the dreadful torpor that heralds disintegration of the personality, I sensed that in truth I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world. If someone had come then to lead me away to a place of execution I would have gone meekly, without a word, without so much as opening my eyes, just as people who suffer from violent seasickness, if they are crossing the Caspian Sea on a steamer, for instance, will not offer the slightest resistance should someone tell them that they are about to be thrown overboard. Whatever was going on within me, said Austerlitz, the panic I felt on facing the Start of any sentence that must be written, not knowing how I could begin it or indeed any other sentence, soon extended to what is in itself the simpler business of reading, until if I attempted to read a whole page I inevitably fell into a state of the greatest confusion. If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up, and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl anymore, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge. The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog. I could not even understand what I myself had written in the past—perhaps I could understand that least of all. All I could think was that such a sentence only appears to mean something, but in truth is at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us. The very thing which may usually convey a sense of purposeful intelligence—the exposition of an idea by means of a certain stylistic facility—now seemed to me

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  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. At one-thirty I called on Van Norden, as per agreement. He had warned me that if he didn’t answer it would mean that he was sleeping with someone, probably his Georgia cunt. Anyway, there he was, tucked away comfortably, but with an air of weariness as usual. He wakes up cursing himself, or cursing the job, or cursing life. He wakes up utterly bored and discomfited, chagrined to think that he did not die overnight. I sit down by the window and give him what encouragement I can. It is tedious work. One has to actually coax him out of bed. Mornings—he means by mornings anywhere between one and five p.m.—mornings, as I say, he gives himself up to reveries. Mostly it is about the past he dreams. About his “cunts.” He endeavors to recall how they felt, what they said to him at certain critical moments, where he laid them, and so on. And as he lies there, grinning and cursing, he manipulates his fingers in that curious, bored way of his, as though to convey the impression that his disgust is too great for words. Over the bedstead hangs a douche bag which he keeps for emergencies—for the virgins whom he tracks down like a sleuth.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  So off they went, somewhat pickled, and in the best of humor. All the time that Fillmore was at the château I never once went to see him. It wasn’t necessary, because Ginette visited him regularly and gave me all the news. They had hopes of bringing him around in a few months, so she said. They thought it was alcoholic poisoning—nothing more. Of course, he had a dose—but that wasn’t difficult to remedy. So far as they could see, he didn’t have syphilis. That was something. So, to begin with, they used the stomach pump on him. They cleaned his system out thoroughly. He was so weak for a while that he couldn’t get out of bed. He was depressed, too. He said he didn’t want to be cured—he wanted to die. And he kept repeating this nonsense so insistently that finally they grew alarmed. I suppose it wouldn’t have been a very good recommendation if he had committed suicide. Anyway, they began to give him mental treatment. And in between times they pulled out his teeth, more and more of them, until he didn’t have a tooth left in his head. He was supposed to feel fine after that, yet strangely he didn’t. He became more despondent than ever. And then his hair began to fall out. Finally he developed a paranoid streak—began to accuse them of all sorts of things, demanded to know by what right he was being detained, what he had done to warrant being locked up, etc. After a terrible fit of despondency he would suddenly become energetic and threaten to blow up the place if they didn’t release him. And to make it worse, as far as Ginette was concerned, he had gotten all over his notion of marrying her. He told her straight up and down that he had no intention of marrying her, and that if she was crazy enough to go and have a child then she could support it herself. The doctors interpreted all this as a good sign. They said he was coming round. Ginette, of course, thought he was crazier than ever, but she was praying for him to be released so that she could take him to the country where it would be quiet and peaceful and where he would come to his right senses. Meanwhile her parents had come to Paris on a visit and had even gone so far as to visit the future son-in-law at the château. In their canny way they had probably figured it out that it would be better for their daughter to have a crazy husband than no husband at all. The father thought he could find something for Fillmore to do on the farm. He said that Fillmore wasn’t such a bad chap at all. When he learned from Ginette that Fillmore’s parents had money he became even more indulgent, more understanding. The thing was working itself out nicely all around.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The only thing for nonenslaved man to do is to move out to the edge, lose contact with the machines of organization which are as ubiquitous in this country as in Russia. “Instead of bucking your head against a stone wall, sit quietly with hands folded and wait for the walls to crumble. ... Don’t sit and pray that it will happen! Just sit and watch it happen!” These sayings the culture littérateur condemns as irresponsible. Miller follows through with the complete program of nonparticipation in our machine society, which is organized from the cradle to the grave. “Just as Gandhi successfully exploited the doctrine of nonresistance, so these ‘saints of the just’ practiced non-recognition—nonrecognition of sin, guilt, fear and disease... even death.” Whitman also believed in nonrecognition of death. His view of death as part of life is one of the many reasons for his unpopularity in America, where death is considered a crime against society. “Why try to solve a problem? Dissolve it! [says Miller]. Fear not to be a coward, a traitor, a renegade. In this universe of ours there is room for all, perhaps even need for all. The sun does not inquire about rank and status before shedding its warmth; the cyclone levels the godly and the ungodly; the government takes your tax money even though it be tainted. Nor is the atom bomb a respecter of persons. Perhaps that is why the righteous are squirming so!” All of this is about modern America and the high cost of security. Do we really have a high standard of living? Miller says not, as most poets do. If living means appreciation of life we have the lowest standard of living in the world, in spite of the fact that it costs more to live in America than in any country in the world. Miller says “the cost is not only in dollars and cents but in sweat and blood, in frustration, ennui, broken homes, smashed ideals, illness and insanity. We have the most wonderful hospitals, the most fabulous prisons, the best equipped and highest paid army and navy, the speediest bombers, the largest stockpile of atom bombs, yet never enough of any of these items to satisfy the demand. Our manual workers are the highest paid in the world; our poets the worst. ...”

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  All were found shot dead.387 Charged with murder was Marcus Wesson, the fifty-seven-year-old patriarch of a family “cult” and “master manipulator.”388 Wesson taught his family he was “God’s messenger” and that the “end times” were “close at hand.” The family was reportedly heavily “indoctrinated by Marcus Wesson’s ‘bastardization’ of religion.” Wesson wrote his own version of the Bible, and he insisted on daily “bible studies.”389 The Wesson family included seventeen children, seven nieces and nephews. A stern disciplinarian, Marcus Wesson dictated everything, including diet, dress, and home schooling. He didn’t have a regular job but instead managed whatever money those in his household earned. According to Wesson’s son Dorian his father was “psychotic, delusional and narcissistic.” Another son Adrian said, “He was God. That’s just the way it was.” Punishments were often brutal. One of Wesson’s children recalled being beaten with wire for twenty minutes for simply sneaking a spoonful of peanut butter. “It felt like being in a prison. Very depressing—like, hopeless. And you felt trapped…nowhere to go,” his daughter Gypsy Wesson told ABC News .390 In private, individual conversations Wesson convinced each of his daughters that the Bible mandated incest.391 He fathered eighteen children with seven women, including his daughters and nieces. At times Wesson fed his family from trash cans, while he ate hamburgers and junk food.392 Born in Kansas, Marcus Wesson, was raised by a “devout Seventh-day Adventist” mother and “alcoholic father.” His family wandered from state to state, moving from Missouri to Kansas, to Indiana, to California, and then to Washington.393 Wesson served in the army during the Vietnam War as an ambulance driver in Europe. He returned to the United States in 1968. In 1971 he moved into the home of single mother Rosemary Solorio in San Jose, California. Solorio had children, and one of her daughters, Elizabeth Solorio, married Wesson during 1974. He was twenty-seven, and she was fifteen. By the 1980s Marcus and Elizabeth Wesson had a family of nine children.394 At various times the family lived in a tent, on a boat, on a bus, and on “bare land,” according to court documents. In 1981 Wesson managed to buy a home with a loan of $60,000. In 1990 he was convicted of welfare fraud and perjury.395 The family occupied a succession of homes purchased by various family members.396 Wesson began to sexually touch his daughters when they were eight and nine years old. “I didn’t know anything else and I thought it was all right,” Kiani Wesson told ABC News . “Such was his control over their minds that he could even send them out into the world and they didn’t blow the whistle,” commented psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, director of the Hallowell Centers in New York and Boston.397 According to testimony in court, Wesson was fascinated with cult leader David Koresh.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I thought to myself [said Miller]—you poor old futzer, you, just wait until I get it off my chest. … I’ll give you an Horatio Alger book. … My head was in a whirl to leave his office. I saw the army of men, women and children that had passed through my hands, saw them weeping, begging, beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming, threatening. I saw the tracks they left on the highways, lying on the floor of freight trains, the parents in rags, the coal box empty, the sink running over, the walls sweating and between the cold beads of sweat the cockroaches running like mad; I saw them hobbling along like twisted gnomes or falling backwards in the epileptic frenzy. … I saw the walls giving way and the pest pouring out like a winged fluid, and the men higher up with their ironclad logic, waiting for it to blow over, waiting for everything to be patched up, waiting, waiting contentedly… saying that things were temporarily out of order. I saw the Horatio Alger hero, the dream of a sick America, mounting higher and higher, first messenger, then operator, then manager, then chief, then superintendent, then vice-president, then president, then trust magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all the Americas, the money god, the god of gods, the clay of clay, nullity on high, zero with ninety-seven thousand decimals fore and aft. … I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the day after the Apocalypse, when all the stink has cleared away. And he did. Miller’s first book, Tropic of Cancer , was published in Paris in 1934 and was immediately famous and immediately banned in all English-speaking countries. It is the Horatio Alger story with a vengeance. Miller had walked out of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company one day without a word; ever after he lived on his wits. He had managed to get to Paris on ten dollars, where he lived more than a decade, not during the gay prosperous twenties but during the Great Depression. He starved, made friends by the score, mastered the French language and his own. It was not until the Second World War broke out that he returned to America to live at Big Sur, California. Among his best books several were banned: the two Tropics (Tropic of Cancer , 1934, and Tropic of Capricorn , 1939); Black Spring , 1936; and part of the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion (including Sexus, Plexus , and Nexus ). Unfortunately for Miller he has been a man without honor in his own country and in his own language. When Tropic of Cancer was published he was even denied entrance into England, held over in custody by the port authorities and returned to France by the next boat. He made friends with his jailer and wrote a charming essay about him. But Miller has no sense of despair.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  A century of unrest, of materialism, and of “progress,” as we say. Purgatorial in every sense of the word, and the writers who flourished in that period reflect this ominously. Wars and revolutions were abundant. Russia alone, we are told, waged thirty-three wars (mostly of conquest) during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Shortly after Rimbaud is born his father is off to the Crimean War. So is Tolstoy. The revolution of 1848, of brief duration but full of consequences, is followed by the bloody Commune of 1871, which Rimbaud as a boy is thought to have participated in. In 1848 we in America are fighting the Mexicans with whom we are now great friends, though the Mexicans are not too sure of it. During this war Thoreau makes his famous speech on Civil Disobedience, a document which will one day be added to the Emancipation Proclamation. … Twelve years later the Civil War breaks out, perhaps the bloodiest of all civil wars. … From 1874 until his death in 1881 Amiel is writing his Journal Intime … which… gives a thoroughgoing analysis of the moral dilemma in which the creative spirits of the time found themselves. The very titles of the books written by influential writers of the nineteenth century are revelatory. I give just a few… The Sickness unto Death (Kierkegaard), Dreams and Life (Gérard de Nerval), Les Fleurs du Mal (Baudelaire), Les Chants de Maldoror (Lautréamont), The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), La Bête Humaine (Zola), Hunger (Knut Hamsun), Les Lauriers Sont Coupés (Dujardin), The Conquest of Bread (Kropotkin), Looking Backward (Edward Bellamy), Alice in Wonderland, The Serpent in Paradise (Sacher-Masoch), Les Paradis Artificiels (Baudelaire), Dead Souls (Gogol), The House of the Dead (Dostoevski), The Wild Duck (Ibsen), The Inferno (Strindberg), The Nether World (Gissing), A Rebours (Huysmans). … Goethe’s Faust was not so very old when Rimbaud asked a friend for a copy of it. Remember the date of his birth is October 20th, 1854 (6:00 A.M. Western Standard Diabolical Time). The very next year, 1855, Leaves of Grass makes its appearance, followed by condemnation and suppression. Meanwhile Moby Dick had come out (1851) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854). In 1855 Gérard de Nerval commits suicide, having lasted till the remarkable age of 47. In 1854 Kierkegaard is already penning his last words to history in which he gives the parable of “The Sacrificed Ones.” Just four or five years before Rimbaud completes A Season in Hell (1873), Lautréamont publishes his celebrated piece of blasphemy, another “work of youth,” as we say, in order not to take these heartbreaking testaments seriously. … By 1888 Nietzsche is explaining to Brandes that he can now boast three readers: Brandes, Taine, and Strindberg. The next year he goes mad and remains that way until his death in 1900. Lucky man! From 1893 to 1897 Strindberg is experiencing a crise … which he describes with magisterial effects in The Inferno .

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I FORESEE THE TIME WHEN GOD WILL HAVE NO MORE JOY IN THEM, BUT WILL BREAK UP EVERYTHING FOR A RENEWED CREATION. I AM CERTAIN THAT EVERYTHING IS PLANNED TO THIS END, AND THAT THE TIME AND HOUR IN THE DISTANT FUTURE FOR THE OCCURRENCE OF THIS RENOVATING EPOCH ARE ALREADY FIXED. BUT A LONG TIME WILL ELAPSE FIRST, AND WE MAY STILL FOR THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF YEARS AMUSE OURSELVES ON THIS DEAR OLD SURFACE. ” Excellent! At least a hundred years ago there was a man who had vision enough to see that the world was pooped out. Our Western world! —When I see the figures of men and women moving listlessly behind their prison walls, sheltered, secluded for a few brief hours, I am appalled by the potentialities for drama that are still contained in these feeble bodies. Behind the gray walls there are human sparks, and yet never a conflagration. Are these men and women, I ask myself, or are these shadows, shadows of puppets dangled by invisible strings? They move in freedom apparently, but they have nowhere to go. In one realm only are they free and there they may roam at will—but they have not yet learned how to take wing. So far there have been no dreams that have taken wing. Not one man has been born light enough, gay enough, to leave the earth! The eagles who flapped their mighty pinions for a while came crashing heavily to earth. They made us dizzy with the flap and whir of their wings. Stay on the earth, you eagles of the future! The heavens have been explored and they are empty. And what lies under the earth is empty too, filled with bones and shadows. Stay on the earth and swim another few hundred thousand years! And now it is three o’clock in the morning and we have a couple of trollops here who are doing somersaults on the bare floor. Fillmore is walking around naked with a goblet in his hand, and that paunch of his is drumtight, hard as a fistula. All the Pernod and champagne and cognac and Anjou which he guzzled from three in the afternoon on, is gurgling in his trap like a sewer. The girls are putting their ears to his belly as if it were a music box. Open his mouth with a buttonhook and drop a slug in the slot. When the sewer gurgles I hear the bats flying out of the belfry and the dream slides into artifice. The girls have undressed and we are examining the floor to make sure that they won’t get any splinters in their ass. They are still wearing their high-heeled shoes. But the ass! The ass is worn down, scraped, sandpapered, smooth, hard, bright as a billiard ball or the skull of a leper. On the wall is Mona’s picture: she is facing northeast on a line with Cracow written in green ink.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The father thinks he’s going to open up a stationery store for me. Ginette will handle the customers, take in the money, etc., while I sit in the back of the store and write—or something. Can you picture me sitting in the back of a stationery store for the rest of my life? Ginette thinks it’s an excellent idea. She likes to handle money. I’d rather go back to the château than submit to such a scheme.” For the time being, of course, he was pretending that everything was hunky- dory. I tried to persuade him to go back to America but he wouldn’t hear of that. He said he wasn’t going to be driven out of France by a lot of ignorant peasants. He had an idea that he would slip out of sight for a while and then take up quarters in some outlying section of the city where he’d not be likely to stumble upon her. But we soon decided that that was impossible: you can’t hide away in France as you can in America. “You could go to Belgium for a while,” I suggested. “But what’ll I do for money?” he said promptly. “You can’t get a job in these goddamned countries.” “Why don’t you marry her and get a divorce, then?” I asked. “And meanwhile she’ll be dropping a kid. Who’s going to take care of the kid, eh?” “How do you know she’s going to have a kid?” I said, determined now that the moment had come to spill the beans. “How do I know?” he said. He didn’t quite seem to know what I was insinuating. I gave him an inkling of what Yvette had said. He listened to me in complete bewilderment. Finally he interrupted me. “It’s no use going on with that,” he said. “I know she’s going to have a kid, all right. I’ve felt it kicking around inside. Yvette’s a dirty little slut. You see, I didn’t want to tell you, but up until the time I went to the hospital I was shelling out for Yvette too. Then when the crash came I couldn’t do any more for her. I figured out that I had done enough for the both of them. ... I made up my mind to look after myself first. That made Yvette sore. She told Ginette that she was going to get even with me. ... No, I wish it were true, what she said. Then I could get out of this thing more easily. Now I’m in a trap. I’ve promised to marry her and I’ll have to go through with it. After that I don’t know what’ll happen to me. They’ve got me by the balls now.”