Matt

“One passes imperceptibly from one scene, one age, one life to another. Suddenly, walking down the street, be it real or be it a dream, one realizes for the first time that the years have flown, that all this has passed forever and will live on only in memory; and then the memory turns inward with a strange, clutching brilliance and one goes over these scenes and incidents perpetually, in dream and reverie, while walking a street, while lying with a woman, while reading a book, while talking to a stranger . . . suddenly, but always with terrific insistence and always with terrific accuracy, these memories intrude, rise up like ghosts and permeate every fiber of one's being. Hencefoward everything moves on shifting levels—our thoughts, our dreams, our actions, our whole life. A parallelogram in which we drom from one platform of our scaffold to another. Henceforward we walk split into myriad fragments, like an insect witha hundred feet, a centipede with soft-stirring feet that drinks in the atmosphere; we walk with sensitive filaments that drink avidly of past and future, and all things melt into music and sorrow; we walk against a united world, asserting our dividedness. All things, as we walk, splitting with us into a myriad iridiscent fragments. The great fragmentation of maturity. The great change. In youth we were whole and the terror and pain of the world penetrated us through and through. There was no sharp separation between joy and sorrow: the fused into one, as our waking life fuses with dream and sleep. We rose one being in the morning and at night we went down into an ocean, drowned out completely, clutching the stars and the fever of the day.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“I love everything that flows,’ said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it’s painful gall-stones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul...”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Nothing is more obscene than inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysis.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“We know that the destruction of an ideal does not necessarily produce a truth, but only one more piece of ignorance; it is the extension of our ‘empty space,’ an increase in our ‘waste.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power