Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
I said a moment ago that I enjoy writing letters, that it is a veritable passion with me. What grieves me is that I seldom find time to write those with whom I should enjoy regular communication. I mean my intimate friends, those who speak my own language. These letters I usually reserve till the last horn, till I am virtually worn out. Not to write these individuals more freely, more frequently, is in the nature of a deprivation, one result of which is that I find myself writing to them in my sleep. I could fill a page with the names of all those I would dearly love to keep in touch with.
Then there are writers with whom one would like to open communication. Reading a book, or a literary review, I suddenly find myself all afire. “Write him immediately!” I exclaim to myself. (If only to say Amen.) But I don’t. I think of all the letters lying unanswered on my desk. The same old battle—between duty and desire. I limp along with the poor in spirit instead of romping with the gay old dogs. How I curse myself now and then!
Every so often I break out. Of a sudden I will take it into my head to write someone at the other end of the world—someone in Mozambique, Lahore, Cochin-China. I know in advance I shall never get a reply. No matter. It does the soul good. Obeying such impulses, I have written at odd moments to men like Keyserling, Céline, Giono, Francis Carco, Hermann Hesse, Jean Cocteau. Sometimes an answer is forthcoming, and then I am overwhelmed. Then it was a good day, a red-letter day. Then I thank Uncle Sam for the service he renders us: I bless the pilots in the stratosphere who deliver the goods, come wind, hail, snow, rain, sleet, frost, fog or rot.
And then there are times when such a stillness invades me that I am amazed to think I ever wanted to pen a letter to any one, even to God. “Wherever you are, you must be getting the message!” So powerful are the radiations emanating from within that I feel certain they reach to the most hidden recesses of the globe. Sometimes, as if in corroboration of this feeling, I receive a letter from a distant friend with whom I had silently communicated in these bright, quiet moments. We should have more such moments, all of us. Many more than we ordinarily do. We should get to know it for a fact, accept it as the norm, live by it, that it is possible to communicate instantly with whomever one wishes, at any time, no matter how remote (in any sense of the word) the person may be. When we are one with ourselves all is one. When we are completely alive we need no mail carriers, no telegraph or telephone lines. We do not even need wings. We are there, everywhere, without making a move.
I am certain that if I ever permanently attain such a state of being there will be no correspondence to plague me. A radiant being is like a sun which shines whether commanded to or not.
It is for me, then, to lift myself by the bootstraps, to remain in the heavens of my own being.
Curious, is it not, to see what a point I have reached in trying to solve my problem! How could I have foreseen, when beginning this lament, that I would arrive at such an admission? Was it not I who said: “Tackle your problems creatively!” What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Anyway, what began as a complaint, or appeal, ends as a prayer. Only get desperate enough, I said, and the light will dawn. Yes, the light is dawning for me now. More and more clearly I see that the solution lies wholly with me. It is I who have to change, I who must exhibit more faith and trust, more confidence in life itself.
It is good that I obeyed the impulse to voice my thoughts. Maybe it will do you good as well as me. For whatever itches me must itch you too. None of us is exempt. We are all one substance, one problem, one solution.
When first I beheld this wondrous region I thought to myself—“Here I will find peace. Here I shall find the strength to do the work I was made to do.”
Back of the ridge which overshadows us is a wilderness in which scarcely anyone ever sets foot. It is a great forest and game reserve intended to be set apart forever. At night one feels the silence all about, a silence which begins far back of the ridge and which creeps in with the fog and the stars, with the warm valley winds, and which carries in its folds a mystery as deep as the earth’s own. A magnetic, healing ambiance. The advent of city folk, with their cares and worries, is pure dissonance. Like the lepers of old, they come with their sores. Whoever settles here hopes that he will be the last invader. The very look of the land makes one long to keep it intact—the spiritual reserve of a few bright spirits.
Of late I have come to take a different view of it. Walking the hills at dawn, or at dusk, looking over the deep canyons or seaward toward the far horizon, absorbed in reveries, drowned in the awesome beauty of it all, I sometimes think how wonderful will be the day when all these mountain sides are filled with habitations, when the slopes are terraced with fields, when flowers burst forth everywhere, not only wild flowers but flowers planted by human hands for human delectation. I try to imagine what it may be like a hundred, five hundred, years hence. I picture villas dotting the slopes, and colossal stairways curving down to the sea where boats lie at anchor, their colorful sails unfurled and flapping listlessly in the breeze. I see ledges cut into the sharp flanks of the cliffs, to give purchase to chapels and monasteries suspended between heaven and earth, as in Greece. I see tables spread under brilliant awnings (as in the time of the Doges), and wine flowing into golden goblets, and over the glitter of gold and purple I hear laughter, laughter like pearling rapids, rising from thousands of jubilant throats. …
Yes, I can visualize multitudes living where now there are only a few scattered families. There is room here for thousands upon thousands to come. There would be no need for a Jake to deliver food and mail three times a week. There would be ways and means undreamed of today. It could happen, in fact, in a very few years from now. What we dream is the reality of tomorrow.
This place can be a paradise. It is now, for those who live it. But then it will be another paradise, one in which all share, all participate. The only paradise, after all.
Peace and solitude! I have had a taste of it, even here in America. Ah, those first days on Partington Ridge! On rising I would go to the cabin door and, casting my eyes over the velvety, rolling hills, such a feeling of contentment, such a feeling of gratitude was mine that instinctively my hand went up in benediction. Blessings! Blessings on you, one and all! I blessed the trees, the birds, the dogs, the cats, I blessed the flowers, the pomegranates, the thorny cactus, I blessed men and women everywhere, no matter on which side of the fence they happened to be.
That is how I like to begin each day. A day well begun, I say. And that is why I choose to remain here, on the slopes of the Santa Lucia, where to give thanks to the Creator comes natural and easy. Out yonder they may curse, revile and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world, with noble, ancient trees, scrub and sagebrush, wild lilac and lovely lupin, with poppies and buzzards, eagles and humming birds, gophers and rattlesnakes, and sea and sky unending.
Finis.
Big Sur, California
May, 1955-June, 1956.
* My Friend, Henry Miller, by Alfred Perlès; published by Neville Spearman, Ltd., London, 1955, and also by the John Day Co., New York, 1956.
* The title is taken from the book of the same name by Étienne Cabet wherein the latter describes his (imaginary) Utopia. A remarkable work in this, that though Communistic in the romantic sense, it is an accurate blueprint of the totalitarian governments we now have.
* From Manas, Los Angeles, March 23, 1955.
* The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch, by Wilhelm Fränger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), page 104.
* ”The human mind has drawn a net of logical relationships and practical ingenuity over the phenomenal world with which it is confronted; and
so, by this intellectual and material domination of the world, it has removed itself to an infinite distance from the created world in which it once had a purely natural share. It was this natural world in which the Brethren of the Free Spirit saw the meaning of life.†(The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch, page 152.)
* See the passage from Cingria’s diary quoted by Pierre Guéguen in the March 1, 1955 issue of the N.R.F. His text is called “Le Dandy.”
* If a Man Be Mad, by Harold Maine (pseudonym) (New York: Double-day & Co., 1947).
* Since I wrote the above he’s been fired. H. M.
* Published by Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1947.
* Which is what he did a few months after the above was written.
* Forever China, by Robert Payne (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1945).
* The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, by Count Hermann Keyserling (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1925), Vol. II.
* Originally published in two sections in the New Directions Annuals 9 and 11, it has now been reprinted in one volume under the title: The Time of the Assassins (New York: New Directions, 1956).
* The House of Certain Death, by Albert Cossery (New York: New Directions, 1949).
* By J. P. Wharton; distributed by Wharton Publishers, Box 303, Los Gatos, California.
* The Gospel of Ramakrishna, published by the Vedanta Society, N. Y.
* See his account of this enterprise in the illustrated brochure dealing with the production of the book.
* De J.-J. Rousseau à Mistral by Joseph Delteil (Paris: Editions du Capitole, 1928).
† Charles Dickens (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1906).
‡ Jesus II, by Joseph Delteil (Paris: Flammarion, 1947).
* The Menninger Story (New York: Doubleday, 1956).
* Recounted in The Air-conditioned Nightmare (New York: New Directions, 1945).
† In the second volume of The Books in My Life.
* I give just a few snatches of those aspects of Milosz which fired me: (1.) "Pendant toute sa vie, Milosz tiendra Don Quichotte pour le synonyme de l'homme." (2.) "Ill commenca ses études (1896) à l'Ecole du Louvre et à l'Ecole des Langue Orientales. Il y étudia l'art phénicien et assyrien, ainsi que l'épigraphie orientale sous la direction du célèbre traducteur de la Bible, Eugène Ledrain... Avec une passion innée, il apprit la cryptographie des langue palestino-mesopotamienne. Etudiant la préhistoire, il songe à l'origine même de l'humanité, à celle du cosmos et à sa cause primordiale." (3.) "Milsoz qui avait une vocation spirituelle indéniable, vivait dépaysé dans ce monde auquel il ne s'adaptait pas; il sentit toujours qu'il n'était créé pour le bonheur humain, que sa naissance avait déjà été une chute, et que son enfance était comme le souvenir d l'était comme le souvenir de l'époque où il prit conscience de la gravité de cette chute." (4.) "La Nature (si belle aux yeux de la plupart des hommes), cette nature, au sein de laquelle nous vivons depuis des millénaires, est une sorte d'absolu de la laideur et de l'infamie. Nous ne la supportons que parce que, tout au fond de nous-mêmes, survit le souvenir d'une premieère nature qui est divine et vraie. Dans cette nature seconde, qui nouse environne, tout est mauvais indiciblement." (Milosz' own words.) These citations are taken from a book called O. V. de L. Milosz: sa vie, son oeuvre, son rayonnement, by Geneviève-Irène Zidonis: Olivier Perrin, Editeur, 198 Boulevard Saint-Germain. Paris. 1951. (A gift from the French Consulate at Los Angeles, California.)
† The Books in My Life (New York: New Directions, 1952).
* Restif de la Bretonne: Témoignages et Jugements: Bibliographie; Au dépens de l’auteur. En vente à la Librairie Briffaut, 4, rue de Furstemburg, Paris (6), 1949.
* Kahlil Gibran: A Biography, by Mikhail Naimy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950). (Translated from the Arabic.)
* Out of Confusion, by M. N. Chatterjee (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1954).
* The Pool of Wisdom, by J. Krishnamurti (Holland: Star Publishing Trust, 1928).
* Italics mine.
* Taken from the editorial, “Socrates for Europe,” Manas, Los Angeles, California, Dec. 7, 1955.
* Taken from “Reasons Why Longer Life Is Possible,” by Dr. Leo L. Spears, of the Spears Chiropractic Sanitarium and Hospital, Denver, Colorado. Dr. Spears has since died of a heart attack.
* Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1928.
* My original intention in composing this text.
* The edition published by Horace Liveright, New York, 1929.
COPYRIGHT © 1957 by New Directions Publishing Corporation
The chapter called “Paradise Lost” was published as a separate book and called A Devil in Paradise, Copyright © 1956 by Henry Miller
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
For permission to reprint quotations from other works the author and publisher are grateful to the following: The Antioch Press for M. J. Chatterjee’s OUT OF CONFUSION; Dodd, Mead and Co. and William Heinemann Ltd. (London) for Robert Payne’s FOREVER CHINA (Eng. title: CHUNGKING DIARY); University of Chicago and Faber & Faber Ltd. (London) for Wilhelm Fränger’s THE MILLENNIUM OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH; Joseph Delteil for his Jesus II and DE JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU A MISTRAL; Dodd, Mead and Co., Methuen and Co. Ltd. (London) and Miss D. E. Collins for G. K. Chesterton’s CHARLES DICKENS; Harcourt, Brace and Co. Inc. and Jonathan Cape Ltd. (London) for Count Keyserling’s THE TRAVEL DIARY OF A PHILOSOPHER (vol. II); Olivier Perrin Editeur (Paris) for Genevieve-Irene Zidonis’ O. V. DE L. MILOSZ: SA VIE, SON OEUVRE, SON RAYONNEMENT; Philosophical Library Inc. for Mikhail Naimy’s KAHLIL GIBRAN: A BIOGRAPHY; Poetry-London for Elizabeth Smart’s BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT; D. Rajagopal for J. Krishnamurti’s THE POOL OF WISDOM; The Vedanta Society for THE GOSPEL OF RAMAKRISHNA; Librairie Briffaut (Paris) for RESTIF DE LA BRETONNE: TEMOIGNAGES ET JUGEMENTS: BIBLIOGRAPHIE; Dr. Leo L. Spears for his “Reasons Why Longer Life Is Possible” and Manas, (Los Angeles) for “Socrates for Europe” and a review of LIVING THE GOOD LIFE.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 57-5542
eISBN 978-0-8112-1970-9
First published as an e-book in 2011.
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011.
also by Henry Miller
THE AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE
ALLER RETOUR NEW YORK
THE BOOKS IN MY LIFE
THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSSI
THE COSMOLOGICAL EYE
A DEVIL IN PARADISE.
THE DURRELL-MILLER LETTERS, 1935-1980
FROM YOUR CAPRICORN FRIEND; HENRY MILLER & THE STROKER 1978-1980
HENRY MILLER ON WRITING
THE HENRY MILLER READER
INTO THE HEART OF LIFE:
HENRY MILLER AT 100
JUST WILD ABOUT HARRY
LETTERS TO EMIL
THE NIGHTMARE NOTEBOOK
THE SMILE AT THE FOOT OF THE LADDER
STAND STILL LIKE THE HUMMINGBIRD
THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS
THE WISDOM OF THE HEART
Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
(Series: # )
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