Essence of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer"

While I've fallen behind in my "essence of" theme posts, I haven't by any means fallen behind in my reading.

Next will be a piece that I feel represents well Saul Bellow's "Humboltd's Gift".

But first, Miller's thoughts on why Paris can make a poor man feel rich and NY, make even a rockefeller feel like a broke dirt-bag beggar (in my own words).

In Miller's words -- my favorite passage begins half way through paragraph 2 @ "A Wagon...":



"Pont Alexandre III. A great windswept space approaching the bridge. Gaunt, bare trees mathematically fixed in their iron grates; the gloom of the Invalides welling out of the dome and overflowing the dark streets adjacent to the Square. The morgue of poetry. They have him where they want him now, the great warror, the last big man of Europe. He sleeps soundly in his granite bed. No fear of him turning over in his grave. The doors are well bolted, the lid is on tight. Sleep, Napoleon! It was not your ideas they wanted, it was only your corpse!
       The river is still swollen, muddy, streaked with lights. I don't know what it is rushes up in me at the sight of this dark, swift-moving current, but a great exultation lifts me up, affirms the deep wish that is in me never to leave this land. I remember passing this way the other morning on my way to the American Express, knowing in advance that there would be no mail for me, no check, no cable, nothing, nothing. A wagon from the Galleries Lafayette was rumbling over the bridge. The rain had stopped and the sun breaking through the soapy clouds touched the glistening rubble of roofs with a cold fire. I recall now how the driver leaned out and looked up the river toward Passy way. Such a healthy, simple, approving glace, as if he were saying to himself: "Ah, spring is coming!" And God knows, when springs comes to Paris, the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise. But in was not only this -- it was the intimacy with which his eye rested upon the scene. It was his Paris. A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen to feel this way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people -- the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth, it seems to me. And yet they give the illusion of being at home. It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all other metropolitan souls.
        When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, maligh. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A trememdnous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.
       When I thinking of this city where I was born and raised, this Manhattan that Whitman sang of, a blind, white rage licks my guts. New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joins that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves.... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. And forty-second Street! The top fo the world, they call it. Where the bottom then? You can walk along with your hands out and they'll put cinders in your cap. Rich or poor, they walk along with head thrown back and they almost break their necks looking up at their beautiful white prisons. They walk along like blind geese and the searchlights spray their empty faces with flecks of ecstasy."     



That's it folks - I spared you Miller's 3 page description of a prostitute's "rose bush".

Stay tuned for a passage of Canadian born - Chicago raised 1976 nobel (literature) prize winner Saul Bellow.