I was like Robinson Crusoe on the island of Tobago. For hours at a stretch I would lie in the sun doing nothing, thinking of nothing. To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish with their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven't the faintest idea what it's about or why people should enjoy killing one another; you look at a place like Albania—it was constantly staring me in the eyes—and you say to yourself, yesterday it was Greek, to-day it's Italian, to-morrow it may be German or Japanese, and you let it be anything it chooses to be. When you're right with yourself it doesn't matter which flag is flying over your head or who owns what or whether you speak English or Monongahela. The absence of newspapers, the absence of news about what men are doing in different parts of the world to make life more livable or unlivable is the greatest single boon. If we could just eliminate newspapers a great advance would be made, I am sure of it. Newspapers engender lies, hatred, greed, envy, suspicion, fear, malice. We don't need the truth as it is dished up to us in the daily papers. We need peace and solitude and idleness. If we could all go on strike and honestly disavow all interest in what our neighbor is doing we might get a new lease on life. We might learn to do without telephones and radios and newspapers, without machines of any kind, without factories, without mills, without mines, without explosives, without battleships, without politicians, without lawyers, without canned goods, without gadgets, without razor blades even or cellophane or cigarettes or money. This is a pipe dream, I know.” As a result, this 1941 literary bombshell, ostensibly about Greece, documents Miller's memories of New York inspired by a view of Athens, provides a lengthy disquisition on jazz when he's confronted by a French woman who disdains the chaos of Greece, and paints a disquieting, mad, and ominous picture of Saturn when he climbs to an observatory and views it through a telescope. He tells us his dreams and daydreams and what he wished he would have said. Everything is fair game; the seeming digressions frequent and fabulous. I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my Ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human—a prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit throughout his work. Everywhere there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm, and almost everywhere the implied belief that it doesn't matter. urn:oclc:876234922 Republisher_date 20120228184408 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120228123137 Scanner scribe1.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Source Into this heady political and social mix came Miller's hilarious and breathtaking demolition of the stupidity, greed and hypocrisy of those who had wrought continuing poverty, war and despair on Europe and the world. His emotional investigation of the wild Greek spirit was not just a spit in the eye of the European establishment – who, if they had read Maroussi would have dismissed him as patently dislodged, inflamed, surreal and even mad – but a giant gob in the face of all that was curmudgeonly and mean. There was no hint of objectivity, balance or fairness. This joyful rant expressed the rage and the hopes of mine and every other generation.

A great book, made greater by my travels. Athens is one of my new favourite European cities. Efcharistó Miller. I'll probably write some more stuff here once the holiday has brewed a little longer. Enraptured by a young woman's account of the landscapes of Greece, Henry Miller set off to explore the Grecian countryside with his friend Lawrence Durrell in 1939. In The Colossus of Maroussi he describes drinking from sacred springs, nearly being trampled to death by sheep and encountering the flamboyant Greek poet Katsumbalis, who 'could galvanize the dead with his talk'. This lyrical classic of travel writing represented an epiphany in Miller's life, and is the book he would later cite as his favourite.

A Sea Change by Elisabeth Jane Howard

Unfortunately, our bloviating Greek poet friend is just getting warmed up: English hasn't got any guts to-day. You're all castrated, you've become business men, engineers, technicians. It sounds like wooden money dropping into a sewer.

He goes on to compare Miller to Jonah in the belly of the whale- passive, subjective, with no desire to alter the course of world events (and with the knowledge that he couldn’t, even if he wanted to). Henry Miller’ı müstehcen olduğu gerekçesiyle uzunca bir süre yazıldığı dönemin yasaklı kitapları arasında olan Yengeç ve Oğlak Dönencesi ile tanıdım. Kesinlikle doğru, kitaplar fazla müstehcen olmakla beraber edebi değeri ise paha biçilemez bana göre. Aradan geçen bu sürede Marousi’nin Devi’yle karşımda bambaşka bir Hery Miller buldum. Kitabının son sayfalarında da bunu doğrulayan bir cümlesi var; ‘gözlerim bağlı, bocalayan, kararsız, adımlarla yürümüştüm;gururlu, kibirliydim...’ Lccn 58009511 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL7999683M Openlibrary_editiona b The Colossus of Maroussi By Henry Miller, Introduction by Will Self, Ian S. MacNiven, pp.10-11. On the eve of Clean Straw for Nothing’s publication, Clift overdosed on barbiatuates in Sydney. In a posthumously-published essay, My Husband George, Clift wrote: “I do believe that novelists must be free to write what they like, in any way they liked to write it, and after all who but myself had urged and nagged him into it?” His idealizing the Greek character and landscape and his tendency towards myth-making may at times seem over the top and naïf. Soon though the reader realizes that it is more of an internal landscape that Miller so emotionally describes and that his journey is one of rebirth.

Narrated by four main characters, The Sea Change moves from London to New York to Athens and, finally, to the Greek island of Hydra. The bestselling author of the Cazalet Chronicles Elisabeth Jane Howard, (a brilliant writer who, for the better part, had to put her own literary ambitions on hold to play second-fiddleto that of her husband Kingsley Amis’ budding career) delivers a novel about learning to move beyond the past without giving up our memories, and how we can change and grow. talking of cities, of how he had gotten a mania for Haussmannising the big cities of the world. He would take the map of London, say, or Constantinople, and after the most painstaking study would draw up a new plan of the city, to suit himself … Naturally a great many monuments had to be torn down and new statues, by unheard-of men, erected in their place. While working on Constantinople, for example, he would be seized by a desire to alter Shanghai … It was confusing, to say the least. Having reconstructed one city he would go on to another and then another. There was no let up to it. The walls were papered with the plans for new cities … It was a kind of megalomania, he thought, a sort of glorified constructivism which was a pathologic hangover from his Peloponnesian heritage. I have always felt that the art of telling a story consists in so stimulating the listener's imagination that he drowns himself in his own reveries long before the end. His adventures from this point veer away from Lawrence Durrell, and it's not until later that he makes another appearance, as most of the book Miller is travelling with Katsimbalis, or on his own. They do meet up in the last part, however, for a few more adventures, as he seeks to cram a little more sight-seeing in before being forced to return to New York, much to his displeasure.The war will not only change the map of the world but it will affect the destiny of every one I care about. Already, even before the war had broken out, we were scattered to the four winds, those of us who had lived and worked together and who had no thought to do anything but what we were doing. My friend X, who used to be terrified at the very mention of war, had volunteered for service in the British Army; my friend Y, who was utterly indifferent and who used to say that he would go right on working at the Bibliothèque Nationale war or no war, joined the Foreign Legion; my friend Z, who was an out and out pacifist, volunteered for ambulance service and has never been heard of since; some are in concentration camps in France and Germany, one is rotting away in Siberia, another is in China, another in Mexico, another in Australia. When we meet again some will be blind, some legless, some old and white-haired, some demented, some bitter and cynical. Maybe the world will be a better place to live in, maybe it'll be just the same, maybe it'll be worse than it is now—who knows? The strangest thing of all is that in a universal crisis of this sort one instinctively knows that certain ones are doomed and that others will be spared.” Phew. I read the book and immediately gave it away, not bearing for it to be unshared. I had entered a new realm. I had confirmed that my responsibilities were not just to myself, or to little England, but to the imagination and to something far greater than my present parlous condition. My immediate miserableness and loneliness were as nothing. And so what if I had nothing to show for life, no house or job, money or prospects? I too was a millionaire in spirit. I too had self-belief. Hayatımda ilk kez mutlu olmanın bütün farkındalığıyla mutluydum.Sadece mutlu olmak iyidir, mutlu olduğunu bilmekse daha iyidir; fakat mutlu olduğunu anlamak, bunun neden ve nasıl hangi olayların koşulların bir araya gelmesi sonucunda gerçekleştiğini bilmek ve yine mutlu olmak, varlığında bir bilincinde mutluluk duymak- işte bu mutluluktan öte, saadettir.” I remember reading a quote a while ago. I can’t remember who said it: “no serious person ever thinks about anything except Hitler and Stalin.” That might be an exaggeration, but one would think it would have been less of an exaggeration in 1939. I think Hitler is mentioned once in the book, and the impending war is mentioned a few times, but never with any of the detail that Miller brings to bear, say, on Katsimbalis. Instead, the reference generally sets us up for another long rhapsody. Or anti-rhapsody, whatever that would be called.