Review: The Henry Miller Reader

The Henry Miller Reader by Henry Miller
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

...Listening to their recital I got the impression that the whole neighborhood was crippled and riddled with malignant diseases.

Everybody with whom they had any dealings, friend, relative, neighbor, butcher, letter-carrier, gas inspector, every one without exception carried about with him perpetually a little flower which grew out of his own body and which was named after one or the other of the familiar maladies, such as rheumatism, arthritis, pneumonia, cancer, dropsy, anemia, dysentery, meningitis, epilepsy, hernia, encephalitis, megalomania, chilblains, dyspepsia and so on and so forth. Those who weren't crippled, diseased or insane were out of work and living on relief. Those who could use their legs were on line at the movies waiting for the doors to be thrown open. I was reminded in a mild way of Voyage au Bout de la Nuit. The difference between these two worlds other- wise so similar lay in the standard of living; even those on relief were living under conditions which would have seemed luxurious to that suburban working class whom Céline writes about. In Brooklyn, so it seemed to me, they were dying of malnutrition of the soul. They lived on as vegetable tissue, flabby, sleep-drugged, disease-ridden carcasses with just enough intelligence to enable them to buy oil burners, radios, automobiles, news-papers, tickets for the cinema.

"Why are so many people into astrology?"

“Someone might struggle to admit they’re feeling vulnerable, but can more easily acknowledge ‘my Cancer moon is really sensitive today,’” Solas ["an Irish psychic intuitive"] says.

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