In the moment all is dear to me, dear that in this logic there is no
redemption, the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and
every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel
absurdly and humbly great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as the
dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. I no longer look into the eyes of
the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and
I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the
world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever, just the still
germination of events unbroken by night and day, by yesterday and tomorrow.
The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on
points in time; the eye sees forward and backward at will. The eye which was
the I of the self no longer exists; this selfless eye neither reveals nor
illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless,
uninformed voyager. Trying to retain the lost body I grew in logic as the
city, a point digit in the anatomy of perfection. I grew beyond my own
death, spiritually bright and hard. I was divided into endless yesterdays,
endless tomorrows, resting only on the cusp of the event, a wall with many
windows, but the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows, the last
shell of the lost body, if I am to rejoin the present. That is why I no
longer look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of
will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore the curve of
vision. I see around myself as the mother who bore me once saw round the
comers of time. I have broken the wall created by birth and the line of
voyage is round and unbroken, even as the navel. No form, no image, no
architecture, only concentric flights of sheer madness. I am the arrow of
the dream's substantiality. I verify by flight. I nullify by dropping to
earth.
Henry Miller Tropics of Cancer
Pre-Farewell Dublin
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