Tropic of Cancer

"One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."-Henry Miller 12/26/1891 - 6/7/1980


I am highly excited about my third literature essay due in December. We were given three lists of "Top 100's", and "Most Influential", and my professors "Top Choices" that made up about three-hundred titles of great literary works combined. The best part is that I only recognized a couple, so there is a complete world I haven't even touched. I instantly hung the list up on my refrigerator when I got home, and even "A" got excited because she is constantly reading and always looking for good titles. Look no more.

I was humbled by how little I really now about great literary titles, that is to say I know nothing at all. Yet I have, at one time or another, enjoyed when a book I read gave me a new feeling of awareness and understanding. That, is what the whole sha-banga-bang is about when it comes to literature. So now I have a whole arsenal of good reads dangling from the fridge. I'm so stoked! (I know you think I'm a dork)

I was completely in shock when I saw one book on the long list of choices, was one that I tried to get at my local library last year and didn't, because I was told they would have to order it in for me. "Nah, forget it then," I said to the librarian. Why? Because the lazy habits I've formed for reading in my life has lead to a non-hunger to read. Self awareness can be a wonderful thing. So now, I not only get to redeem myself, but I get to get a good grade for it as well.

The book I was looking for was Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer". The supposed pinnacle of his unorthodox style of literature, here is an abstract.

"Autobiographical novel by Henry Miller, published in France in 1934 and, because of censorship, not published in the United States until 1961. Written in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, it is a monologue about Miller's picaresque life as an impoverished expatriate in France in the early 1930s.

The book benefited from favorable early critical response and gained popular notoriety later as a result of obscenity trials. Containing little plot on narrative, Tropic of Cancer is made up of anecdotes, philosophizing, and rambling celebrations of life. Despite his poverty, Miller extols his manner of living, unfettered as it is by moral and social conventions. He lives largely off the resources of his friends. In exuberant and sometimes preposterous passages of unusual sexual frankness, he chronicles numerous encounters with women, including his mysterious wife Mona, as he pursues a fascination with female sexuality. Tropic of Cancer was the first of an autobiographical trilogy, followed by Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939)."

I love the fact that he feels that civilization tries to stranglehold the imagination, and creativity of the human being. I personally agree, and this book chronicles the unfettered human spirit. I haven't even read the book yet, and I love it. I found interest with the book earlier from a person who commented on one of my posts in the past. He thought I would find interest in it because of my own personal deviant qualities.

It always seems like people want to set a norm, so that they may feel in control. Yet Miller said, "The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order." Whether that be acceptable or unacceptable in your opinion is beside the point. I think I'm going to enjoy this book, and the ones that will come after.














"What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse." - Henry Miller with his wife at left, and her friend right.