a few pithy lines work well in this book. most of the vignettess strike me as egotistical however.

A tribute and love letter to the remote coastal outpost where Miller settled after his return from Europe. He found there a landscape and community that retained for him the promise of America that he felt had been unfulfilled in much of the country. In addition to portraits of his Big Sur neighbors and descriptions of the area's natural wonders, the book contains an often hilarious account of a disastrous visit from Miller's Swiss born astrologer Conrad Moricand that was also published separately as A Devil in Paradise.

I love Henry Miller. Not a disciplined writer, but the gusto with which he approached life is transfered onto the page and is always invigorating. This is possibly the most spiritual of his books. It his him reflecting and being as still as he could be, rather than throwing himself at situations and people. But even when he's still, he is still with the same passion as when he is in motion. Tropic of Capricorn is my favorite book of him in motion (young), this is my favorite book of him being still (older).

This is a good book to read on and off over months or years. It's a rambling commentary on life in West Coast America, the people who live in rural California and art and books and learning.

“I came to join the cult of sex and anarchy,” he said, quietly and evenly, as if he were talking about toast and coffee. I told him there was no such colony.” And that's pretty much the only mention about sex in the entire book. So if you're expecting 404 pages of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Quiet Days in Clichy “sex and anarchy” from Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, you're going to be just as disappointed as Ralph – the starry eyed young man with dreams of becoming a writer, whom Henry Miller met one midsummer afternoon, pacing back and forth outside his converted convict's shack in Anderson Creek, California. That's not to say Big Sur and the Oranges is disappointing, or that you won't find anarchy (there's plenty of homespun, homeopathic, day in, day out anarchy, just not the Tropical, squirmy, heat-generating chaos of Eros, Himeros and Aphrodite). What you are going to discover, however, surprisingly, antithetically, asymmetrically, incongruously, nonconformably, unorthodoxly, is Henry Miller – Man of God.

And not some Bible passage spewing, hymn singing, beatitude reciting, front pew piously pounding, thumping Christian without the Christ caricature of godliness. But the William Blake, Dostoevsky, Walt Whitman, Ramakrishna, Francis of Assis, Jesus without the Christ without the Christian, Alan Watts, Abe Lincoln and “do as I do, not as I say” mysticism of the extraordinary ordinary God incarnate in man – and in this case, the 5 times married, pornographer, painter, philosopher and poet of life, Henry Valentine Miller.

In Miller's admittedly favourite of his countless writings, Chronos surrenders to Kairos. Linear, seasonal, historical, workweek, weekend time, January 1st to December 31st time, 365 days of the year time, time that progresses one consecutive day at a time, abdicates in favour of random, exhaling, inhaling Big Sur time. Time where marriage is preceded by divorce time, where one child, Val, is preceded by 2 children Val and Tony time – which all boils down to Henry Miller time. Which too, as you maze your way through Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, you begin to divine is closer to God's time – Kairos.

A time outside of time where everything happens at once, where 100,000,000 lives multiplied by 100,000,000 years are lived non-linearly, where history is just a state of mind. Henry Miller writes, paints (over 2,000 watercolours) raises his kids, bickers with his wife, cleans out his septic tank, takes long, inspiring walks along the cliffs of Big Sur California, ruminates on the order, or disorder of the universe, on God, on Jesus, the Buddha, the noble peasant, and his beatific Christian Scientist neighbour, Jean Wharton. He also complains of not having the required solitude needed for his writing, with so many people dropping by unannounced, so many fan letters to respond to; he expounds gently on how unnecessary it is to discipline your children; he is gracious and effusive whenever talking about friends and neighbours (with the exception of “The Devil in Paradise”), even the crackpots, especially the crackpots, even the hobos, especially the hobos, the architects, the “coloured bootlack,” the artists, novelists, poets, backyard philosophers, scientists, housewives, scrub-ground farmers and idealists who patch in and patch up the patchwork community of Miller's Big Sur paradise – his flawed and quirky little stretch of heaven on earth, where he'd landed by way of New York, by way of Greece, by way of Paris “in the midst of a violent downpour,” in 1944, chronological time.

As you may have guessed, this is not a review, but an impression. A highly favourable, 4 star impression of an intimately rendered, autobiographical hodge-podge of loosely connected, chronologically challenged vignettes, by one of my now favourite authors, Henry Miller. Who writes so much like another of my favourite authors, Fyodor Dostoevsky: tangentially, long windedly, honestly, and with a hell of a lot more substance than form, and who also lived, breathed, sinned, ranted, wrote, prayed bodily, silently, subversively, with all the breathless, godlike intensity of the unknowable, unthinkable, unspeakable...

Incredible. Great book by a great man. His descriptions of paradise are beautiful, as well as his character sketch on Moricand, the derelict French astrologer who crashed in on his paradise in Big Sur for a bit too long of a stay.

I could not get into this book. Miller just comes across as a womanizing, pompus ass. I was supposed to read this in a class about writing that looks at writers perspectives on writing. Miller was a poor example in my opinion. He seemed more concerned with name dropping and telling personal tales that fueled his own ego and than actually delivering a good piece of advice or story.

Published in 1956. I like that the epilogue originally was intended to be issued as a pamphlet under the title, “This is my answer”… written in 1946.
I didn’t enjoy large parts of the book, as it hopped from autobiographical detail (his water colors, childrearing (rich vs. poor)...fan mail) to social commentary... I skimmed quite a bit of the 400 pages when what started as potentially amusing seemed to meander without a point.

However, there were some memorable lines, and a chance to walk down memory lane of French lit, including Balzac and Restif de la Bretonne. Some of the pages pop with amusing anecdotes of fellow artists.--ex. p. 170 I enjoyed his comments on suffering fools gladly and Delteil who creates Jesus the Second who encounters Old Adam: "Gestes que tout cela... jeux de mains, ombres chinoises, phénomenologie..." The evil's not there... it is within. It is not act but state. Being and not doing. "Evil is in the soul"...
Is this Delteil or Miller having fun?

I was hopeful that Bosch would receive more of a mention by p. 237, with the discussion of "the task of genuine love"... however, there was no further mention. It was followed by an episode at Slade's Spring, where Miller encounters an India-rubber-skinned fellow at whom he pokes merciless fun. The following chapter starts with quote from MN Chatterjee's "Out of Confusion". "If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there.". Indeed, this is how I felt mid-way through the book.

It also was the beginning of my favorite chapter of the book. A description of America, the flip and froth of "deluded dipsydoodlers" . "When we were a young nation life was crude and simple. Our great enemy then was the redskin. (He became our enemy when we took his land away from him.). In those early days there were no chain stores, no delivery lines, no hired purchase plan, no vitamins, no supersonic flying fortresses, no electronic computers; ... All one needed for protection was a musket in one hand and a Bible in the other. " He continues about America's idea of freeing the rest of the world... "we are almost at the point now where we may be able to exterminate every man, woman and child throughout the globe who is unwilling to accept the kind of freedom we advocate.

Someone wrote in the margin of p. 262 "Who could have said it better" as Miller launches into
a page about belonging... and the plight of those who live in a nation dead set against living simply and wisely. p. 268: "The great hoax which we are perpetuating every day of our lives is that we are making life easier, more comfortable, more enjoyable, more profitable. We are doing just the contrary.". Waste. "Our thoughts, our energies, our very lives are being used up to create what is unwise, unnecessary, unhealthy.".

I like his take on human beings:
We are in two worlds at once:
1) the one we think we’re in;
2) the one we would like to be in.

I felt in reading it, it was a peek into a the mind of a genius… sometimes amusing, sometimes fire-crackly-witty, and sometimes a providing a tedious mirror of name-dropping wannabes milling about trying not to feel useless and unfit for life’s struggles.
Uplifting it is not. I admire how he can play with fiction—clearly, he has the power to create whatever world he wants.

I didn’t realize that many of his books were banned!
The copy of the book I got out of the library was hiding in the basement stacks, out of view. I love that there were reviews… and concur with much said:
“A good part of the book seems to have been tossed together… the author, in an unusually mellow mood, simply following his nose around Big Sur. (paradise in an isolated, physically primitive, though intellectually sophisticated, community). Portrait sketching of friends, neighbors, in sympathetic appreciations… the third part tells the story of Conrad Moricand’s disastrous descent on this West Coast Paradise...
Imaginative verve. this provocative writer reveals a world to us of cosmic grandeur and personal fulfillment… it can be ours if we will stop bucking our heads against a stone wall of strife and competition…”

Well… I agree with the final reviewer who found the book boring… but not wholly, "as there are generous and genuine bits of wisdom, philosophical and human, sown throughout; but they are so curiously interwoven, interlarded, or generally interpenetrated, with the jejune and the trust that one can only marvel at the mind of the writer for whom they seem to exist at the same level.”

Take home points:
— questions to ponder: does it matter if we live a day or 1,000 years? Does “what was not” speak more eloquently than “what was”?
Was there a beginning? “Nature smiling at herself in the mirror of eternity”.

The windows of the soul are so infinite… if your paradise is flawed, just open more windows!
We never complain of wasting time in a good dream… so… consider life as a dream, and remember Confucious:
“if man sees truth in the morning… he may die in the evening without regret.”

To give you a flavor of his ramblings:
How are you doing these days living with yourself?
To reach a reader, use language of “not-ness”… and the reader with feel with equal despair and bewilderment, common purpose and all-embracing significance.

Well.. certainly, Miller provides us an extensive reading list.. starting with "The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch" by Wilhelm Fränger... which provides the title.

Wha-bam! Miller does it again! Blows my mind, that is. This is a great H. Miller book to read if all the sex in his other books is a turn if for you. He's a bit more....stable in his older years, but just as inightful.

Bought at the Henry Miller library - magic little place in Big Sur — being at the place he wrote this book brought this text to life. Beautiful descriptions of Big Sur but also meaningful insight into education, poverty, generosity, spirituality and rationality. I dig his views ( mostly). I think what struck me most in this text is Miller’s views towards creation and giving. It’s like …. we all know that we live in a capitalist wage labor nightmare, but Miller really brings it home. Enough to make a girl want to move to Big Sur and become a blacksmith and never answer a phone again.

Biggest complaint - simply not enough about Bosch.

This book was fun to read, It opens the reader up to the process of Henry Miller, as well as the more conscious thoughts of his life rather than the artistic statements and cosmic wisdom.

I picked this up on a whim, as it's Henry Miller's account of his time in my near-neighberhood. So far, it's a confusing mess, mostly about people I've never heard of, and could care less about.

I might skim on a bit for local color, but so far it looks like an early DNF. Tant pis.

When I think of Henry Miller:

You, too?