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Rimbaud tiên tri thế kỷ 20. Miller tiên tri thế kỷ 21.

New Review:
On a second read years later, I find Miller's voice in this way too hippie new age, bombastically "spiritual" and guru-esque than societally critical, though there are a few gem lines here and there, the overall effect is ruined by his messianic aspirations.
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Old Review:

Perhaps Miller's best work, the only other vying for the prize would be Tropic of Cancer. But there's a certain retrospective concision and focus in this book that gives Miller the platform he needs in a way dissimilar and unique to Tropic of Cancer. And seeing as almost all his books following Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring are pale shadows of the joy, rebellion, and experimentation of those works, this book stands alone as one of his best for distancing itself from his drained out autobio fiction saga by then submerged in morasses of the past, sluggish, ugly things. Oscar Wilde on being released from prison could no longer write because the suffering of it had stifled his joy and pleasure. Rimbaud could no longer write because poetry did not bestow him the intangible grandeur he'd desired so before. But Miller kept writing through all things, he painted here and there, and I forget if he wrote to his dying day, but he was okay with dredging up the past time and time again, he was a metaphysical randy as all hell huckster. When he writes about America, there's not one good word, which I appreciate but it's not fun reading. For me all his best work is about Paris and the French, and so is this one via Rimbaud.

Quotes:
What we obviously lack in America, what we are not even aware we lack, is the dreamer, the inspired madperson.

As the voice of the poet becomes stifled, history loses its meaning and the eschatological promise bursts like a new and frightening dawn upon the consciousness of humanity.

It is the past which is engulfing us, not the future. The future always has and always will belong to the poet.

I believe that the dreamer, no matter how impractical they may appear to the man in the street, is a thousand times more capable, more efficient than the statesman.

The only law which is really lived up to whole-heartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity.

Humanity's greatest dread is the expansion of consciousness. All the fearsome, gruesome part of mythology stems from this fear. "Let us live in peace and harmony!" begs the little man. But the law of the universe dictates that peace and harmony can only be won by inner struggle. (Infinitist deconditioned logic)

Whose voice is it that now makes itself heard, the poet's or the scientist's? Are we thinking of beauty, however bitter, or are we thinking of atomic energy? And what is the chief emotion which our great discoveries now inspire? Dread! We have knowledge without wisdom, comfort without security, belief without faith. The poetry of life is expressed only in terms of the mathematical, the physical, the chemical. The poet is the pariah, an anomaly. They are on the way to extinction. Who cares now how monstrous they make themselves?

We have never thought of power in terms of good, only in terms of evil.

What humans want are food, shelter, clothing--basic things--not money.

And for the rebel above all humans it is necessary to know love, to give it even more than to receive it, and to be it even more than to give it.

He is in our world but not of it; his allegiance is elsewhere. It is his mission to seduce us, to render intolerable this limited world which bounds us. (4D human being)

The scientist's instinct for life is perverted
For both Rimbaud and Van Gogh the cup of bitterness was filled to overflowing (like Denis before the 60s)

Humanity's greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge out little flame with the central fire of the universe

And life for the modern human had become an eternal Hell for the simple reason that they have lost all hope for attaining paradise. They do not even believe in a paradise of their own creation.
The true ancestors of the visionaries live in the future, distant humans much unlike the past.

He changes identity so thoroughly that if he were to pass himself on the road he would not recognize himself. This is perhaps the last desperate way of tricking madness--to become so utterly sane that one does not know one is insane.

All forms, all orders of being from the angels to the worms, are struggling to communicate with those above and below (communication through the chain of being to free consciousness to unshackle perception)

The sage remains silent after the creation of their values to give voice to them in silence and have them heard that much more.

Similarly, he refused to recognize an ideal society composed of soul-less bodies manipulated from their political or economic centers

Narcism introduces a fear greater than all others--the loss of identity.

Let us have a new heaven and a new earth!--that was the sense of Rimbaud's obstinate revolt

The moral crisis of the 19th century has merely given way to the spiritual bankruptcy of the 20th.

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