Tropic of Cancer

Early on Sunday morning, I finished reading Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. The book described the author's time in Paris during the 1930s, and included graphic descriptions of his sexual escapades there. In between those vivid scenes, there were some really beautiful stream-of-consciousness mental explosions, which were nothing less than poetic.

Here are my top three quotes from Tropic of Cancer:

"Lawyer, priest, doctor, politician, newspaperman -- these are the quacks who have their fingers on the pulse of the world. A constant atmosphere of calamity. It's marvelous. It's as if the barometer never changed, as if the flag were always at half-mast." -- page 146

"One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard." -- pages 183-84

"It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!" -- page 257

Yeah, man, in the spirit of that last quote, let's all dance like this guy: