Henry Miller

[Paul DiFilippo]

Has anyone ever looked at Henry Miller and his writings in
relation to TRP?  If there are no direct allusions/parallels, I
think there is certainly an indirect one, insofar as Miller
represented a great loosening of the kind TRP describes in
his SLOW LEARNER intro.  In any case, I was moved to these
reflections by reading a Miller essay on Nin ("Un Etre Etoilique")
in which Miller seems almost to presage the arrival of a TRP-like
figure:  "Of the truly great authors no one has ever complained
that they over-elaborated.  On the contrary, we usually bemoan
the fact that there is nothing further left us to read.  And so
we turn back to what we have and we re-read, and as we re-read we 
discover marvels which we had previously ignored.  We go back to
them again and again, as to inexhuastible wells of wisdom and
delight.  Almost invariably, it is curious to note, these authors
of whom I speak are observed to be precisely those who have given us 
more than the others.  They claim us precisely because we sense
in them an unquenchable flame.  Nothing they wrote seems to us
insignifivant--not even their notes, their jottings, not even
the designs which they scribbled unconsciously in the margins
of their copy books.  Whereas with the meagre spirits everything
seems superfluous, themselves as well as the works they have
given us."

--
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"I have almost nothing in common with myself"--Franz Kafka
"I do the best imitation of myself."  Ben Folds Five