SLPAD - 128 - “Entropy” - 2 - epigraph

[Michael Bailey]

The epigraph -
“Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet.
The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more
death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change
anywhere. . . . We must get into step, a lockstep toward the prison of
death. There is no escape. The weather will not change. — Tropic of Cancer”

I found this rather nifty article
https://www.literarytraveler.com/articles/miller_paris/

“At this point, I might as well admit that every male college student of
the 1960s and ’70s owned *Tropic of Cancer*. “


The downside of the Bohemian lifestyle is right there in the opening lines
of _Tropic of Cancer_ but (as the article mentions) undergraduates tended
to concentrate on the copious sex and humor - both types: “funny-“ and
“good”

My impression of “Entropy” based on a couple shallow readings is: doesn’t
at least one aspect of it involve examining the lifestyle of self-conscious
Bohemians with an eye to maybe minimizing the glamour, and analyzing the
base & superstructure of its reality? (Proto-Whole-Sick-Crew?)

The only way to give that idea even more prominence than Henry Miller did
by putting this miserabilist pronunciamento at the head of the story -

Is by placing it even before the story!

Seems like, doesn’t it?

My ready-made thesis, which no doubt will be overwhelmed by the actual
story, is that there isn’t a character in “Entropy” with the ebullient
energy Henry Miller radiated in his books, and thus no counter or cure for
Boris’s depressing description. But also I expect (and seem to vaguely
recall) maybe some other data transmogrifying the scene, with a Pynchonian
spin.