by Henry Miller
These lines from the preface to The Decline of the West are-to haunt me for many a year. It happens that I have taken to reading the book during the lonely vigils which have begun. Every evening after dinner I return to the room, make myself snug and cosy, then settle down to gnaw at this immense tome in which the panorama of human destiny is unrolled. I am fully aware that the study of this great work represents another momentous event in my life. For me it is not a philosophy of history nor a morphological creation, but a world-poem. Slowly, attentively, savouring each morsel as I chew it, I burrow deeper and deeper. I drown myself in it. Often I break the siege by pacing to and fro, to and fro. Sometimes I find myself sitting on the bed, staring at the wall. I look right through the wall: I look deep into a past which is alive and fathomless. Occasionally a line or phrase comes with such impact that I am forced out of the nest, flung headlong into the street, where I wander like a somnambulist. Now and then I find myself in Joe’s restaurant at Borough Hall, ordering a big meal; with each mouthful I seem to be swallowing another mighty epoch of the past. Unconsciously I stoke the furnace in order to gird myself for another wrestling bout with the omnivorous one. That I am of the borough of Brooklyn, one of the natives, seems preposterous. How can a mere Brooklyn boy ingest all this? Where is his passport to the distant realms of science, philosophy, history et cetera? All that this Brooklyn boy knows has been acquired through osmosis. I am the lad who hated to study. I am the charming fellow who consistently rejected all systems of thought. Like a cork tossed about on an angry sea I follow in the wake of this morphological monster. It mystifies me that I should be able to follow him even distantly. Am I following or am I being sucked under by a vortex? What is it that enables me to read with understanding and delight? Whence the training, the discipline, the percipience which this monster demands? His thought is music to my ears; I recognize all the hidden melodies. Though I am reading him in English, it is as if I were reading the language he wrote in. His vehicle is the German language, which I thought I had forgotten. But I see I have forgotten nothing, not even the curricula I once planned to follow but never did.
From Nietzsche the questioning faculty! That little phrase sets me dancing…
Nothing is so inspiring to one who is trying to write as to come upon a thinker, a thinker who is also a poet, a thinker who looks for the soul which animates things. I see myself again as a mere youth, asking the librarian, or the minister sometimes, to lend me certain profound works—deep I called them then. I see the astonished look on their faces when I mention the titles of these formidable books. And then the inevitable—But why do you want those books? to which I always rejoined: And why shouldn’t I want those books? That I was too young, that I hadn’t read enough to cope with such works, meant nothing to me. It was my privilege to read what I wanted when I wanted. Was I not a born American, a free citizen? What did age matter? Later, however, I had to secretly admit that I did not understand what these deep works were about. Or rather, I understood that I did not want the abscesses which accompanied the knowledge they secreted. How I yearned to grapple with the mysteries! I wanted all that had soul in it and meaning. But I also demanded that the author’s style match the mystery he was illuminating. How many books possess this quality? I met my Waterloo at the very threshold of life. I retained my ignorance, dreaming that it was bliss.
The questioning faculty! That I never abandoned. As is known, the habit of questioning everything leads one to become either a sage or a sceptic. It also leads to madness. Its real virtue, however, consists in this, that it makes one think for himself, makes one return to the source.
Was it so strange that in reading Spengler I began to appreciate all over again what truly wonderful thinkers we were as boys? Considering our age and our limited experience of life, we nevertheless managed to propound to one another the most profound and vital questions. We tackled them manfully, too, with our whole being. Years of schooling destroyed the art. Like chimpanzees, we learned to ask only the right questions—the ones the teachers could answer. It is on this sort of chicanery that the whole social structure is reared. The university of life! Only the desperate ones choose this curriculum. Even the artist is apt to go astray, because he too is obliged, sooner or later, to observe on which side his bread is buttered.
The Decline of the West! I can never forget the thrill which ran up my spine when I first heard this title. It was like Ivan Karamazov saying—I want to go to Europe. Maybe I know that I shall go only to a cemetery, but it will be to the dearest of cemeteries.
For many a year I had been aware that I was participating in a general decline. We all knew it, all felt it, only some succeeded in forgetting about it more quickly than others. What we hadn’t understood so clearly, most of us, was that we were part of this very West, that the West included not only Europe but North America. To us America had always been a chancy place—one day hot, one day cold, one day barren, one day fertile. In short, according to how you struck it, it was either all myrrh and frankincense or plain undiluted horse manure. It was not our way to think in terms of historical destiny. Our history had begun only a few years back—and what there was of it was dull and boring. When I say we I mean we boys, we youths, we young men who were trying to sprout long pants under our skirts. Mamma’s boys, all of us, and if we had a destiny it was to become cracker-jack salesmen, cigar store clerks or chain store managers. The wild ones joined the Army or Navy. The incorrigible ones got themselves safely stowed away in Dannemora or Sing Sing. No one pictured himself as a plodding engineer, plumber, mason, carpenter, farmer, lumberman. One could be a trolley car conductor one day and an insurance agent the next day. And tomorrow or the day after one might wake up and find himself an alderman. Order, discipline, purpose, goal, destiny? Unknown terms. America was a free country, and nothing one did could ruin it—ever. That was our world outlook. As for an Uberblick, that led to the bughouse. ‘What are you reading, Henry? If I showed the book to my questioner he was sure to say: You’ll go nuts reading that sort of junk. This junk, incidentally, was usually the world’s choice literature. No matter. To them or us such books were of prehistoric vintage.
No, no one was thinking consciously and deliberately in term of a world decline. The decline was none the less real, and it was hollowing us out. It revealed itself in unsuspected ways. For example, nothing was worth getting excited about. Nothing. Or, one job was as good as another, one man the equal of another. And so on. All boloney, naturally.
Nietzsche, my first great love, hadn’t seemed very German to me. He didn’t even seem Polish. He was like a fresh-minted coin. But Spengler immediately impressed me as being German to the core. The more abstruse and recondite his language, the easier I followed him. A pre-natal language, his. A lullaby. What is erroneously called his pessimism struck me as nothing more than cold Teutonic realism. The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death. Let us be honest. In the whole metaphysic of Europe has there ever been any truth but this sad German truth which, of course, is a lie? Suddenly, thanks to this historical maestro, we glean that the truth of death need not be sad, particularly when, as happens, the whole civilized world is already part of it. Suddenly we are asked to look into the depths of the tomb with the same zeal and joy with which we first greeted life.
Alles Vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.
Try as I might, I could never finish a chapter without succumbing to the temptation to glance at the succeeding chapters. The headings of these chapters obsessed me. They were enchanting. They belonged to a grimoire rather than to a philosophy of history. The Magian World: Act and Portrait: On the Form of the Soul: Physiognomic and Systematic: Historic Pseudo-morphoses … And the last chapter of all, what else could it be but MONEY? Had anyone ever written of Money in this fascinating language? The modern mystery: MONEY.
From The Meaning of Numbers to Money—a thousand large, dense pages, all written out i
n three years. A bomb that failed to go off because another bomb (World War One) had blown the fuse.
And what footnotes! To be sure, the Germans love footnotes. Was it not about the same time that Otto Rank, one of the twelve disciples of Freud, was busy appending his fascinating footnotes to his studies of the Incest Motif, Don Juan, Art and Artist?
Anyway, from the footnotes to the index in the back of the book—like a journey from Mecca to Lhassa, on foot. Or from Delphi to Timbuctoo, and back again. Who but Spengler, moreover, would have grouped such figures as Pythagoras, Mohammed and Cromwell? Who other than this man would have looked for homologies in Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism? Who had dared to speak of the glorious Renaissance as a contretemps?
Walking the streets, my head spinning with all the dazzling references, I get to thinking of similar periods, periods in the distant past, it now seems, when I was completely absorbed in books. One period especially comes back to me vividly. It is the period when I first got to know Maxie Schnadig. There he is, dressing the show window of a haberdashery store not far from Kosciusko Street, where he lived. Hello Dostoievsky! Hoorah! Back and forth through the winter snows—with Dostoievsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Andreyev, Chekov, Artzibashev … And Oblomov! A new calendar of time for me. New friends, new perspectives, new sorrows. One of these new friends proves to be none other than Maxie’s cousin. He is a man much older than us, a physician from Novgorod. That is to say a Russian Jew, but a Russian just the same. And because he is bored with family life he suggests to us that we form a little study group, the three of us, to while the evenings away. And what do we choose to study? The sociology of Lester F. Ward. But Lester F. Ward is only a spring-board for the good doctor. He literally bounces into those subjects which represent the missing links in our lamentable scheme of knowledge—magic, symbols, herbology, crystalline forms, the prophets of the old Testament, Karl Marx, the technique of revolution, and so on. A samovar always on the boil, tasty sandwiches, smoked herring, caviar, fine teas. A skeleton dangling from the chandelier. He is happy that we are acquainted with the Russian dramatists and novelists, delighted that we have read Kropotkin and Bakunin, but—do we know the real Slavic philosophers and thinkers? He reels off a string of names which are utterly unknown to us. We are given to understand that in all Europe there never were such daring thinkers as the Russians. According to him, they were all visionaries and Utopists. Men who questioned everything. Revolutionaries all of them, even the reactionary ones. Some had been fathers of the Church, some peasants, some criminals, some veritable saints. But they had all endeavored to formulate a new world, usher in a new way of life. And il you consult the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I recall him saying, you will discover nothing about them. They are not even mentioned. What these Russians were striving for, he emphasized, was not the creation of a rich cultural life but the perfect life. He would discourse at length about the great wealth of the Russian language, how superior it was even to the language of the Elizabethans. He would read Pushkin aloud to us in his own tongue, then throw the book down with a sigh and exclaim: What’s the use? We’re in America now. A kindergarten. He was bored, supremely bored with the American scene. His patients were nearly all Jewish, but American Jews, and he had little in common with them. To him America meant apathy. He missed the talk of revolution. To be truthful, I think he also missed the horrors of the pogrom. He felt that he was rotting away in the hollow tomb of democracy. Sometime you must ask me about Fedorov, he remarked once. But we never got that far. We got bogged down in Lester F. Ward’s sociology. It was too much for Maxie Schandig. Poor Maxie was already poisoned by the American virus. He wanted to go ice-skating, wanted to play hand-ball, tennis, golf. And so, after a few months the study group dissolved. Never once since have I heard mention of Lester F. Ward. Nor have I ever again seen a copy of this great work. As compensation, perhaps, I took to reading Herbert Spencer. More sociology! Then one day I fell upon his Autobiography, and I devoured it. There was indeed a mind. A lame one, but it served its purpose. A mind dwelling alone on an arid plateau. Not a hint of Russia, of revolution, of the Marquis de Sade, of love. Not a hint of anything but problems. The brain rules, because the soul abdicates.
As soon as Life is fatigued. says Spengler, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities—which are intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem.
There are phrases, sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs from The Decline of the West which seem to be engraved in my brain-pan. The first reading went deep. Since then I have read and re-read, copied and re-copied the passages which obsess me. Here are a few at random, as inexpugnable as the letters of the alphabet…
To bring up, out of the web of world-happening, a millenium of organic culture-history as an entity and person, and to grasp the conditions of its inmost spirituality—such is the aim.
Only the insight that can penetrate into the metaphysical is capable of experiencing in dates the symbols of that which happened, and so of elevating an Incident into a Destiny. And he who is to himself a Destiny (like Napoleon) does not need this insight, since between himself as a fact and the other facts there is a harmony of metaphysical rhythm which gives his decisions their dreamlike certainty.
To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Aeschylus, Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities is to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s.
The classical spirit, with its oracles and its omens, wants only to know the future, but the Westerner would shape it. The Third Kingdom is the Germanic ideal. From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen … every great man has linked his life to an eternal morning. Alexander’s life was a wondrous paroxysm, a dream which conjured up the Homeric ages from the grave. Napoleon’s life was an immense toil, not for himself nor for France, but for the Future.
From the high and distant standpoint it matters very little what ‘truths’ thinkers have managed to formulate in words within their respective schools, for, here as in every great art, it is the schools, conventions and repertory of forms that are the basic elements. Infinitely more important than the answers are the questions—the choice of them, the inner form of them…
With the Name comes a new world-outlook … The Name grazes the meaning of consciousness and the source of fear alike. The world is not merely existent, a secret is felt in it … Man names that which is enigmatic. It is the beast that knows no enigmas … With the name the step is taken from the everyday physical of the beast to the metaphysical of man. It was the greatest turning-point in the history of the human soul.
A true system of thoughts emphatically cannot exist, for no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are always brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned a priori by its own form and can never reach that which the words mean … And this ignorabimus is in conformity also with the intuition of every true sage, that abstract principles of life are acceptable only as figures of speech, trite maxima of daily use underneath which life flows, as it has always flowed, onward. Race, in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that, under all the great names, it has been thinkers—who are personalities—and not systems, which are mutable, that have taken effect upon life.
For the sake of the machine, human life becomes precious. Work becomes the great word of ethical thinking: in the 18th Century ‘it loses its derogatory implication in all languages. The machine words and forces the man to co-operate. The entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth trembles under it … And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric-Man has felt the machine to be devilish, and rightly. It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred Causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience, is set in motion, silent and irresistible…
A power can be overthrown only by a
nother power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic onflow in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history … Ever in History it is life and life only—race-quality, the triumph of the will-to-power—and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World-history is the world court, and it has ever decided in favor of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life—decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its rights would hold before a tribunal of waking-consciousness. Always it has sacrificed truth and justice to might and race, and passed doom of death upon men and peoples in whom truth was more than deeds, and justice than power. And so the drama of a high Culture—that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities—closes with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-encircling cosmic flow…
For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this moment of its development—the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarium that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step—our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth the living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing…
What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is ‘in condition’, well-nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so … It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently—this is the time when the banal assertion that hunger and love are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of ‘happiness of the greatest number’, of comfort and ease, of ‘panem et circenses’; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself….