Plexus by Henry Miller — Read

"I feel in myself a lift so luminous," says Louis Lambert, "that I might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral. " This statement, which Balzac voices through his double, expresses perfectly the secret anguish of which I was then a victim. At one and the same time I was leading two thoroughly divergent lives. One could be described as "the merry whirl," the other as the contemplative life. In the role of active being everybody took me for what I was, or what I appeared to be; in the other role no one recognized me, least of all myself. No matter with what celerity and confusion events succeeded one another, there were always intervals, self-created, in which through contemplation I lost myself. It needed only a few moments, seemingly, of shutting out the world for me to be restored. But it required much longer stretches-of being alone with myself-to write. As I have frequently pointed out, the business of writing never ceased.

But from this interior process to the process of translation is always, and was then very definitely, a big step. Today it is often hard for me to remember when or where I made this or that utterance, to remember whether I actually said it somewhere or whether I intended to say it sometime or other. There is an ordinary kind of forgetting and a special kind; the latter is due, more than likely, to the vice of living in two worlds at once. One of the consequences of this tendency is that you live everything out innumerable times. Worse, whatever you succeed in transmitting to paper seems but an infinitesimal fraction of what you've already written in your head. That delicious experience with which everyone is familiar, and which occurs with haunting impressiveness in dreams-I mean of falling into a familiar groove: meeting the same person over and over, going down the same street, confronting the identically same situation-this experience often happens to me in waking moments.