Plexus by Henry Miller — Read

"And now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty, and if I were asked to find a formula for my relation to the latter I should say that I had made of his "outlook" (Ausblick) an "overlook" (Uberblick). But Goethe was, without knowing it, a disciple of Leibnitz in his whole mode of thought. And, therefore, that which has at last (and to my own astonishment) taken shape in my hands I am able to regard and, despite the misery and disgust of these years, proud to call a German philosophy. " (Blankenburg am Harz, December 1922.)

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 cozy, 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, savoring 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.