Read Online Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller - Free Book Online Page A

like time itself, maybe each time I passed up there, something was tugging away at me, urging me to take it in, to announce myself; anyway each time I passed on high I was truly alone, and whenever that happened the book commenced to write itself, screaming the things which I never breathed, the thoughts I never uttered, the conversations I never held, the hopes, the dreams, the delusions I never admitted. If this then was the true self it was marvellous, and what’s more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop to continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen in the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent existence. My thoughts too led an independent existence. Suddenly, looking at Hymie and thinking of that strange word “ovaries”, now stranger than any word in my whole vocabulary, this feeling of icy isolation came over me and Hymie sitting beside me was a bull-frog, absolutely a bull-frog and nothing more. I was jumping from the bridge head first, down into the primeval ooze, the legs clear and waiting for a bite; like that Satan had plunged through the heavens, through the solidcore of the earth, head down and ramming through to the very hub of the earth, the darkest, densest, hottest pit of hell. I was walking through the Mojave Desert and the man beside me was waiting for nightfall in order to fall on me and slay me. I was walking again in Dreamland and a man was walking above me on a tightrope and above him a man was sitting in an aeroplane spelling letters of smoke in the sky. The woman hanging on my arm was pregnant and in six or seven years the thing she was carrying inside her would be able to read the letters in the sky and he or she or it would know that it was a cigarette and later would smoke the cigarette, perhaps a package a day. In the womb nails formed on every finger, every toe; you could stop right there, at a toe nail, the tiniest toe nail imaginable and you could break your head over it, trying to figure it out. On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing such a hodge-podge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn’t disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toe nails, hair, teeth, blood,
ovaries,
if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. The bull-frog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat; they were stuck in the cold sweat of the primeval ooze. Each collar button was an ovary that had come unglued, an illustration out of the dictionary without benefit of lucubration; lacklustre in the cold yellow fat of the eyeball each buttoned ovary produced a subterranean chill, the skating rink of hell where men stood upside down in the ice, the legs free and waiting for a bite. Here Dante walked unaccompanied, weighed down by his vision, and through endless circles gradually moving heavenward to be enthroned in his work. Here Shakespeare with smooth brow fell into the bottomless reverie of rage to emerge in elegant quartos and innuendoes. A glaucous frost of non-comprehension swept clear by gales of laughter. From the hub of the bull-frog’s eye radiated dean white spokes of sheer lucidity not to be annotated or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving sightless in kaleidoscopic change. Hymie the bull-frog was anovarian spud generated in the high passage between two shores: for him the skyscrapers had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the buffaloes exterminated; for him the twin cities had been joined by the Brooklyn Bridge, the caissons sunk, the