The Rosy Crucifixion 3 - Nexus by Henry Miller Read Free Book Online

that’s our world perspective…
    At this point he got out of bed to fix himself a drink, asking as he did so if I could stand any more of his drivel. I nodded affirmatively.
    I’m thoroughly wound up, as you see, he continued. As a matter of fact, I’m beginning to see it all so clearly again, now that I’ve unlimbered to you, that I almost feel I could write the books myself. If I haven’t lived for myself I certainly have lived other people’s lives. Perhaps I’ll begin to live my own when I begin writing. You know, I already feel kindlier toward the world, just getting this much off my chest. Maybe you were right about being more generous with myself. It’s certainly a relaxing thought. Inside I’m all steel girders. I’ve got to melt, grow fibre, cartilage, lymph and muscle. To think that any one could let himself grow so rigid … ridiculous, what! That’s what comes from battling all one’s life.
    He paused long enough to take a good slug, then raced on.
    You know, there isn’t a thing in the world worth fighting for except peace of mind. The more you triumph in this world the more you defeat yourself. Jesus was right. One has to triumph over the world. Overcome the world, I think was the expression. To do that, of course, means acquiring a new consciousness, a new view of things. And that’s the only meaning one can put on freedom. No man can attain freedom who is of the world. Die to the world and you find life everlasting. You know, I suppose, that the advent of Christ was of the greatest importance to Dostoievsky. Dostoievsky only succeeded in embracing the idea of God through conceiving of a man-god. He humanized the conception of God, brought Him nearer to us, made him more comprehensible, and finally, strange as it may sound, even more God-like … Once again I must come back to the criminal. The only sin, or crime, that man could commit, in the eyes of Jesus, was to sin against the Holy Ghost. To deny the spirit, or the life force, if you will. Christ recognized no such thing as a criminal. He ignored all this nonsense, this confusion, this rank superstition with which man has saddled himself for millenia. He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone! Which doesn’t mean that Christ regarded all men as sinners. No, but that we are all imbued, dyed, tainted with the notion of sin. As I understand his words, it is out of a sense of guilt that we created sin and evil. Not that sin and evil have any reality of their own. Which brings me back again to the present impasse. Despite all the truths that Christ enunciated, the world is now riddled and saturated with sinfulness. Every one behaves like a criminal toward his fellow-man. And so, unless we set about killing one another off—world-wide massacre—we’ve got to come to grips with the demonic power which rules us. We’ve got to convert it into a healthy, dynamic force which will liberate not us alone—we are not so important!—but the life force which is damned up in us. Only then will we begin to live. And to live means eternal life, nothing less. It was man who created death, not God. Death is the sign of our vulnerability, nothing more.
    He went on and on and on. I didn’t get a wink of sleep until near dawn. When I awoke he was gone. On the table I found a five dollar bill and a brief note saying that I should forget everything we had talked about, that it was of no importance. I’m ordering a new suit just the same, he added. You can choose the material for me.
    Naturally I couldn’t forget it, as he suggested. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything else for weeks but man the criminal, or, as Stymer had put it, man his own criminal.
    One of the many expressions he had dropped plagued me interminably, the one about man taking refuge in the mind. It was the first time, I do believe, that I ever questioned the existence of mind as something apart. The thought that possibly all was mind fascinated me. It sounded more revolutionary