“Writing is Crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain & sorrow to commemorate an event which is intransmissible.”
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
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Henry Miller 187
American novelist 1891–1980Related quotes
“What is involved is not a commemoration of mythical events but a reiteration of them.”
Myth and Reality (1963)
Context: In one way or another one "lives" the myth, in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted.
"Living" a myth, then, implies a genuinely "religious" experience, since it differs from the ordinary experience of everyday life. The "religiousness" of this experience is due to the fact that one re-enacts fabulous, exalting, significant events, one again witnesses the creative deeds of the Supernaturals; one ceases to exist in the everyday world and enters a transfigured, auroral world impregnated with the Supernaturals' presence. What is involved is not a commemoration of mythical events but a reiteration of them. The protagonists of the myth are made present; one becomes their contemporary. This also implies that one is no longer living in chronological time, but in the primordial Time, the Time when the event first took place. This is why we can use the term the "strong time" of myth; it is the prodigious, "sacred" time when something new, strong, and significant was manifested. To re-experience that time, to re-enact it as often as possible, to witness again the spectacle of the divine works, to meet with the Supernaturals and relearn their creative lesson is the desire that runs like a pattern through all the ritual reiterations of myths. In short, myths reveal that the World, man, and life have a supernatural origin and history, and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplary.
“The very word "sorrow" colours the fact of sorrow, the pain of it.”
3rd Public Talk, Brockwood Park, UK (5 September 1981)
1980s
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front
Source: Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast
“One of the advantages of a great sorrow is that nothing else seems painful.”
Memoirs of J. Casanova de Seingalt (1894)
“No God created the crime of murder, and no God created sorrow or pain”
Source: The Seth Material (1970), p. 273
Context: No God created the crime of murder, and no God created sorrow or pain... Again, because you believe that you can murder a man and end his consciousness forever, then murder exists within your reality and must be dealt with... The assassin of Dr. King believes that he has blotted out a living consciousness for all eternity... But your errors and mistakes, luckily enough, are not real and do not affect reality, for Dr. King still lives.
“Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain
That has been, and may be again.”
The Solitary Reaper.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
