"One of Henry Miller's most luminous statements of his personal philosophy of life, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird (1962), provides a symbolic title for this collection of stories and essays."
Excerpts
The world may seem like hell on wheels—and we are doing our best, are we not, to make it so?—but there is always room, if only in one’s own soul, to create a spot of Paradise, crazy though it may sound.
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Look not to Russia, China, India, not to Washington, not to the adjoining county, city or state, but to your immediate surroundings. Forget Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and all the others. Do your part to the best of your ability, regardless of the consequences. Above all, do not wait for the next man to follow suit.
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There is no escape. As it says in the Avestas: “Evil exists not, only the past. The past is past; the present is a moment; the future is all.”
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Whenever we talk about right and wrong we are turning the light of scrutiny upon our neighbors instead of upon ourselves. We judge in order not to be judged.
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The real wilderness is not out there somewhere, but in the towns and cities, in that complicated web which we have made of life and which serves no purpose but to thwart, cramp and inhibit the free spirits.
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Imagine the planets pausing to decide the direction of their orbits! Imagine them struggling to change their fiery courses! Thinking—what a vice! Struggling—what absurdity! To know is so easy, so painless. The ground for any kind of growth and cultivation is prepared by lying fallow.
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What a race we are, we adults, forever breaking treaties, forever preying upon the unfortunate, forever dictating to others how to live, and know not how ourselves. Each day that we go forth to earn our bread we come home shamefaced, detesting the work of our hands, reviling ourselves for being the lickspittles we are. Pretending that we are supporting our loved ones, we rob, cheat, prevaricate, punish, maim, torture, wound and kill our fellow men. Each one passes the buck: thus no one is responsible. This we call civilization.
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... happiness is desirable, but it is a by-product, the result of a way of life, not a goal which is forever beyond one’s grasp. Happiness is achieved en route. And if it be ephemeral, as most men believe, it can also give way, not to anxiety or despair, but to a joyousness which is serene and lasting.
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Living apart and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with another’s way of life—so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit! Hands off! Yet not to grow indifferent, or refuse aid when it is sincerely demanded. Living thus, practicing this simple way of life, strange things occurred; some might call them miraculous. And from the most unexpected quarters astonishing, most instructive lessons….
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Life on earth will always be a Hell; the antidote is not a hereafter called Heaven but a new life here below—“the new heaven and the new earth”—born of the complete acceptance of life.
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Any theory, any idea, any speculation can augment the zest for life so long as one does not make the mistake of thinking that he is getting somewhere. We are getting nowhere, because (metaphysically speaking) there is nowhere to go. We are already there, have been since eternity. All we need do is wake up to the fact.
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The real nonsense, of course, goes under such highfalutin names as science, religion, philosophy, history, culture, civilization, and so on and so forth. The Mad Hatter is not your miserable clochard lying in the gutter with a bottle clasped to his bosom but His Excellency, Sir Popinjay of His Majesty’s Court, he who pretends to have us believe that, armed with the right words, the right portfolio, the right top hat and spats, he can placate, tame or subdue this or that monster who is making ready to gobble up the world on behalf of The Peepul, or in the name of Christ, or whatever the song happens to be.
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We are all advocates of a better world, and we are all the devil’s disciples. We want to change the other fellow, not ourselves; we want our children to be better than us, but do nothing to make ourselves more worthy of our children.
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The birds wing their way above the din and hubbub, content to ride the wind. They leave no monuments in space, no writings in the sky. Every creature of the wild is a demonstration of faith and joy. Man alone, the Lord of Creation, suffers. Suffers not from want but from an unnamable deprivation.
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Harmony, serenity, bliss do not come from struggle but from surrender.
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I am now like those alcoholics who, after years of abstinence, finally learn how to take a drink without fear of becoming drunk. I mean that I have made my peace with suffering. Suffering belongs, just as much as laughter, joy, treachery or what have you. When one perceives its function, its value, its usefulness, one no longer dreads it, this endless suffering which all the world is so eager to dodge. When it is regarded in the light of understanding it becomes something else. I called this process of transmutation my “rosy crucifixion.”
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And with all this “progress” [Man] has not advanced an inch. He stands at the same frontier he faced fifty thousand, or a hundred thousand, years ago. He has only to make a jump (inwardly) and he will be free of the clockwork. But he can’t. He won’t. With an obstinacy unthinkable he refuses to believe in himself, refuses to assume his full powers, refuses to raise himself to his ordained stature. He elects for Utopia rather than Reality.
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And wherever [Man] appears—or erupts—he leaves a scar upon the face of the earth. Now he toys with the idea of harnessing the planets, as well as the spaces between, in order to carry on his ghastly, ghostly work of despoliation. Why does he stop at the planets? Why not ransack the entire universe? What’s to hinder? Give him enough rope and, by God, he will do just this. He is now at that ripe stage of devolution wherein he is foolish enough to believe that he can take the universe apart and destroy it piece by piece—just to prove to himself that he is not impotent. He would unseat the Creator, if he had enough humility left to conceive of something greater than himself.
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[John Cowper Powys] has evolved a philosophy of his own—a philosophy of solitude or a philosophy of “in spite of,” as he calls it—which he practices and which keeps him literally “as fresh as a daisy.” ... Without wants, he has become free as a bird, and what is more important, he is acutely aware of his hard-won freedom and rejoices in it.
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How many of us are masters of our fate? How many of our friends or acquaintances can we point to and say: “There is a liberated individual!” Or even: “There is a self-sufficient individual!”
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The astounding variety of disorders—physical, mental and social—which now ravage humankind would indicate that it is the soul of man which is in revolt. For all his ills the only counsel that is offered him is: “Dog, return to your vomit!”
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And is it not an insane world which we have come to inhabit? What valid meaning is there to any of our acts, plans, thoughts? Whatever we create only adds to our distress and confusion, our eventual annihilation. Nothing our sick brains invent can add an ounce of joy to this thoroughly empty existence. The more we discover, the more we invent, the more crippled and frustrated we become. And this drunken mechanic, this push-button maniac, thinks to explore the outer universe. What a joke!
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The subject becomes more complicated when it is admitted that these rebels or iconoclasts found a way to live in the world without being part of it. “To render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s….” Ambivalence? Contradictoriness? Hypocrisy? Not at all. Still less, defeatism. No, the great triumph of these original souls lay in their discovery of a solution beyond the opposites.
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What, moreover, can you truly call your own? The house you live in, the food you swallow, the clothes you wear—you neither built the house nor raised the food nor made the clothes. You made the money—and how!—to buy these necessities. Someone else made them for you. The same goes for your ideas. You moved into them ready-made. Someone else thought them up for you. As for yourself, you haven’t the time to think, or the energy, or even the desire.
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The great exemplars all led simple lives. Inspiring though they be, no one follows in their footsteps. Only a rare few have even attempted to do so. Yet now and then, even today, a unique individual does break away, breaks free of the treadmill, as it were, and demonstrates that it is possible, even in this sad world, to lead one’s own life.
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Now and then, like the prophets of old, I have gone so far as to exult over the approaching doom. It was not man I condemned, however, but his way of life. For if there is one power which man indubitably possesses—have we not had proof of it again and again?—it is the power to alter one’s way of life. It is perhaps man’s only power.
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I no longer have any illusions about the importance of words. Lao-Tzu put all his wisdom into a few indestructible pages. Jesus never wrote a line. As for the Buddha, he is remembered for the wordless sermon he gave while holding a flower for his listeners to regard (or hear). Words, like other waste matter, eventually drift down the drain. Acts live on. The Acts of the Apostles, bien entendu, not the beehive activity which today passes for action.
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The language of society is conformity; the language of the creative individual is freedom.
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And that is where [Walt] Whitman belongs, out beyond the last frontiers of the Western world, neither of the West nor of the East but of an intermediary realm, a floating archipelago dedicated to the attainment of peace, happiness and well-being here and now.
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... either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird.
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When the lights go out let us be thankful if we have left enough inner radiance to glow like the glowworm.
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... he dubbed me “as of henceforth” The Happy Rock.
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