Aller Retour New York by Henry Miller

Author:Henry Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2314-0
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1991-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

And now, Joey, I’m going to get serious for a moment. I’m going to say a few words about the aeroplane, about that obsession for the air which seems to have the Americans by the balls. I want to ask you what it means, this business of flying to the moon, or Mars, or Jupiter? I ask myself very seriously if this flying mania is not the symptom of a very great and very real distress, if it does not mean something more than just a conquest of the air, as they say. It’s all right to say that the aviator is connecting one city with another, that he’s cutting down the time element, establishing new modes of communication, etc. But that’s not all—that’s not the whole story. There is another and deeper element which enters into it, and that’s the awakening of a mystic sense. The aviator rises above the earth and revolves with the earth, or almost. He moves with the stars in a new dimension, or he has the illusion of so doing. He feels a sense of power, not as of old—in touching the earth—but in freeing himself from the earth. This is dangerous. In another hundred years he will be thinking astrologically again. He will have developed the flying sense, he will be drunk with the feel of the cosmos, with new space-time ideas, just as Europe was drunk with the discovery of America. He will say to himself that it is his ambition to reach the moon, or Mars, or Jupiter, but he will never reach the moon—he will reach to himself again, to man, to a new fury of creative activity. Each time a new horizon is opened up, each time the imaginative horizon is enlarged, the earth becomes smaller and more habitable. Life does not spread: it blooms, it burgeons, it develops in intensity. Now men think it is important to get from one place to another more quickly. Tomorrow they will stand stock-still, content to go nowhere. They will stand stock-still and sing about travelling to incalculable realms. There is only one road for man, and that is towards God. Along this road, if he searches and prays, he meets himself. Then he opens wide his jaws and sings with all his might. Then he doesn’t need God anymore—God then is everywhere distant as the farthest planet, close as his own skin. We are going towards God, I say, in the aeroplane. No aeroplane will ever reach God. No man will ever reach God. But we can have Hallelujah, and when a man has found himself it is Hallelujah all the time. I have found it without hiring an aeroplane. I found it standing in a pair of moccasins.

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