Wealth & Money Quote by Henry Miller

Miller comes at you like a street-corner mystic who’s had enough of your careful self-management. The imperative verbs pile up - develop, see, forget - with the brisk confidence of someone who believes attention is a moral act. It’s not “find yourself.” It’s the opposite: get out of your own way. The line reads like a rebuke to the cult of introspection, the kind that turns the self into a full-time project and the world into background noise.

The trick is how he sells discipline as ecstasy. “Develop an interest” sounds almost bureaucratic, like a habit you can train, but then he detonates it with sensory abundance: people, things, literature, music. The list is democratic and promiscuous, collapsing high culture and street life into the same glittering heap. That’s pure Miller: appetite as aesthetic program. “Throbbing” is doing a lot of work, too - it’s physical, impatient, faintly obscene, insisting that reality isn’t an idea but a pulse you can sync to if you stop monitoring your own.

Context matters. Miller’s best-known work was read as scandal partly because it refused respectable selfhood: the tidy, industrious, ashamed persona. Exile, bohemian poverty, and the interwar atmosphere of disillusion sharpened his suspicion of conventional “purpose.” So “Forget yourself” isn’t saintly self-abnegation; it’s a jailbreak. The subtext is that boredom and despair aren’t solved by better thoughts about your life, but by a more ravenous relationship to what’s already there - the “beautiful souls and interesting people” you miss when you’re busy curating an identity.