Wealth & Money Quote by Henry Miller

Miller’s provocation isn’t just a gothic valentine to rot; it’s a direct attack on the cultural cult of “progress” that treats growth as virtue and decline as failure. By calling decay “wonderful and rich,” he flips the moral signage. The word choice matters: “looked upon” frames the claim as an aesthetic stance, almost a cultivated gaze, while “expression of life” refuses the tidy separation between living and dying. Decay isn’t the opposite of vitality in this worldview; it’s vitality changing costumes.

The subtext is Miller’s lifelong impatience with self-improvement narratives and sanitized respectability. His work keeps returning to bodies, sex, hunger, exhaustion, and the messy economies of desire. In that universe, breakdown is not a shameful backstage event; it’s part of the show. When he pairs decay with growth, he’s also smuggling in a creative credo: art is compost. What looks like collapse - relationships fraying, cities crumbling, a psyche unraveling - can become raw material, texture, meaning.

Contextually, Miller wrote against the grain of early-to-mid 20th-century faith in industry, hygiene, productivity, and linear advancement, even as the century delivered mechanized slaughter and spiritual burnout. His line reads like a rejection of the managerial mindset: life isn’t a quarterly report. It’s a cycle, and the dark, soggy parts are not an error in the system; they’re the system doing what it does.