Politics & Power Quote by Henry Miller

Geography is a convenient alibi; Henry Miller refuses to let it off the hook. By dismissing the oceans as the real barrier, he targets something more stubborn than distance: a national gaze that turns the rest of the world into background scenery, either exotic entertainment or irrelevant noise. The line is built like a small act of sabotage. It flips a familiar story Americans tell themselves - we are far away, therefore we are different - into an indictment: we are different because we choose to look narrowly.

Miller’s intent isn’t polite cosmopolitanism. It’s provocation from an expatriate who made a career out of treating “America” less as a place than as a mindset: boosterism, moral certainty, a reflex to translate experience into utility, and a consumer’s habit of scanning for value. In that light, “the American way of looking” becomes a kind of cultural myopia. You can cross an ocean and still carry the same lens; you can stay home and still be worldly. The isolation he names is psychological, even ideological.

The subtext is also defensive and self-incriminating. Miller’s Paris years gave him the outsider’s clarity and the exile’s bitterness: he’s both escaping American provincialism and haunted by it. The quote works because it’s accusatory without being programmatic; it doesn’t offer a new “way of looking,” it just insists that the old one is the real border wall. In a century of rising American power, that’s the sharper point: dominance can make curiosity optional, and optional curiosity becomes a habit.