Time & Perspective Quote by Henry Miller

Attention is Miller's contraband: a quiet act that smuggles wonder back into a world flattened by routine. The sentence begins with a dare - "The moment one gives close attention" - and then pulls the rug from under "any thing". Not "beautiful things", not curated marvels, but whatever is nearest, most ignored, most supposedly exhausted. The blade of grass is doing strategic work here. It's ordinary to the point of invisibility, a cliché of the natural world, and Miller turns that very cliché into proof: the problem isn't scarcity of meaning, it's our stinginess with perception.

The rhetoric escalates like a mind slipping past the gatekeepers of reason: mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent. That crescendo is a manifesto against the modern reflex to measure, label, and move on. Miller isn't arguing that the grass has changed; he's arguing that our mode of looking changes the universe we're allowed to inhabit. The subtext is almost polemical: distraction is a spiritual failure, attention a kind of erotic devotion.

Context matters. Miller wrote as a modernist outsider, suspicious of bourgeois efficiency and the deadening logic of productivity. His work is obsessed with intensity - sensory, sexual, metaphysical - and this line is a pocket version of that project. "Indescribably" is the tell: language strains, then admits defeat, which is also a flex. If the world can't be fully said, it has to be lived, stared at, surrendered to.