"We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate"
About this Quote
Reading, for Henry Miller, isn’t self-improvement. It’s self-indulgence with a pulse. “We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate” swats away the pious, résumé-driven version of literature - reading as a staircase to competence - and replaces it with a sensuous image: the soul as a body that can stretch out, take its time, and enjoy itself without apologizing.
The verb choice is doing the heavy lifting. “Luxuriate” implies softness, slowness, even a little decadence. That’s a provocation from a writer who spent his career arguing that modern life trains us to be efficient machines: productive, anxious, perpetually “caught up.” Miller’s broader project, especially in works like Tropic of Cancer, is anti-respectability: the insistence that art matters because it widens the nervous system, not because it earns you cultural merit badges.
The subtext is also a defense of pleasure against suspicion. In many moral economies, pleasure is treated as a distraction unless it can be justified by outcomes. Miller won’t justify it. He frames reading as a private sanctuary where the inner life can become lush again - a counterweight to work, bureaucracy, and the daily trimming-down of desire.
Contextually, this fits a 20th-century modernist lineage that mistrusted mass conformity and prized the interior. Miller isn’t pitching escapism so much as restoration: reading as a space where attention can be unshackled, where the self isn’t optimized but inhabited.
The verb choice is doing the heavy lifting. “Luxuriate” implies softness, slowness, even a little decadence. That’s a provocation from a writer who spent his career arguing that modern life trains us to be efficient machines: productive, anxious, perpetually “caught up.” Miller’s broader project, especially in works like Tropic of Cancer, is anti-respectability: the insistence that art matters because it widens the nervous system, not because it earns you cultural merit badges.
The subtext is also a defense of pleasure against suspicion. In many moral economies, pleasure is treated as a distraction unless it can be justified by outcomes. Miller won’t justify it. He frames reading as a private sanctuary where the inner life can become lush again - a counterweight to work, bureaucracy, and the daily trimming-down of desire.
Contextually, this fits a 20th-century modernist lineage that mistrusted mass conformity and prized the interior. Miller isn’t pitching escapism so much as restoration: reading as a space where attention can be unshackled, where the self isn’t optimized but inhabited.
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| Topic | Book |
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