{"id":985,"date":"2025-11-18T22:09:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T22:09:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/?p=985"},"modified":"2025-11-18T22:10:18","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T22:10:18","slug":"through-a-glass-darkly-1961","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/?p=985","title":{"rendered":"Through a Glass Darkly (1961)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When attentive bookstore clerks line their shelves with literature as complements to city guides, the Paris selections are often chosen from favourites of the 1920s and \u201930s: Hemingway\u2019s\u00a0The Sun Also Rises\u00a0andA Moveable Feast, Orwell\u2019s\u00a0Down & Out in Paris and London, the short stories of Fitzgerald.<\/p>\n

Rarely if ever does Henry Miller\u2019s\u00a0Black Spring\u00a0make the cut. Coming between his two infamous\u00a0Tropic\u00a0books \u2013\u00a0Cancer\u00a0andCapricorn\u00a0\u2013 the collection is one of Miller\u2019s shortest, and thus most approachable. A series of short vignettes acting as a memoir of sorts, it\u2019s initially set in Brooklyn, but finds its true balance between poetry and depravity during the author\u2019s time as a young man in the French capital.<\/p>\n

A dark and dissenting portrait of the City of Lights, the book juxtaposes its bleak portrayal with the liberated love letters of his fellow lost-generation comrades, and finds little in common with their drunken and unrealistic ideals.<\/p>\n

While they painted absinthe- tinged portraits with their words, Miller sought to smear his stream- of-conscious thoughts through the bleak Nietzschean philosophy which had emerged between the two world wars: the conflicting chaos of our world and the hopelessness of existence, the lack of any true meaning and the need for a new sense of harmony.<\/p>\n

He does this by searching deep within himself to find the \u201creal\u201d through any means possible: having sex with a widow on the day of her husband\u2019s funeral, imagining Paris as China while stumbling through the city in an opium-infused nightmare, touring pissoirs and letting women watch him urinate.<\/p>\n

But as Nietzsche spoke of a harmony between the active and reactive, so too does Miller find his balance of sorts: \u201cYou strike a balance in order to add a hypothetical weight,\u201d he writes in the chapter\u00a0The Angel is My Watermark!\u00a0\u201cIn order to create a reason for your existence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cblack spring\u201d of the title is telling: while each chapter initially feels unrelated, the reader finds their connection at the end, when the book reveals itself as an exploration of Miller\u2019s early years during a time in one\u2019s life of new beginnings.<\/p>\n

But in a similar sense, the book is the \u201cspring\u201d of Miller\u2019s works: not as erotic as his more controversial books, nor as confusingly surreal as his\u00a0Rosy Crucifixion\u00a0trilogy,\u00a0Black Spring\u00a0stands as the ideal starting point for those new to the author.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When attentive bookstore clerks line their shelves with literature as complements to city guides, the Paris selections are often chosen from favourites of the 1920s and \u201930s: Hemingway\u2019s\u00a0The Sun Also Rises\u00a0andA Moveable Feast, Orwell\u2019s\u00a0Down & Out in Paris and London, the short stories of Fitzgerald. Rarely if ever does Henry Miller\u2019s\u00a0Black Spring\u00a0make the cut. Coming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=985"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":987,"href":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/985\/revisions\/987"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vagal.lakhanitechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}