Henry Miller, knowledge, lethargy, and being lazy

Henry Miller offers this inspiring passage, stating:

“To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthy feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes...”(Colossus of Marousi, p47)

Ignorance and indifference are our only ways out of this belly of the whale confusion and misunderstanding. Without these weapons- i.e. amnesia and apathy- we shall forever dwell in confinement, and yet we will not even know we are confined- for the prisons we are held in are naught but 'doing' and  'knowing'.

The self which tries to attain knowledge, enlightenment, or understanding is a false entity, therefore any such striving merely reinforces the unreality of its existence.

E. M. Cioran secures our position, asserting: "Who can fail to see the moment when ...man, lucid and empty, will have no word on hand to designate his abyss? ...On the ruins of knowledge, a sepulchral lethargy will make us all into specters..."(Decay, p137)

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These excerpts are taken from unpublished chapters from

THE WAY OF WONDER, by Jack Haas