You don't become ecstatic and you are not plunged into violent grief you don't pray for rain, neither do you dance a jig. The heating and cooling system is one system, and Cancer is separated from Capricorn only by an imaginary line. Thought and action are one, because swimming you are in it and of it, and it is everything you desire it to be, no more, no less. You live in the fruits of your action and your action is the harvest of your thought. Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it could not possibly be anything else as long as you are you and I am I. Nothing can be more real than what you suppose it to be. And there is no desire to be of help to others even, because why rob them of a privilege which must be earned? Life stretches out from moment to moment in stupendous infinitude. There is no suffering any more because there is nothing which can threaten your security. “Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem - to be yourself! And with the first step you make in this direction you realize that there is neither plus nor minus you throw the skates away and swim. I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.” To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted: it was something to make me puke. I never helped anyone expecting that it would do me any good I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. It was purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for.

Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating above it was a jangle and a discord. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. “Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.

Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller