"The Colossus of Maroussi " By Henry Miller

“To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful 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.”

― Henry Miller

What man wants is peace in order that he may live.

Defeating our neighbor doesn’t give peace any more than curing cancer brings health. Man doesn’t begin to live through triumphing over his enemy nor does he begin to acquire health through endless cures.

The joy of life comes through peace, which is not static but dynamic. No man can really say that he knows what joy is until he has experienced peace. And without joy there is no life, even if you have a dozen cars, six butlers, a castle, a private chapel and a bomb-proof vault.

Our diseases are our attachments, be they habits, ideologies, ideals, principles, possessions, phobias, gods, cults, religions, what you please. Good wages can be a disease just as much as bad wages.

Leisure can be just as great a disease as work. Whatever we cling to, even if it be hope or faith, can be the disease which carries us off. Surrender is absolute: if you cling to even the tiniest crumb you nourish the germ which will devour you…

I hear people talking about peace and their faces are clouded with anger or with hatred or with scorn and disdain, with pride and arrogance. There are people who want to fight to bring about peace—the most deluded souls of all.

There will be no peace until murder is eliminated from the heart and mind. Murder is the apex of the broad pyramid whose base is the self. That which stands will have to fall.

Everything which man has fought for will have to be relinquished before he can begin to live as man. Up till now he has been a sick beast and even his divinity stinks. He is master of many worlds and in his own he is a slave.

What rules the world is the heart, not the brain, in every realm our conquests bring only death. 

We have turned our backs on the one realm wherein freedom lies…

I know what the cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world." 

"The Colossus of Maroussi"

 by Henry Miller

Out of the sea, as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light...I had everything a man could desire, and I knew it. I knew too that I might never have it again. I felt the war coming on - it was getting closer and closer every day. For a little while yet there would be peace and men might still behave like human beings. 

Just before the outbreak of World War II, the American Henry Miller, who had been living in Paris after the publication of his novels "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn", took a boat to Athens in the heat of summer. There he met his friend Lawrence Durrell, who took him to Corfu. 

Miller's exploration of Greece - Athens, the islands and the Pelopponese - was later described by him as the 'high water mark in life's adventures thus far'. In beautiful and passionate prose, he perfectly captures the splendour and magic of the country, concentrating not only on the landscape but also the people. His classic narrative is peppered with fabulous portraits of poets and artists, chief among them Katsimbalis, the Colossus himself.

Henry Miller was born in New York in 1891, and left for Europe in 1930. His autobiographical novel Tropic of Cancer, a frank account of an artist's adventures in Paris, was published in Paris in 1934, supported by his lover Anais Nin, but banned for decades in Britain and the USA. His other works include Tropic of Capricorn published in 1939.