Note: This post originally opened with a photo from Peter Gowland of Henry Miller on a bicycle. After contacting Peter about the photo, I took it down (at least until May, and then we'll see) and he was very nice, but since the picture is currently in a gallery show, posting it was a no-no, so please check out the picture (as well as the other sweet Henry Miller pictures) at www.petergowland.com/glamour8c.html, it is the opening picture.
I've been flipping through Black Spring on the john lately ("No harm, I say, can ever be done a great book by taking it with you to the toilet. Only the little books suffer thereby"). I've read it before, so this time I'm just opening it at random. This morning I found this section, titled "A Saturday Afternoon," in which he describes a bike ride along the Seine (and the joys of urinals and reading on toilets, which the quote above comes from).
This doesn't really have a point, but I want to share this passage:
The approach to the bridge is paved with cobblestones. I ride so slowly that each cobble sends a separate and distinct message to my spinal column and up through the vertebrae to that crazy cage in which the medulla oblongata flashes its semaphores. And I cross the bridge at Sèvres . . . I yell, like that maniac St. Paul—'Oh death, where is thy sting?' In back of me Sèvres, before me Boulogne, but this that passes under me, this Seine started up somewhere in my myriad simultaneous trickles, this still jet rushing on from out of a million billion roots, this still mirror bearing the clouds along and stifling the past, rushing on and on and on while between the mirror and the clouds moving transversally I, a complete corporate entity, a universe bringing countless centuries to a conclusion, I and this that passes beneath me and that floats above me and all that surges through me, I and this, I and that joined up in one continuous movement, this Seine and every Seine that is spanned by a bridge is the miracle of a man crossing it on a bicycle.
Awesome, I like it!
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