Yes, It Is Just Like a Lunatic Asylum. All of It.

A colleague gave this to me tonight and said, “Henry Miller wrote this about when he was a copy editor. I printed it out for you.”

“I must say, right at the start, that I haven’t a thing to complain about. It’s like being in a lunatic asylum, with permission to masturbate for the rest of your life. The world is brought right under my nose and all that is requested of me is to punctuate the calamities. There is nothing on which these slick guys upstairs do not put their fingers: no joy, no misery, passes unnoticed. They live among the hard facts of life, reality, as it is called. It is the reality of a swamp and they are the frogs who have nothing better to do but croak. The more they croak the more real life becomes. Lawyer, priest, doctor, politician, newspaperman—these are the quacks who have their fingers on the pulse of the world.”

—Henry Miller, “Tropic of Cancer,” 1934


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