Miller was the "first"man not the "frist" man....
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Just the other day, my eyes fell upon the visage of an Australian from the Great War. He was, what, 108! Forty-five years from now I will be 108, if I am still alive. Who will be on the list of recipients of my annual letter then, if I am still writing? What will I thinkabout the Middle East then? Perhaps, if I live to such a ripe old age and I can then talk, not about WW1 as those old chaps I saw on the TV recently, but about the one referred to by Henry Miller in the following quotation, a quotation that contains an interesting perspective on our times and the war we are all fighting, each in our individual ways.
It seems that Miller was very impressed with the religion I became associated with back in 1953, some 45 years ago--the Baha'i Faith. So I took more than my usual interest in him, as is only natural. He was also, as far as I know, the first to get away with using that “f” word in his trilogy: Sexus, Plexus and Nexus back in the 1950s and early 1960s. I was just finishing my baseball career at the time, trying to make it with girls and not very successfully-- and getting into that religion for the first time, a religion that was and is claiming to be the youngest of the world’s great religions.
Anyway, Miller writes, and I think it was about 1941 or 1942,: "When the destruction brought about by the Second World War is complete, another set of destructions will set in. And it will be far more drastic, far more terrible, than the destruction which we are now witnessing. The whole planet will be in the throes of revolution. And the fires will rage until the very foundations of the present world crumble."
Decades ago people would have had trouble comprehending Miller's idea here, as they had and have trouble comprehending the Baha’i idea. But slowly quite unobtrusively it seems, people are coming to a global perspective and in the decades ahead it will be their survival ethos. This new Faith I have been in for 45 years is emerging little by little from an obscurity in which it has languished for, it could be argued, more than two centuries, at least if one includes its three precursors. Anyway, good on yer, old Henry. good on yer--as they say in Australia--where I have lived for 36 years.-Ron Price
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