Desde el trópico

...All my life things had worked all right – in the end. It wasn’t in the cards for me to exert myself. Something had to be left to the Providence – in my case a whole lot. Despite all the putward manifestations of misfortune or mismanagement I knew that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. And with a double crown too. The external situation was bad, admitted – but what bothered me more was the internal situation. I was really afraid of myself, of my appetite, my curiosity, my flexibility, my permeability, my malleability, my geniality, my powers of adaption. No situation in itself could frighten me: I somehow always saw myself sitting pretty, sitting inside a buttercup, as it were, and sipping the honey. Even if it were flung in jail I had a hunch I’d enjoy it. It was because I knew how not to resist, I suppose. Other people wore themselves out tugging and straining and pulling; my strategy was to float with the tide. What people did to me didn’t bother me nearly so much as what they were doing to others or to themselves. I was really so damned well off inside that I had to take on the problems of the world. And that’s why I was in a mess all the time. I was trying to live out the world destiny. If I got home of an evening, for instance, and there was no food in the house, not even for the kid, I would turn around and go looking for the food. But what I notice about myself, and that was what puzzled me, was that no sooner outside and hustling for the grub than I was back at the Weltanshauung again. I didn’t think of food in general, food in all the stages, everywhere in the world at that hour, and how did it was gotten and how it was prepared and what people did if they didn’t have it and how maybe there was a way to fix it that so everybody would have it when they wanted it and no more time wasted on such an idiotically simple problem. I felt sorry for the wife and the kid, sure, but I also felt sorry for the Hottentots and the Australian bushmen, not to mention the starving Belgians and the Turks and the Armenians. I felt sorry for the human race, for the supidity of man and his lack of imagination. Missing a meal wasn’t so terrible – it was the ghastly emptiness of the street that disturbed me profoundly. All those bloody houses, one like another, and all so empty and cheerless looking. Fine paving stones under foot and asphalt in the middle of the stoops to walk up, and yet a guy could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be looking for a crust of bread. That’s what got me. The incongruousness of it. If one could dash out with a dinner bell and yell “Listen, listen people, I’m a guy what’s hungry. Who wants shoes shined? Who wants the garbage brought out? Who wants the drainpipes cleane out?” If you could only go out in the street and put it to them clear like that. But no, you don’t dare to open your trap. If you tell a guy in the street you’re hungry you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That’s something I’ve never understood. I don’t understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple – you just say Yes some comes up to you. And if you can’t say Yes you can take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to don a uniform and kill men you don’t know, just to get the crust of bread, is a mystery to me. That’s what I think about, more than about whose trap it’s going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I’m here to live not to calculate. And that’s just what those bastards don’t want you to do – to live! They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That’s reasonable. That’s intelligent. If I were running the boat things would be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, By Jesus! You wouldn’t have to shit in your own pants over trifles. Maybe there wouldn’t be macadamized roads and streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million billion varieties, maybe there wouldn’t even be glass in the windows, maybe you’d have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn’t be French cooking and Italian cooking and Chinses cooking, maybe people would kill each other when their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would stop them because there wouldn’t be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn’t be any cabinet ministers or legislatures because there wouldn’t be any goddamned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take moths and years to trek from place to place, but you wouldn’t need a visa or a passport or a carte d’indetité because you wouldn’t be registered anywhere you wouldn’t bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it wouldn’t male any difference since you wouldn’t own anything except what you could carry around with you and why would want to own anything when evertyhing could be free?
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Henry Miller
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Tropic of Capricorn
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280 - 282
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.saludos