Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Rating:
Summary: a clear vision of Miller's life-affirming philosophy
Review: In this book, Miller presents a series of essays of various topics, including his friends, other artists, and Miller's social concerns. The longest piece is "Money and how it gets that way". Of course, this piece is written with subtle sarcasm throughout. Although the longest piece of the book, it doesnt stand out as the best, and in fact, doesnt seem to fit in with the rest of the essays. In the other essays, Miller demonstrates his ability to exploit what is powerful and life-affirming, laughing off all that is refined, petty, and weak. This comes out especially in the essays on fellow writers. There is an essay on Thoreau, Miller writes: "He found Walden, but Walden is everywhere if man is there". It is this sort of formula that is constant throughout both "Stand Still Like the Hummingbird" and the rest of Miller's work: There is something positive and life-affirming everywhere so long as one is alive, it is only a matter of recognizing the greatness of life itself. Although not naively bashing all forms of technology, Miller urges us in "The Hour of Man" to take the time to return the basics and discover not technology, but ourselves, our families, and our friends. As Miller explores that which affirms life, he also takes the time to present piercing criticisms directed at those who are petty, controlling, and all too caught up in the rat-race; for example, he writes: "What, moreover, can you call your own? The house you live in, the food you swallow, the clothes you wear-you neither built the house nor raised the food nor made the clothes. The same goes for your ideas. You moved into them ready-made". This passage is indicative of Miller's insistance on creation and his general emphasis on overabundance and embracing the brilliance of nature and life as opposed to trying to control it. In "Tropic of Cancer", Miller writes that he "loves everything that flows", and one gets the impression that according to Miller, everything flows. Thus, the formula in "Stand Still Like a Hummingbird" can be summed up by saying that rather than try to stop these great flows of life, we should flow with them and embrace their power. Overall, this book is enjoyable, intelligent; yet, for a book of personal philosophy, rarely preaches morality and is never sentimental.

Rating:
Summary: a clear vision of Miller's life-affirming philosophy
Review: In this book, Miller presents a series of essays of various topics, including his friends, other artists, and Miller's social concerns. The longest piece is "Money and how it gets that way". Of course, this piece is written with subtle sarcasm throughout. Although the longest piece of the book, it doesnt stand out as the best, and in fact, doesnt seem to fit in with the rest of the essays. In the other essays, Miller demonstrates his ability to exploit what is powerful and life-affirming, laughing off all that is refined, petty, and weak. This comes out especially in the essays on fellow writers. There is an essay on Thoreau, Miller writes: "He found Walden, but Walden is everywhere if man is there". It is this sort of formula that is constant throughout both "Stand Still Like the Hummingbird" and the rest of Miller's work: There is something positive and life-affirming everywhere so long as one is alive, it is only a matter of recognizing the greatness of life itself. Although not naively bashing all forms of technology, Miller urges us in "The Hour of Man" to take the time to return the basics and discover not technology, but ourselves, our families, and our friends. As Miller explores that which affirms life, he also takes the time to present piercing criticisms directed at those who are petty, controlling, and all too caught up in the rat-race; for example, he writes: "What, moreover, can you call your own? The house you live in, the food you swallow, the clothes you wear-you neither built the house nor raised the food nor made the clothes. The same goes for your ideas. You moved into them ready-made". This passage is indicative of Miller's insistance on creation and his general emphasis on overabundance and embracing the brilliance of nature and life as opposed to trying to control it. In "Tropic of Cancer", Miller writes that he "loves everything that flows", and one gets the impression that according to Miller, everything flows. Thus, the formula in "Stand Still Like a Hummingbird" can be summed up by saying that rather than try to stop these great flows of life, we should flow with them and embrace their power. Overall, this book is enjoyable, intelligent; yet, for a book of personal philosophy, rarely preaches morality and is never sentimental.

Rating:
Summary: As Fresh As Flowers that bloom in the snow
Review: These highly readable pieces reflect the incredible vitality and variety of interests of the writer who extended the frontiers of modern literature. If you think the New Thought movement has some Ancient Wisdom roots, you will enjoy this collection of stories and essays. If you have read, even occasionally, Henry David (Thoreau), Ralph Waldo (Emerson), Uncle Walt (Whitman), this volume is for you. Henry Miller says nothing here either more offensive or less insightful than these three Transcendentalists who lived before him.

Miller's genius for comedy is at its best in "Money and How It Gets That Way"-a tongue-in-cheek parody of "economics" provoked by a postcard from Ezra Pound which asked if he had "ever thought about money." Stand Still Like the Hummingbird provides a right and perfect metaphor for this outstanding collection, one of Henry's Miller's most luminous statements of his personal philosophy of life. Much of this book, while previously published, appeared only in foreign magazines or in small limited editions which have gone out of print.

If you're an artist (starving or successful), you'll appreciate Miller's deep concern for the role of artist in society, in "An Open Letter to All and Sundry," and in "The Angel Is My Watermark." If you're a writer (struggling to be or already published), you'll find inspiration in words like these, scattered like gemstones--generous and true-throughout these pages: "...when you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous." In short, there is much for many: timeless wisdom, not only for us still living "in this world," but also for us, who, like Henry Miller, have always suspected we are "not of this world."

Rating:
Summary: As Fresh As Flowers that bloom in the snow
Review: These highly readable pieces reflect the incredible vitality and variety of interests of the writer who extended the frontiers of modern literature. If you think the New Thought movement has some Ancient Wisdom roots, you will enjoy this collection of stories and essays. If you have read, even occasionally, Henry David (Thoreau), Ralph Waldo (Emerson), Uncle Walt (Whitman), this volume is for you. Henry Miller says nothing here either more offensive or less insightful than these three Transcendentalists who lived before him.

Miller's genius for comedy is at its best in "Money and How It Gets That Way"-a tongue-in-cheek parody of "economics" provoked by a postcard from Ezra Pound which asked if he had "ever thought about money." Stand Still Like the Hummingbird provides a right and perfect metaphor for this outstanding collection, one of Henry's Miller's most luminous statements of his personal philosophy of life. Much of this book, while previously published, appeared only in foreign magazines or in small limited editions which have gone out of print.

If you're an artist (starving or successful), you'll appreciate Miller's deep concern for the role of artist in society, in "An Open Letter to All and Sundry," and in "The Angel Is My Watermark." If you're a writer (struggling to be or already published), you'll find inspiration in words like these, scattered like gemstones--generous and true-throughout these pages: "...when you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous." In short, there is much for many: timeless wisdom, not only for us still living "in this world," but also for us, who, like Henry Miller, have always suspected we are "not of this world."

Rating:
Summary: It's amazing how life experience changes your outlook
Review: Years ago, as a kid really, I'd read Miller's Tropics (plus a couple of smaller pieces). Then his writing came through as passionate, philosophical, liberating, healthily pornographic. I never became a Miller junkie, but I remembered the Tropics as something that affected me deeply; that's what I've remembered.

Now, I never realized that he wrote essays too, so when I've bumped into the "Stand Still..." I grabbed a copy w/o much thinking, simply based on the vague rememberances of his work, or rather, the impressions I had at the time of reading him as a youth. The result has been most interesting: I've recognized the same Miller -- passionate, opinionated, vociferous, aggressive -- but this time, amazingly, I found him also boring, nonsensical, preachy, repetitive, inept as a writer, self-assured beyond measure, ego-maniacal, at times ungrammatical (unless it's printing errors), laughably ignorant (for example, he clearly considers a light year a measure of time.) I've got terribly annoyed by his deliberately obscure vocabulary, with all these hifalutin "polyphylacteric" words that he probably picked from some medical or theological dictionary -- to do what? impress the reader? preposterous...

Astonished by this new interpretation, I've even gone back and reread some of his other stuff. It's been a couple of decades since my encounter with the Tropics, and what a difference this time made in my outlook! I've read Nietzsche since, and Tao, and many, many other books, I guess I've read a lot of what he himself read -- and now, when I read his philosophical parts, I can't help seeing a thoroughly unoriginal stylistically faux-Emersonian mixture of a bit of second-hand Nietzsche, a bit of second-hand TaoTeChing, blended with a huge amount of sheer shamanistic jibberish delivered in mighty spurts of abracadabra into the reader's face -- without a trace of shame. Every page abounds in totally isolated striking phrases that never cohere into a single whole... a quotation dictionary printed straight-through... An overpowering flood of meaningless, totally unjustified, never argued incantations: I had a mental image of a raving lunatic foaming at the mouth dancing near a fire in a darkening forest with a bone through his nose. Boring. Annoying. This time his eroticism felt like stick-figure populated pornography in a sense that there's no shade of truth (factual or artistic) in any of it; just like any cheap porno flick, it's all sheer masturbatory fantasy (which I couldn't know in my teenage years, but which is all to clear to me now.) Arrogant, sure of himself for no apparent reason, escapist, reactionary, irrational in the extreme, impudent; all of this left a fairly bad taste in my mouth; I could barely finish the book.

As literature, it's less than nothing -- and yet... yet again, like in my younger years, it's been liberating -- though in a totally different sense now: it brought a stark realization of how much I have changed over the years. Which, of course, is a valuable experience with wide-ranging ramifications going far beyond my appreciation of Henry Miller's writings; it is so difficult to notice the passage of time in ourselves; this book did it. So after all, if not one thing then another: still I'm grateful.