Henry Miller on the lack of thinkers

    Henry Miller, by holding Picasso’s wit high, is right about the lack of thinkers – and though he doesn’t conclude more, that is a sad thing in everyday affairs, and a dangerous thing in political and economic life:

I sometimes feel sorry for Picasso although I know he is one of the great, great men in this world of ours. But I feel sorry that he is the slave or victim of his creation, that he’s a compulsive artist. They say he’s not happy unless he’s working. He can’t enjoy not working, as it were. But I must say one thing about him. To me everything he says has high wisdom, and it’s said beautifully and with wit. You can ask him about anything, even things he doesn’t know about, and you get a wonderful answer. Because that mind of his is turning over all the time, and it isn’t a mind that says, “I’ve been trained, I know, I’ve studied.” No, it’s a quick spontaneous sort of thinking. You see, I think that there are very few real thinkers in the world, that we are all sleepwalkers; we are not thinking, we are reacting all the time. We are telling what we heard, what we have borrowed from others. We have no thoughts of our own. But Picasso says things with originality and, even if they’re crazy, lopsided, topsy-turvy, it makes high sense to me.

    (Quoted from page 121 of My Life and Times, by Henry Miller. Playboy Press, 1971.)
    For a brief biography of Henry Miller, click here. For images of or relating to Henry Miller, click here. To see and hear a minute of Henry Miller describing his discovery and love of Big Sur, click here.