A Jaded Moon

Since my last post was about Lawrence Durrell, one thought led to another and I found myself rereading The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller. Miller, like Durrell and his zoologist brother Gerald, form the trifecta of my Greek obsession, always hinging on my unquenched desire to spend a summer writing in Corfu. At some point in the book, Miller is wandering through Crete, an island I visited out of college with my then boyfriend.

That summer, I was obsessed with the sanctity of our travels, wanting only the authentic experience and to be waterlogged with big feelings about the universe, the world and the future of all things. My boyfriend, on the other hand, had developed an acute allergy to sunblock. Unfortunately we decided that it was the bright Mediterranean sun responsible for turning his face into a shiny red plane. We kept piling on the SPF. Every time I looked at his taut tomato face, I felt a bubble of anger rising in me. His face was ruining my quest across ancient lands.

Miller too was often obsessed with dissecting locations down to their emotional skeletons. Big Sur. Paris. New York. Here Crete. Of course, he blows the roof off his descriptions. A few phrases stick out:

“Again I had that feeling of the back pages of Dicken’s novels, of a quaint one-legged world illumined by a jaded moon: a land that had survived every catastrophe and was now palpitating with a blood beat, a land of owls and herons and crazy relics such as sailors bring back from foreign shores.”

I too had walked Knossos and Phaestos with cautious steps, hoping to feel fifty centuries of civilization under foot. I wanted a connection with that part of us that mistakes history for eternity. I’m just not sure I was capable. Like a jaded moon.  

Miller goes on, “The island was once studded with citadels, the gleaming hub of a wheel whose splendor cast its shadow over the whole known world…. The last wheel has fallen apart, the vertical life is down with; man is spreading over the face of the earth in every direction like a fungus growth, blotting out the last gleams of light ,the last hopes.”

And while Miller’s prose are voracious dictates about the end of civilization, which he sees everywhere, least of all though in his drunken debauches, I am drawn now to the concept of the jaded moon. Next blog: ennui. 21st C Gen X jadedness. Perhaps also my favorite theme: paralysis.