_{"The cancer of time is devouring us. Our heroes have killed themselves or are killing themselves. So the hero is not Time, but Timelessness. We must march, in closed ranks, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. Time will not change."}

In Tropic of Cancer, there is no classical structure. This is writing in its purest form. Almost virginal. It uses interior monologue like few others. It's as if it split its head open and made you feel its hunger, its rage, and its desire.

The prose is direct, sometimes vulgar, but always honest. It uses autobiography as a weapon, confession as a method. There are no filters, no embellishments. As if it were telling us its secrets, in the midst of a drunken stupor.

That lack of artifice, that total nakedness, is what captures you. It disarms you. It forces you to face life as it is.

Henry Miller takes you by the hand and drags you through the streets of Paris, shows you the alleys with the glamour rotting inside, forces you to put your hands in misery and feel it warm, alive. His prose has no flourishes. It's like a blow, a sledgehammer. The sound of a tooth breaking on the pavement. It's as honest as pain can be.

His obscene tenderness fascinates. The way he describes a woman, not as an object, but as a territory to be explored, with its ravines and its storms, is intoxicating.

_{"I have no money, no resources, no hope. I am the happiest man in the world. A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think that, I am. Everything that was literature has been stripped away from me. There are no more books to write, thank God."}

Henry knows how to talk about hunger, not with pity, but with a voluptuous rage. Hunger, for him, is not a defeat; it is a state of high alert, a sharpening stone. Miller taught me to listen to the music of emptiness itself.

He and I have often met in these early mornings without electricity. We talk about women, about the impossibility of love, about stupidity. He tells me to write, he always tells me to write, that it doesn't matter what, that the important thing is to never stop writing.

"Everything else is a lie, boy," he whispers to me in a hoarse voice. "Work, family, homeland... it's all a set. The only thing that's real is this moment, this pain, this pleasure, this word you tear from your guts."

It's courage in its raw honesty. Miller fears nothing, not being made out to be an idiot, not being hated, not being misunderstood. His writing is an act of wild freedom, an untethered animal that obeys no one. That's why they banned him. That's why they burned his books. Not because of the swearing or the sex scenes in Tropic of Cancer, but because of that freedom that smells the danger of those who prefer cages.

Without Miller, perhaps, there would be no Bukowski. Without Miller, the Beats would have been good kids playing at being rebels. He showed them the abyss and said, "Jump, you bastards. The fall is the only part that matters."

_{"I'll sing for you, perhaps a little off-key, but I will sing. I'll sing while you die, I'll dance on your filthy corpse…"}

In this world filled with political hypocrisy and plastic smiles, Miller is a grunt. He always knew that beneath the civilized veneer, we are still animals who dream and create. Miller is the red wine stain on a white shirt, the mess at a gala dinner, the obscene laugh at a funeral.

Tropic of Cancer is not an old book. It's more alive than most of those published today. Dirty isn't bad; sometimes dirt is just the trace of a life lived intensely. Today's young people will find their own Miller. Or not. Everything conspires against them.

Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer as he lived: without a safety net, without a filter, with the urgency of someone with nothing to lose. His prose is a torrent that sweeps you away, stirs you up, spits you out transformed. There is no conventional beauty here; there is naked, raw, sometimes repugnant, but always vital truth.

He uses interior monologue not as a literary technique, but as a natural breathing process. He puts you inside his head, makes you share his hunger, his cold, his lust. There is no distance between the author and the reader; we are complicit in his misery.

_{"To sing, you must first open your mouth. You must have two lungs and some knowledge of music. You don't need an accordion or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. So, this is a song. I am singing.".}

The characters are real ghosts. June, his muse and executioner, is as tangible as the neighbor screaming in the yard. The bohemian friends, the prostitutes, the vagabonds: all have a lacerating humanity. Miller doesn't judge, he describes. He loves them in their decline, celebrates them in their failure.

It's hot and there's no power. Outside, a car drives by, blasting music. Reggaeton plays, something Miller would have loved for its rawness. Inside, the candle burns down. The wax drips onto the table, forming small sculptures. On the last page of my photocopied Tropic of Cancer, someone wrote in pencil: "This too shall pass." A lie. This doesn't pass. This endures.

Henry didn't want readers; he wanted accomplices. And here I am, years later, many years later, as the Poet of Macondo would say, being his accomplice... on an island where the light fades, but the forbidden words continue to illuminate the hunger, the desire, the rage, the need to say: "I am here, I exist." Miller knew it. That's why he wrote. That's why I write. So, when tomorrow dawns and the light returns, we'll still be here, revealing truths, both beautiful and terrible, on paper, while in Cuba, and in Paris, and around the world, life continues its merciless and glorious course.

[...sin red, sin filtro, con la urgencia del que no tiene nada que perder (...) No hay aquí belleza convencional; hay verdad desnuda, cruda, a veces repugnante, pero siempre vital...]

Saludos cordiales amigos de la Lectura!!!

Henry Miller resucita cada noche cuando se va la luz en casa. No necesita invitación. Se sienta junto a mi en el portal, enciende un cigarro imaginario y me mira con esa sonrisa de lobo hambriento que debió tener en París, en 1930, cuando decidió que escribir sería su forma de hablar al mundo.

Nunca lo leí en un libro encuadernado. Llegó a mí en fotocopias mal hechas, pasadas de mano en mano, como un pecado.
Las páginas casi siempre olían a humedad y a sudor, como debe oler la verdad. Recuerdo una en particular, la de la escena con Fillmore y la prostituta en el hotel barato. Esa página tenía una mancha de café seca, justo donde Miller describe la luz sucia de la habitación. Siempre quise saber si quien la fotocopió había derramado su café exactamente allí, perturbado por la crudeza de las palabras. O fue el azar.

To all of you artists out here at HIVE! If you ever are lost, please join Bokura No Digital World at our Discord chat.