Henry Miller Describes The Beauty Of Big Sur Giving Literature The Oranges Of Hieronymus Bosch: Part III
Conrad Moricand. This chance meeting serves as an analogy to represent a conflict between two types of intellectual thought emerging in the new California: the thoughts of the rational man and the man studying the realms of superstition, astrology, and the metaphysical world of imagination. Moricand is a man of this world of imagination.
The world of the new California will be one dominated by the prophets of the metaphysical realms. New religous cults, alternative living experiments, a range of literary exchange through the Haiku poetry verse from the east, and a change in the perspective in regards to the whole enlightened man would come to pass in this version of California. Miller represents the older type of California; more of the type from the Steinbeckian strain. He views the world as a realist. He is a rationalist viewing nature through the eyes of experience. Moricand, however, is a new manner of man; viewing the world through the surreal world of the Romantic. In his world, there is room for magic. For Miller, such a view holds traps for the free man. He prefers to live in a world uncontrolled by the hand of astrological faith. He prefers choosing the right to control his own destiny.
Having met before the second world war in France in l936, Miller and Moricand had discussed these issues in their early youth. As the war had progressed, he had lost touch with his old friend from his early days in Paris. Twenty years later, Moricand is also drawn to northern california to visit his old friend at Big Sur. Miller picks his old friend up at the airport, and their old debate resumes, through conversational imagery switching backwards in time and circling again into the present. Their conversation is resolved, coming once again in full circle, as Miller in a dramatic confrontation refutes the ideology of his friend's astrological beliefs.
"Sometimes I think that astrology must have had its inception at a moment in man's evolution when he lost faith in himself. Or, to put it another way, when he lost his wholeness. When he wanted to know instead of to be. Schizophrenia began far back, not yesterday or the day before. And when man split he split into myriad fragments. But even today, as fragmented as he is, he can be made whole again. The only difference between the Adamic man and the man of today is that the one was born to Paradise and the other has to create it." (p.323)
Miller sees a Big Sur and a California that is
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