Catching Out the Quote

02 Mar, 2025

This week had me unexpectedly reading Henry Miller’s Black Spring—not out of any desire to jump back into an author I’d loved and made excuses for in my twenties, but because, having failed to chase down a Miller quotation alleged to be found in said book, I checked it out from the library to see whether the denizens of the internet were really just doing their unquestioning thing and passing on some uplifting string of words without checking the source.

Not able to search inside the book anywhere online, I started with the paperback version. I wanted to see whether the quote even existed, yes, but also and more importantly, wanted to determine, if it really was to be found in this novel, what the context surrounding it was. Because the thing is, nothing at all about the quote sounded remotely like Miller. An author all too inclined to feature wham-bam accounts of slipping any of his appendages into female orifices, their owners dismissed as creatures not exactly deserving of dignity, didn’t really seem prone to effusing, “I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” And in addition to all the sneering about quims and cunts, that “one” pronoun feels far too proper for a guy who wanted, in this book, at least, to blow quite a bit to shreds.

It’s not that Miller wouldn’t have been fascinated by small, mundane details; he obviously was paying attention, and a hell of a lot of it, to the things most people never notice. Had he not been, his descriptions of people and places, the dialogue he wrote, would never have been so capable of setting you right down in early twentieth-century New York or Paris streets or cafés or tailor shops or run-down apartments, making you feel like you intimately knew a time and place most of us weren’t alive to witness. It’s just that the expression of anything he cared about would probably never have been able to fit on an inspirational office poster (or drawn in gauzy typefaces on Instagram or Pinterest)—and had he seen it attributed to him, he probably would have gone off on a merited rant about American feel-goodism.

So I read the book—without coming across the quotation. Had I missed it? I went back and checked out the e-version, doing multiple searches with different phrases and even single words. Confirming my suspicions, it was nowhere to be found. The internet had done its lazy thing, each link in the virtual chain failing to stop for the few minutes it took to check out a book and make sure the attribution was being made correctly.

It’s not that this is a new, digitally enabled danger; Nietzsche, for instance, has been dishonestly quoted at least since his sister gained control of his work.¹ It’s just that it’s so much easier now for a faked citation to spread, and hence, to stick around as valid. And the problem isn’t just the misattribution; it’s also the way misattributed text casts something like a dishonest shadow over the work of an author—or the author themself—in general. Witness what’s probably the most widespread misuse of a Nietzsche quote: “God is dead.” Among other things, taking those three words as the whole story has led to at least one smug evangelical T-shirt I remember seeing in college: “God is dead.” —Nietzsche. “Nietzsche is dead.” —God. Wow, you really owned the philosopher with that one, kid.

The problem is that people who tend to toss out that phrase as representative of our condemnable disrespect for the divine usually don’t follow through and read what comes next. In Walter Kaufmann’s translation, here’s what the madman who delivers the message says to the onlookers in the marketplace: “‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers…. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”² The episode in The Gay Science isn’t the triumphantly misguided declaration that T-shirt would like to believe it is; this is a dismayed lamentation, and one made at that by a madman. It’s a cry, yes, to live into our fullness—but it wasn’t something intended as a gleeful celebration on the part of a nineteenth-century snowflake.³ In order to understand that, though, you need not only to read that scene, but the rest of the book—and to really understand that Nietzsche wasn’t some anti-street preacher of his time, you should read a lot more of his work than that. But that takes time and patience and some investigation of the era and situation in which he was living and writing—so much attention and time that can’t be contained in a tossed-off summary.

I’m guessing the people who find and pass along that Miller quote (and others) haven’t read anything the author actually wrote, and so are probably walking around with the sense that he was a great and sensitive guy who’d be very supportive of their attempts to fill the world with harmless and gentle exhortations to look more closely at the wondrous stuff around us. What do these people do, though, when looking more closely means uncovering some repulsive truths—some cruelty, some bad taste, some anger that can’t be assuaged with a nice peaceful saying? What happens when that ugliness can’t be separated from the beauty—the careful depiction of a cat’s movements, of the working class guys in a bar—that comes along with it? Well, that’s complicated. That’s hard to face or to think about. Better just stick with what makes you feel good, and pretend that’s all there is to it. If you meet Henry Miller in the afterlife, though, be prepared for a verbal drudging—and Nietzsche being on hand to churn out a wearable version of the takedown.

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