“I cannot refrain from repeating- never have I known a community in which there was so much talent, so many capable men and women, so many resourceful, self-sufficient souls. Even that scally-wag up in the hills who pretends to be a good for nothing, ‘ a real son of a bitch,’ as he lovingly labels himself, knows how to live with himself and can be, when he chooses, a most gentle, lovable, charitable person, one of those happy ‘misfits’ who has tasted everything and who, God bless him!, has therefore no more respect for the inside of a temple than the inside of a jail, no more consideration for a scholar than for a tramp, no higher opinion of a judge than of the culprit who keeps the judge in food and raiment…It is all thrown at you pell-mell: landscapes, seascapes, forests, streams, birds, of passage, weeds, pests, rattlesnakes, gophers, earwigs, misfits, vagabonds, sunsets, rainbows, yarrow, hollyhocks, and that leech of the plant world called the morning-glory. Even the rocks are seductive and hypnotic. And where else in the world will you find a towering wall of fog advancing from the date line with a knife-blue crest behind which a setting sun shoots out ‘squirrels and lightening’? ”
-Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957)
