Henry Miller on life as a mysterious journey

"No one takes a straight-cut line through life. Often we fail to stop at the stations indicated on the timetable. Sometimes we go off the track. Sometimes we lose our way, or take to the air and vanish life chaff. The most tremendous voyages are sometimes taken without moving from the spot. In the space of a few minutes some individuals live out of the span of an ordinary mortal's total experience. Some use up numbers of lives in the course of their stay here below. Some burgeon like mushrooms while others slip back hopelessly, mired in their tracks. What it is that goes on moment by moment in a man's life is forever unfathomable. No man can possibly relate the whole story, no matter how limited a fragment of his life he may choose to dwell on. It is this aura of the unknown, in which the real struggle takes place, that alone interests me. In describing facts, events, relationships, even trivia, I am constantly endeavoring to make the reader aware of the all-pervasiveness of that dark, mysterious realm in the absence of which nothing could happen."
--Henry Miller, The World of Sex (1940)