He was continually talking about himself and his relation to the world about, a quality which created the unfortunate impression that he was simply a blatant egotist… To come into is presence gave me the sensation of being undressed, or rather peeled, for it was much more than mere nakedness which he demanded of the person he was talking to. In talking to me he addressed himself to a me whose existence I had only dimly suspected, the me, for example, which emerged when, suddenly, reading a book, I realized that I had been dreaming. Few books had this faculty of putting me into a trance, this trance of utter lucidity in which, unknown to oneself, one makes the deepest resolutions. Roy Hamilton’s conversation partook of this quality. It made me more than ever alert, preternaturally alert, without at the same time crumbling the fabric of dream. He was appealing in other words, to the m of the self, to the being who would eventually outgrow the naked personality, the synthetic individuality leave me truly alone and solitary in order to work out my own proper destiny.

Our talk was like a secret language in the midst of which the others went to sleep or faded away like ghosts… Hamilton opened my eyes and gave me new values, and though later I was able to lose the vision which he had bequeathed me nevertheless I could never again see the world, or my friends, as I had seen them prior to his coming. Hamilton altered me profoundly, as only a rare book, a rare personality, a rare experience, can alter one. For the first time in my life I understood what it was to experience a vital friendship and not to feel enslaved or attached because of the experience. Never, after we parted, did I feel the need of his actual presence; he had given himself completely and I possessed him without being possessed. It was the first, clean, whole experience of friendship, and it was never duplicated by any other friend. He was the symbol personified and consequently entirely satisfactory, hence no longer necessary to me. He himself understood this thoroughly. Perhaps it was the fact of having no father that pushed him alone road toward the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the uselessness of ties.


— Henry Miller, The Tropic Of Capricorn