Just pulled out this quote for a friend who was born on xmas, thought ya'll might dig it:
"Everything that happened to me happened too late to
mean much to me. It was even so with my birth. Slated for Christmas I was
born a half hour too late. It always seemed to me that I was meant to be the
sort of individual that one is destined to be by virtue of being born on the
25th day of December. Admiral Dewey was born on that day and so was Jesus
Christ . . . perhaps Krishnamurti too, for all I know. Anyway that's the
sort of guy I was intended to be. But due to the fact that my mother had a
clutching womb, that she held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out
under another configuration - with a bad set-up, in other words. They say -
the astrologers, I mean -that it will get better and better for me as I go
on; the future in fact, is supposed to be quite glorious. But what do I care
about the future? It would have been better if my mother had tripped on the
stairs the morning of the 25th of December and broken her neck: that would
have given me a fair start! When I try to think, therefore, of where the
break occurred I keep putting it back further and further, until there is no
other way of accounting for it than by the retarded hour of birth. Even my
mother, with her caustic tongue, seemed to understand it somewhat. "Always
dragging behind, like a cow's tail" - that's how she characterized me. But
is it my fault that she held me locked inside her until the hour had passed?
Destiny had prepared me to be such and such a person; the stars were in the
right conjunction and I was right with the stars and kicking to get out. But
I had no choice about the mother who was to deliver me. Perhaps I was lucky
not to have been born an idiot, considering all the circumstances. One thing
seems clear, however - and this is a hangover from the 25th - that I was
born with a crucifixion complex. That is, to be more precise, I was born a
fanatic."
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
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