Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Perhaps a slightly lower standard would be necessary,’ suggested Chelifer.
‘It’s a remarkable thing,’ pursued Mr. Cardan meditatively, ‘that the greatest and most influential reformer of modern times, Tolstoy, should also have proposed a reversion to tribalism as the sole remedy to civilized restlessness and uncertainty of purpose. But while we propose a tribalism based on the facts — or should I say the appearances?’ — Mr. Cardan twinkled amicably at Calamy— ‘of modern life, Tolstoy proposed a return to the genuine, primordial, uneducated, dirty tribalism of the savage. That won’t do, of course; because it’s hardly probable, once they have tasted it, that men will allow le confort moderne, as they call it in hotels, to be taken from them. Our suggestion is the more practicable — the creation of a planet-wide tribe of Babbitts. They’d be much easier to propagate, now, than moujiks. But still the principle remains the same in both projects — a return to the tribal state. And when Tolstoy and Chelifer and myself agree about anything, believe me,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘there’s something in it. By the way,’ he added, ‘I hope we haven’t been hurting your susceptibilities, Calamy. You’re not moujiking up here, are you? Digging and killing pigs and so on. Are you? I trust not.’
Calamy shook his head, laughing. ‘I cut wood in the mornings, for exercise,’ he said. ‘But not on principle, I assure you, not on principle.’
‘Ah, that’s all right,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘I was afraid you might be doing it on principle.’
‘It would be a stupidity,’ said Calamy. ‘What would be the point of doing badly something for which I have no aptitude; something, moreover, which would prevent me from doing the thing for which it seems to me just possible I may have some native capacity.’
‘And what, might I ask,’ said Mr. Cardan with an assumed diffidence and tactful courtesy, ‘what may that thing be?’
‘That’s rather biting,’ said Calamy, smiling. ‘But you may well ask. For it has certainly been hard to see, until now, what my peculiar talent was. I’ve not even known myself. Was it making love? or riding? or shooting antelopes in Africa? or commanding a company of infantry? or desultory reading at lightning speeds? or drinking champagne? or a good memory? or my bass voice? Or what? I’m inclined to think it was the first: making love.’
‘Not at all a bad talent,’ said Mr. Cardan judicially.
‘But not, I find, one that one can go on cultivating indefinitely,’ said Calamy. ‘And the same is true of the others — true at any rate for me. . . . No, if I had no aptitudes but those, I might certainly as well devote myself exclusively to digging the ground. But I begin to find in myself a certain aptitude for meditation which seems to me worth cultivating. And I doubt if one can cultivate meditation at the same time as the land. So I only cut wood for exercise.’
‘That’s good,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘I should be sorry to think you were doing anything actively useful. You retain the instincts of a gentleman; that’s excellent. . . .’
‘Satan!’ said Calamy, laughing. ‘But do you suppose I don’t know very well that you can make out the most damning case against the idle anchorite who sits looking at his navel while other people work? Do you suppose I haven’t thought of that?’
‘I’m sure you have,’ Mr. Cardan answered, genially twinkling.
‘The case looks damning enough, no doubt. But it’s only really cogent when the anchorite doesn’t do his job properly, when he’s born to be active and not contemplative. The imbeciles who rush about bawling that action is the end of life, and that thought has no value except in so far as it leads to action, are speaking only for themselves. There are eighty-four thousand paths. The pure contemplative has a right to one of them.’
‘I should be the last to deny it,’ said Mr. Cardan.
‘And if I find that it’s not my path,’ pursued Calamy, ‘I shall turn back and try what can be done in the way of practical life. Up till now, I must say I’ve not seen much hope for myself that way. But then, it must be admitted, I didn’t look for the road in places where I was very likely to find it.’
‘What has always seemed to me to be the chief objection to protracted omphaloskepsis,’ said Mr. Cardan, after a little silence, ’is the fact that you’re left too much to your personal resources; you have to live on your own mental fat, so to speak, instead of being able to nourish yourself from outside. And to know yourself becomes impossible; because you can’t know yourself except in relation to other people.’
‘That’s true,’ said Calamy. ‘Part of yourself you can certainly get to know only in relation to what is outside. In the course of twelve or fifteen years of adult life I think I’ve got to know that part of me very thoroughly. I’ve met a lot of people, been in a great many curious situations, so that almost every potentiality latent in that part of my being has had a chance to unfold itself into actuality. Why should I go on? There’s nothing more I really want to know about that part of myself; nothing more, of any significance, I imagine, that I could get to know by contact with what is external. On the other hand, there is a whole universe within me, unknown and waiting to be explored; a whole universe that can only be approached by way of introspection and patient uninterrupted thought. Merely to satisfy curiosity it would surely be worth exploring. But there are motives more impelling than curiosity to persuade me. What one may find there is so important that it’s almost a matter of life and death to undertake the search.’
‘Hm,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘And what will happen at the end of three months’ chaste meditation when some lovely young temptation comes toddling down this road, “balancing her haunches,” as Zola would say, and rolling the large black eye? What will happen to your explorations of the inward universe then, may I ask?’
‘Well,’ said Calamy, ‘I hope they’ll proceed uninterrupted.’
‘You hope? Piously?’
‘And I shall certainly do my best to see that they do,’ Calamy added.
‘It won’t be easy,’ Mr. Cardan assured him.
‘I know.’
‘Perhaps you’ll find that you can explore simultaneously both the temptation and the interior universe.’
Calamy shook his head. ‘Alas, I’m afraid that’s not practicable. It would be delightful if it were. But for some reason it isn’t. Even in moderation it won’t do. I know that, more or less, by experience. And the authorities are all agreed about it.’
‘But after all,’ said Chelifer, ‘there have been religions that prescribed indulgence in these particular temptations as a discipline and ceremony at certain seasons and to celebrate certain feasts.’
‘But they didn’t pretend,’ Calamy answered, ‘that it was a discipline that made it easy for those who underwent it to explore the inward universe of mind.’
‘Perhaps they did,’ objected Chelifer. ‘After all, there’s no golden rule. At one time and in one place you honour your father and your mother when they grow old; elsewhere and at other periods you knock them on the head and put them into the pot-au-feu. Everything has been right at one time or another and everything has been wrong.’
‘That’s only true with reservations,’ said Calamy, ‘and the reservations are the most important part. There’s a parallel, it seems to me, between the moral and the physical world. In the physical world you call the unknowable reality the Four-Dimensional Continuum. The Continuum is the same for all observers; but when they want to draw a picture of it for themselves, they select different axes for their graphs, according to their different motions — and according to their different minds and physical limitations. Human beings have selected three-dimensional space and time as their axes. Their minds, their bodies and the earth on which they live being what they are, human beings could not have done otherwise. Space and time are necessary and inevitable ideas for us. And when we want to draw a picture of that other reality in which we live — is it different, or is it somehow, incomprehensibly, the same? — we choose, unescapably — we cannot fail to choose, those axes of reference which
we call good and evil; the laws of our being make it necessary for us to see things under the aspects of good and evil. The reality remains the same; but the axes vary with the mental position, so to speak, and the varying capacities of different observers. Some observers are clearer-sighted and in some way more advantageously placed than others. The incessantly changing social conventions and moral codes of history represent the shifting axes of reference chosen by the least curious, most myopic and worst-placed observers. But the axes chosen by the best observers have always been startlingly like one another. Gotama, Jesus and Lao-tsze, for example; they lived sufficiently far from one another in space, time and social position. But their pictures of reality resemble one another very closely. The nearer a man approaches these in penetration, the more nearly will his axes of moral reference correspond with theirs. And when all the most acute observers agree in saying that indulgence in these particular amusements interferes with the exploration of the spiritual world, then one can be pretty sure it’s true. In itself, no doubt, the natural and moderate satisfaction of the sexual instincts is a matter quite indifferent to morality. It is only in relation to something else that the satisfaction of a natural instinct can be said to be good or bad. It might be bad, for example, if it involved deceit or cruelty. It is certainly bad when it enslaves a mind that feels, within itself, that it ought to be free — free to contemplate and recollect itself.’
‘No doubt,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘But as a practical man, I can only say that it’s going to be most horribly difficult to preserve that freedom. That balancing of haunches . . .’ He waved his cigar from side to side. ‘I shall call again in six months and see how you feel about it all then. It’s extraordinary what an effect the natural appetites do have on good resolutions. Satiated, one thinks regeneration will be so easy; but when one’s hungry again, how hard it seems.’
They were silent. From the depths of the valley the smoky shadows had climbed higher and higher up the slope. The opposite hills were now profoundly black and the clouds in which their peaks were involved had become dark and menacing save where, on their upper surfaces, the sun touched them with, as it declined, an ever richer light. The shadow had climbed up to within a hundred feet of where they were sitting, soon it would envelop them. With a great jangling of bells and a clicking of small hard hoofs the six tall piebald goats came trotting down the steep path from the road. The little boy ran behind them, waving his stick. ‘Eia-oo!’ he shouted with a kind of Homeric fury; but at the sight of the three men sitting on the bench outside the house he suddenly became silent, blushed and slunk unheroically away, hardly daring to whisper to the goats while he drove them into their stable for the night.
‘Dear me,’ said Chelifer, who had followed the movements of the animals with a certain curiosity, ‘I believe those are the first goats I have seen, or smelt, in the flesh since I took to writing about them in my paper. Most interesting. One tends to forget that the creatures really exist.’
‘One tends to forget that anything or any one really exists, outside oneself,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘It’s always a bit of a shock to find that they do.’
‘Three days hence,’ said Chelifer meditatively, ‘I shall be at my office again. Rabbits, goats, mice; Fetter Lane; the family pension. All the familiar horrors of reality.’
‘Sentimentalist!’ mocked Calamy.
‘Meanwhile,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘Lilian has suddenly decided to move on to Monte Carlo. I go with her, of course; one can’t reject free meals when they’re offered.’ He threw away his cigar, got up and stretched himself. ‘Well, we must be getting down before it gets dark.’
‘I shan’t see you again for some time, then?’ said Calamy.
‘I shall be here again at the end of six months, never fear,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘Even if I have to come at my own expense.’
They climbed up the steep little path on to the road.
‘Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye.’
Calamy watched them go, watched them till they were out of sight round a bend in the road. A profound melancholy settled down upon him. With them, he felt, had gone all his old, familiar life. He was left quite alone with something new and strange. What was to come of this parting?
Or perhaps, he reflected, nothing would come of it. Perhaps he had been a fool.
The cottage was in the shadow now. Looking up the slope he could see a clump of trees still glittering as though prepared for a festival above the rising flood of darkness. And at the head of the valley, like an immense precious stone, glowing with its own inward fire, the limestone crags reached up through the clouds into the pale sky. Perhaps he had been a fool, thought Calamy. But looking at that shining peak, he was somehow reassured.
Point Counter Point
First published in 1928, Point Counter Point is often considered to be more complex than some of Huxley earlier satirical works. It derives its title from ideas of musical composition, as Huxley first presents one view, before offering a counter view and so forth until it reaches a resolution. The author based many of the characters on high profile public figures, including Nancy Cunard, D. H. Lawrence and Augustus John. Huxley included aspects of his own character in the writer, Philip Quarles, whom he depicts as awkward and emotionally detached. One figure, the political demagogue, Everard Webley, who heads the Brotherhood of British Freeman, is often believed to have been modelled on the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley. However, it is perhaps worth noting that at the time Huxley composed the novel, Mosley was still a Labour MP and four years away from founding his infamous and unsuccessful fascist party.
The first edition of the novel
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
Huxley’s friend, the author, D.H Lawrence
CHAPTER I
‘YOU WON’T BE late?’ There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling’s voice, there was something like entreaty.
‘No, I won’t be late,’ said Walter, unhappily and guiltily certain that he would be. Her voice annoyed him. It drawled a little, it was too refined – even in misery.
‘Not later than midnight.’ She might have reminded him of the time when he never went out in the evenings without her. She might have done so; but she wouldn’t; it was against her principles; she didn’t want to force his love in any way.
‘Well, call it one. You know what these parties are.’ But as a matter of fact, she didn’t know, for the good reason that, not being his wife, she wasn’t invited to them. She had left her husband to live with Walter Bidlake; and Carling, who had Christian scruples, was feebly a sadist and wanted to take his revenge, refused to divorce her. It was two years now since they had begun to live together. Only two years; and now, already, he had ceased to love her, he had begun to love someone else. The sin was losing its only excuse, the social discomfort its sole palliation. And she was with child.
‘Half-past twelve,’ she implored, though she knew that her importunity would only annoy him, only make h
im love her the less. But she could not prevent herself from speaking; she loved him too much, she was too agonizingly jealous. The words broke out in spite of her principles. It would have been better for her, and perhaps for Walter too, if she had had fewer principles and given her feelings the violent expression they demanded. But she had been well brought up in habits of the strictest self-control. Only the uneducated, she knew, made ‘scenes’. An imploring ‘Half-past twelve, Walter’ was all that managed to break through her principles. Too weak to move him, the feeble outburst would only annoy. She knew it, and yet she could not hold her tongue.
‘If I can possibly manage it.’ (There; she had done it. There was exasperation in his tone.) ‘But I can’t guarantee it; don’t expect me too certainly.’ For of course, he was thinking (with Lucy Tantamount’s image unexorcizably haunting him), it certainly wouldn’t be half-past twelve.
He gave the final touches to his white tie. From the mirror her face looked out at him, close beside his own. It was a pale face and so thin that the down-thrown light of the electric lamp hanging above them made a shadow in the hollows below the cheek-bones. Her eyes were darkly ringed. Rather too long at the best of times, her straight nose protruded bleakly from the unfleshed face. She looked ugly, tired and ill. Six months from now her baby would be born. Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man – a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create and, having created, would become the battle-ground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry. A thing would grow into a person, a tiny lump of stuff would become a human body, a human mind. The astounding process of creation was going on within her; but Marjorie was conscious only of sickness and lassitude; the mystery for her meant nothing but fatigue and ugliness and a chronic anxiety about the future, pain of the mind as well as discomfort of the body. She had been glad, or at least she had tried to be glad, in spite of her haunting fears of physical and social consequences, when she first recognized the symptoms of her pregnancy. The child, she believed, would bring Walter closer; (he had begun to fade away from her even then). It would arouse in him new feelings which would make up for whatever element it was that seemed to be lacking in his love for her. She dreaded the pain, she dreaded the inevitable difficulties and embarrassments. But the pains, the difficulties would have been worth while if they purchased a renewal, a strengthening of Walter’s attachment. In spite of everything, she was glad. And at first her previsions had seemed to be justified. The news that she was going to have a child had quickened his tenderness. For two or three weeks she was happy, she was reconciled to the pains and discomforts. Then, from one day to another, everything was changed; Walter had met that woman. He still did his best, in the intervals of running after Lucy, to keep up a show of solicitude. But she could feel that the solicitude was resentful, that he was tender and attentive out of a sense of duty, that he hated the child for compelling him to be so considerate to its mother. And because he hated it, she too began to hate it. No longer overlaid by happiness, her fears came to the surface, filled her mind. Pain and discomfort – that was all the future held. And meanwhile ugliness, sickness, fatigue. How could she fight her battle when she was in this state?