Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘And now you’re recommending me to eat like one.’
‘More or less.’
‘And do you also want me to think like one?’
‘In the long run you won’t be able to avoid it. But, of course, it’s better to do it consciously.’
‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Anthony, ‘I do think like a Buddhist already. Not in all ways perhaps, but certainly in many ways. In spite of roast beef.’
‘You think you think like a Buddhist,’ said the doctor. ‘But you don’t. Thinking negatively isn’t thinking like a Buddhist; it’s thinking like a Christian who’s eating more butcher’s meat than his intestine can deal with.’
Anthony laughed.
‘Oh, I know it sounds funny,’ said the doctor. ‘But that’s only because you’re a dualist.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Not in theory perhaps. But in practice — how can you be anything but a dualist? What are you, Anthony Beavis? A clever man — that’s obvious. But it’s equally obvious that you’ve got an unconscious body. An efficient thinking apparatus and a hopelessly stupid set of muscles and bones and viscera. Of course you’re a dualist. You live your dualism. And one of the reasons you live it is because you poison yourself with too much animal protein. Like millions of other people, of course! What’s the greatest enemy of Christianity today? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there’s cheap Canterbury lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair. And only the most violent stimuli will rouse them to purposive activity, and, what’s worse, the only activity they’ll undertake is diabolic. They can only be stimulated by hysterical appeals to persecute Jews, or murder socialists or go to war. You personally happen to be too intelligent to be a fascist or a nationalist; but again, it’s a matter of theory, not of life. Believe me, Anthony Beavis, your intestines are ripe for fascism and nationalism. They’re making you long to be shaken out of the horrible negativity to which they’ve condemned you — to be shaken by violence into violence.’
‘As a matter a fact,’ said Anthony, ‘that’s one of the reasons why I’m here.’ He waved his hand towards the tumbled chaos of the mountains. ‘Simply to be shaken out of negativity. We were on our way to a revolution when poor Staithes got hurt.’
The doctor nodded. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘you see! And do you suppose you’d be here if you had a healthy intestine?’
‘Well, I don’t really know,’ Anthony answered, laughing.
‘You know quite well that you wouldn’t,’ said the doctor almost severely. ‘Not on that kind of lunatic’s errand, at any rate. For, of course, you might be here as an anthropologist, say, or a teacher, a healer, whatever you like, so long as it meant understanding people and helping them.’
Anthony nodded his head slowly, but did not speak; and for a long way they rode along in silence.
*
There was light out of doors, and it was cleaner under the sky than in the little rancho. Dr Miller had chosen as his operating theatre a little clearing in the woods, outside the village.
‘Beyond the range of the flies, let’s hope,’ he said, but without seeming too confident of it.
A hearth had been built by his two mozos, and on the fire stood a cauldron of boiling water. They had borrowed a table from the schoolmaster and some stools, with bowls for the disinfectant, and a cotton sheet to cover the bedstead.
Dr Miller had given him a dose of Nembutal, and when the time came Mark was carried out unconscious to the clearing among the pine trees. All the boys in the village escorted the stretcher and stood round in attentive silence while the patient was lifted on to the bed. Trousered, and in their wide hats, with their little blankets folded over their shoulders, they seemed, not children, but the absurd and derisive parodies of grown men.
Anthony, who had been holding the gangrened leg, straightened himself up, and, looking round, saw the ring of brown faces and the glitter of all those black, blank eyes. At the sight he found his growing apprehension abruptly transformed into uncontrollable anger.
‘Go away!’ he shouted in English, and advanced towards them, waving his arms. ‘Away, you little beasts, away!’
The children retreated, but slowly, reluctantly, with the manifest intention of returning the moment he should turn his back.
Anthony made a quick dart and caught one small boy by the arm.
‘Little beast!’
He shook the child violently, then, carried away by an irresistible impulse to inflict pain, gave him a cuff over the head that sent the big hat flying between the trees.
Uttering no cry, the child ran away after its companions. Anthony made a last menacing gesture in their direction, then turned and walked back towards the centre of the clearing. He had not taken more than a few steps when a stone, well-aimed, caught him full between the shoulders. He swung round furiously, exploding into such obscenities as he had not uttered since he was at school.
Dr Miller, who was washing his hands at the table, looked up. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘The little devils are throwing stones.’
‘Serve you right,’ said the doctor unsympathetically. ‘Leave them alone, and come and do your duty.’
The unfamiliarly clerical and military word startled him into the uncomfortable realization that he had been behaving like a fool. Worse than a fool. With the realization of his discreditable folly came the impulse to justify it. It was in a tone of pained indignation that he spoke. ‘You’re not going to let them look on, are you?’
‘How am I to prevent them looking on, if they want to?’ asked the doctor, drying his hands as he spoke. ‘And now, Anthony Beavis,’ he went on sternly, ‘pull yourself together. This is going to be difficult enough anyhow, without your being hysterical.’
Silenced and, because he was ashamed of himself, angry with Miller, Anthony washed his hands and put on a clean shirt which had to do duty as overall.
‘Now,’ said the doctor, and stepped forward. ‘We must begin by draining the leg of blood.’
‘The’ leg, not ‘his’ leg, Anthony was thinking, as he stood beside the doctor, looking down on the man sleeping on the bed. Something impersonal, belonging to nobody in particular. The leg. But Mark’s face, Mark’s sleeping face, now so incredibly calm, so smooth, in spite of the emaciation, as though this death-like stupor had drawn a new skin across the flayed and twisted muscles — this could never be merely ‘the’ face. It was ‘his’, his for all its unlikeness to that contemptuous, suffering mask through which at ordinary times Mark looked out at the world. All the more genuinely his, perhaps, just because of that unlikeness. He remembered suddenly what Mark had said to him, beside the Mediterranean, only four months before, when he had woken to see those eyes now shut, but then wide-open and bright with derision, sardonically examining him through the mosquito net. Perhaps one really is what one seems to be in sleep. Innocence and peace — the mind’s essence, and all the rest mere accident.
‘Take his foot,’ Dr Miller ordered, ‘and lift the leg as nearly vertical as you can.’
Anthony did as he was told. Raised in this grotesque way, the horribly swollen and discoloured leg seemed more impersonal, more a mere thing than ever. The stink of mortified flesh was in his nostrils. From behind them, among the trees, a voice said something incomprehensible; there was a snicker of laughter.
‘Now leave the foot to the mozo and stand by here.’ Anthony obeyed, and smelt again the resin of the forest. ‘Hold that bottle for me.’
There was an astonished murmur of ‘Amarillo!’ as the doctor painted the thigh with flavine. Anthony looked again at his friend’s face; it remained undisturbed in its serenity. Essentially still and pure. The leg with its black dead flesh; the saw there in the bowl of permanganate solution, the knives and
forceps; the fascinated children peering out of the forest — all were somehow irrelevant to the essential Mark.
‘Now the chloroform,’ said Dr Miller. ‘And the cotton wool. I’ll show you how to use it. Then you’ll have to go on by yourself.’
He opened the bottle, and the smell of pine trees in the sunshine was overlaid by a rasping and nauseating sweetness.
‘There, do you see the trick?’ asked the doctor. ‘Like that. Go on with that. I’ll tell you when to stop. I’ve got to put on the tourniquet.’
There were no birds in the trees, hardly, even, any insects. The wood was deathly still. This sunny clearing was a little island of speech and movement in an ocean of silence. And at the centre of that island lay another silence, intenser, more complete than the silence of the forest.
The tourniquet was in place. Dr Miller ordered the mozo to lower the grotesquely hoisted leg. He pulled up a stool to the bedside, sat down, then rose again and, as he washed his hands for the last time, explained to Anthony that he would have to operate sitting down. The bed was too low for him to be able to stand. Taking his seat once more, he dipped into the bowl of permanganate for a scalpel.
At the sight of those broad flaps of skin turned back, like the peel of a huge banana, but from a red and bleeding fruit, Anthony was seized with a horrible sensation of nausea. The saliva came pouring into his mouth and he had to keep swallowing and swallowing to get rid of it. Involuntarily, he gave vent to a retching cough.
‘Steady now,’ said the doctor without looking up. With an artery forceps, he secured the end of an oozing vessel.
‘Think of it scientifically.’ He made another sweeping cut through the red flesh. ‘And if you must be sick,’ he went on with sudden asperity, ‘for God’s sake go and do it quickly!’ Then, in another tone — the tone of the professor who demonstrates an interesting point to his students, ‘One has to cut back the nerves a long way,’ he said. ‘There’s a tremendous retraction as the tissues heal up. Anyhow,’ he added, ‘he’ll probably have to have a re-amputation at home. It won’t be a beautiful stump, I’m afraid.’
Calm and at peace, innocent of all craving, all malice, all ambition — it was the face of one who has made himself free, one for whom there are no more bars or chains, no more sepulchres under a stone, and on whom the bird-lime no longer sticks. The face of one who has made himself free . . . But in fact, Anthony reflected, in fact he had had his freedom forced upon him by this evil-smelling vapour. Was it possible to be one’s own liberator? There were snares; but also there was a way of walking out of them. Prisons; but they could be opened. And if the torture-chambers could never be abolished, perhaps the tortures could be made to seem irrelevant. As completely irrelevant as now to Mark this sound of sawing, as this revolting rasp and squeak of the steel teeth biting into the bone, of the steel blade rubbing back and forth in the deepening groove. Mark lay there serene, almost smiling.
CHAPTER FIFTY. Christmas Day 1934
GOD — A person or not a person? Quién sabe? Only revelation can decide such metaphysical questions. And revelation isn’t playing the game — is equivalent to pulling three aces of trumps from up your sleeve.
Of more significance is the practical question. Which gives a man more power to realize goodness — belief in a personal or an impersonal God? Answer: it depends. Some minds work one way, some another. Mine, as it happens, finds no need, indeed, finds it impossible to think of the world in terms of personality. Patanjali says you may believe in a personal God, or not, according to taste. The psychological results will be the same in either case.
For those whose nature demands personality as a source of energy, but who find it impossible to believe that the universe is run by a person in any sense of the word that we can possibly understand — what’s the right policy? In most cases, they reject any practice which might be called religious. But this is throwing away the baby with the bath water. The desired relationship with a personality can be historical, not ontological. A contact, not with somebody existing at present as manager of the universe, but with somebody known to have existed at some time in the past. The Imitation of Christ (or of any other historical character) is just as effective if the model be regarded as having existed there, then, as it is if the model be conceived as existing here, now. And meditation on goodness, communication with goodness, contemplation of goodness are demonstrably effective means of realizing goodness in life, even when that which is meditated on, communicated with and contemplated, is not a person, but a general mind, or even an ideal supposed to exist only in human minds. The fundamental problem is practical — to work out systems of psychological exercises for all types of men and women. Catholicism has many systems of mental prayer — Ignatian, Franciscan, Liguorian, Carmelite, and so on. Hinduism, Northern, Southern, and Zen Buddhism also have a variety of practices. There is a great work to be done here. Collecting and collating information from all these sources. Consulting books and, more important, people who have actually practised what is in the books, have had experience of teaching novices. In time, it might be possible to establish a complete and definite Ars Contemplativa. A series of techniques, adapted to every type of mind. Techniques for meditating on, communicating with and contemplating goodness. Ends in themselves and at the same time means for realizing some of that goodness in practice.
January 1st 1935
Machinery and good organization — modern inventions; and, like all blessings, have to be paid for. In many ways. One item is the general belief, encouraged by mechanical and social efficiency that progress is automatic and can be imposed from outside. We, as individuals, need do nothing about it. Liquidate undesirables, distribute enough money and goods — all will be well. It is a reversion to magic, a pandering to man’s natural sloth. Note the striking way in which this tendency runs through the whole of modern life, cropping up at every point. There seems no obvious connexion between the Webbs and the Soviets on the one hand, and Modern Catholicism on the other. But what profound subterranean resemblances? The recent Catholic revival essentially a revival of sacraments. From a Catholic point of view, this is a ‘sacramental age’. Magic power of sacraments regarded as sufficient for salvation. Mental prayer conspicuously absent. Exact analogy to the Webbs — Soviet idea of progress from without, through machinery and efficient organization. For English Catholics, sacraments are the psychological equivalents of tractors in Russia.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE. February 7th 1934
DR MILLER DISMOUNTED at the open door, left his beast with the mozo, and stepped into the hut.
Propped up on his bed, Mark watched him enter — a small, erect figure, walking briskly, his blue eyes bright with inquiring kindness, the corners of his mouth alive with the potentialities of laughter.
‘And how are all the little patients this evening?’ Mark twisted up his pale and still emaciated face into a ferociously sardonic smile.
From the stool on which he was sitting beside the bed, Anthony shot a glance at him, and remembered the serenity of that face three weeks before, in the early morning sunshine among the pine trees. Serene and at peace. But now that life had come back to him, now that he was safely convalescent, the peace had departed, leaving him the embittered enemy of the whole world. There had been hatred in his eyes even before he was strong enough to speak. Hatred for everyone who came near him — above all for old Miller.
‘I can’t bear his perpetual twinkle,’ was what he had said to Anthony later on. ‘Nobody has a right to go about looking like the advertisement for a constipation cure.’
But the real reason for Mark’s dislike was different. He hated old Miller because of his dependence upon him, because of the unflaggingly watchful efficiency of the man’s care. Poor Mark! How acutely he suffered from having to accept a service and, still more, from being compelled by his own physical weakness to ask for it! How bitterly he resented even affection, if it were given by somebody to whom it was impossible for him to feel superior! His dislike for th
e doctor had been present from the first moment of his return to consciousness, had increased with every day that the old man delayed his departure in order to look after him.
‘But why don’t you get on with your journey?’ he had asked; and when the doctor answered that he was in no hurry and intended to see him safely down to the coast and even, since he himself was leaving, home through the Canal to England, had protested vehemently that his leg was practically healed, that there would be no difficulty in getting back to Puerto San Felipe, that he himself would probably be taking the northbound boat to Los Angeles.