Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Those arrows!’ Bruno said at last. ‘All those arrows!’
But what had happened to his voice? Why did he speak in that almost inaudible whisper? Terror deepened into sheer panic.
Bruno’s smile had expressed a kind of humorous compassion.
‘They seem to have started flying all right,’ he whispered. ‘The predestined target….’
Sebastian shut his eyes, the better to recall that little house at Vence which he had taken for the dying man. Furnished and decorated with an unfailing bad taste. But Bruno’s bedroom had windows on three sides, and there was a wide veranda, windless and warm with spring sunshine, from which one could look out over the terraced fields of young wheat, the groves of orange trees and the olive orchards, down to the Mediterranean.
‘Il tremolar della marina,’ Bruno would whisper when the reflected sunlight lay in a huge splendour across the sea. And sometimes it was Leopardi that he liked to quote:
e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete.
And then, again and again, voicelessly, so that it was only by the movements of the lips that Sebastian had been able to divine the words:
E’l naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.
Little old Mme Louise had done the cooking and the housework; but except for the last few days, when Dr. Borély insisted on a professional nurse, the care of the sick man had been exclusively Sebastian’s business. Those fifteen weeks between the meeting on the Promenade des Anglais and that almost comically unimpressive funeral (which Bruno had made him promise was not to cost more than twenty pounds) had been the most memorable period of his life. The most memorable and, in a certain sense, the happiest. There had been sadness, of course, and the pain of having to watch the endurance of a suffering which he was powerless to alleviate. And along with that pain and sadness had gone the gnawing sense of guilt, the dread and the anticipation of an irreparable loss. But there had also been the spectacle of Bruno’s joyful serenity, and even, at one remove, a kind of participation in the knowledge of which that joy was the natural and inevitable expression — the knowledge of a timeless and infinite presence; the intuition, direct and infallible, that apart from the desire to be separate there was no separation, but an essential identity.
With the progress of the cancer in his throat, speech, for the sick man, became more and more difficult. But those long silences on the veranda, or in the bedroom, were eloquent precisely about the things which words were unfitted to convey — affirmed realities which a vocabulary invented to describe appearances in time could only indirectly indicate by means of negations. ‘Not this, not this’ was all that speech could have made clear. But Bruno’s silence had become what it knew and could cry, ‘This!’ triumphantly and joyfully, ‘this, this this!’
There were circumstances, of course, in which words were indispensable; and then he had resorted to writing. Sebastian got up, and from one of the drawers of his desk took the envelope in which he kept all the little squares of paper on which Bruno had pencilled his rare requests, his answers to questions, his comments and advice. He sat down again and, selecting at random, began to read.
‘Would it be very extravagant to get a bunch of freesias?’
Sebastian smiled, remembering the pleasure the flowers had brought. ‘Like angels,’ Bruno had whispered. ‘They smell like angels.’
‘Don’t worry,’ the next scribbled message began. ‘Having intense emotions is just a matter of temperament. God can be loved without any feelings — by the will alone. So can your neighbour.’
And to this Sebastian had clipped another jotting on the same theme. ‘There isn’t any secret formula or method. You learn to love by loving — by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.’
He picked up another of the squares of paper. ‘Remorse is pride’s ersatz for repentance, the ego’s excuse for not accepting God’s forgiveness. The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful — because the reproached self isn’t abandoned; it remains intact.’
Sebastian thought of the context in which the words had been written — his passion for self-loathing, his almost hysterical desire to make some kind of dramatic expiation for what he had done, to pay off his debt of guilt towards Bruno, who was dying, towards the despairing and embittered Rachel, who had died. If he could submit to some great pain or humiliation, if he could undertake some heroic course of action! He had expected an unqualified approval. But Bruno had looked at him for a few seconds in appraising silence; then, with a gleam of sudden mischief in his eyes, had whispered, ‘You’re not Joan of Arc, you know. Not even Florence Nightingale.’ And then, reaching for the pencil and the scribbling-pad, he had started to write. At the time, Sebastian remembered, the note had shocked him by its calm and, he had felt, positively cynical realism. ‘You’d be inefficient, you’d be wasting your talents, and your heroic altruism would do a great deal of harm, because you’d be so bored and resentful that you’d come to loathe the very thought of God. Besides, you’d seem so noble and pathetic, on top of your good looks, that all the women within range would be after you. Not fifty per cent. of them, as now, but all. As mothers, as mistresses, as disciples — every one. And of course you wouldn’t resist — would you?’ Sebastian had protested, had said something about the necessity of sacrifice. ‘There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice,’ came the answer, ‘the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.’ And a little later, on another scrap of paper: ‘Don’t try to act somebody else’s part. Find out how to become your inner not-self in God while remaining your outer self in the world.’
Bewildered and a little disappointed, Sebastian looked up and found Bruno smiling at him.
‘You think it’s too easy?’ came the whisper. Then the pencil went to work again.
Sebastian rustled through the scattered leaves of paper. Here was what the pencil had written:
‘Performing miracles in a crisis — so much easier than loving God selflessly every moment of every day! Which is why most crises arise — because people find it so hard to behave properly at ordinary times.’
Reading the scribbled lines, Sebastian had felt himself all of a sudden appalled by the magnitude of the task that had been set for him. And soon, very soon, there would be no Bruno to help him.
‘I shall never be able to do it alone,’ he cried.
But the sick man was inexorable.
‘It can’t be done by anyone else,’ the pencil wrote. ‘Other people can’t make you see with their eyes. At the best they can only encourage you to use your own.’
Then, as an afterthought, he had added on another sheet of the scribbling-pad: ‘And, of course, once you’ve started using your own eyes, you’ll see that there’s no question of being alone. Nobody’s alone unless he wishes to be.’
And as though to illustrate his point, he put down his pencil and looked away towards the sunlit landscape and the sea. His lips moved. ‘“The corn was orient and immortal wheat” … Ell’è quel mare al qual tutto si move … E’I naufragar m’è dolce … the shipwreck in that sea….’ He shut his eyes. After a minute or two he opened them again, looked at Sebastian with a smile of extraordinary tenderness and held out his thin bony hand. Sebastian took and pressed it. The sick man looked at him for a little longer with the same smile, then shut his eyes again. There was a long silence. Suddenly, from the kitchen, came the thin, piping voice of Mme Louise, singing her favourite waltz of forty years ago. ‘Lorsque tout est fini….’ Bruno’s emaciated face puckered itself into an expression of amusement.
‘Finished,’ he whispered, ‘finished?’ And his eyes as he opened them were bright with inner laughter. ‘But it’s only just begun!’
For a long time Sebastian sat quite still. But, alas, the memory of the knowledge that had come to him that day was very different from the knowledge. And, in the end, perhaps even this memory would have to be mortified.
He sighed profoundly, then turned back to his note-book.
War guilt — the guilt of London and Hamburg, of Coventry, Rotterdam, Berlin. True, one wasn’t in politics or finance, one was lucky enough not to have been born in Germany. But in a less obvious, more fundamental way, one was guilty by just being imperviously oneself, by being content to remain a spiritual embryo, undeveloped, undelivered, unillumined. In part, at least, I am responsible for my own maiming, and on the hand that is left me there is blood and the black oily smear of charred flesh.
Look at any picture paper or magazine. News (and only evil is news, never good) alternates with fiction, photographs of weapons, corpses, ruins, with photographs of half-naked women. Pharisaically, I used to think there was no causal connection between these things, that, as a strict sensualist and aesthete, I was without responsibility for what was happening in the world. But the habit of sensuality and pure aestheticism is a process of God-proofing. To indulge in it is to become a spiritual mackintosh, shielding the little corner of time, of which one is the centre, from the least drop of eternal reality. But the only hope for the world of time lies in being constantly drenched by that which lies beyond time. Guaranteed God-proof, we exclude from our surroundings the only influence that is able to neutralize the destructive energies of ambition, covetousness and the love of power. Our responsibility may be less spectacularly obvious than theirs; but it is no less real.
The rain is over. On the spider-webs the beads of water hang unshaken. Above the tree-tops the sky is like a closed lid, and these fields are the flat bare symbols of a total resignation.
Invisible in the hedge, a wren periodically releases the ratchet of its tiny whirring clockwork. From the wet branches overhead the drops fall and fall in the unpredictable rhythm of an absolutely alien music. But the autumnal silence remains unflawed and even the rumble of a passing lorry, even the long crescendo and the fading roar of a flight of aeroplanes, even my memories of those explosions and all the long nights of pain, are somehow irrelevant and can be ignored. On the sphere’s surface what a clatter of ironmongery! But here, at its glassy centre, the three old hornbeams and the grass, the brambles and the holly tree stand waiting. And between the repetitions of his mindless little declaration of personal independence, even the wren occasionally stops, down there at the bottom of the hedge, to listen for a moment to the silence within the silence; cocks his head and, for a second or two, is aware of himself, waiting, in the twiggy labyrinthine darkness, waiting for a deliverance of which he can have no inkling. But we, who can come, if we choose, to the full knowledge of that deliverance, have quite forgotten that there is anything to wait for.
Something of the happiness he had felt in the course of that long-drawn solitude under the dripping trees came back to him. Not, of course, that it was anything like enough to sense the significances of landscapes and living things. Wordsworth had to be supplemented by Dante, and Dante by … well, by somebody like Bruno. But if you didn’t idolatrously take the manifestation for the principle, if you avoided spiritual gluttony and realized that these country ecstasies were only an invitation to move on to something else, then of course it was perfectly all right to wander lonely as a cloud and even to confide the fact to paper. He started to read again.
To the surprise of Humanists and Liberal Churchmen, the abolition of God left a perceptible void. But Nature abhors vacuums. Nation, Class and Party, Culture and Art have rushed in to fill the empty niche. For politicians and for those of us who happen to have been born with a talent, the new pseudo-religions have been, still are and (until they destroy the entire social structure) will continue to be extremely profitable superstitions. But regard them dispassionately, sub specie aeternitatis. How unutterably odd, silly and satanic!
Gossip, day-dreaming, preoccupation with one’s own moods and feelings — fatal, all of them, to the spiritual life. But among other things even the best play or narrative is merely glorified gossip and artistically disciplined daydreaming. And lyric poetry? Just ‘Ow!’ or ‘Oo-ooh!’ or ‘Nyum-nyum!’ or ‘Damn!’ or ‘Darling!’ or ‘I’m a pig!’ — suitably transliterated, of course, and developed.
Which is why some God-centred saints have condemned art, root and branch. And not only art — science, scholarship, speculation. Or remember Aquinas: the consummate philosophical virtuoso — but after achieving the unitive knowledge of that Primordial Fact, about which he had so long been spinning theories, he refused to write another word of theology. But what if he had come to union twenty years earlier? Would there have been no Summa? And, if so, would that have been a matter for regret? No, we should have answered a few years ago. But now some physicists are beginning to wonder if scholastic Aristotelianism may not be the best philosophy in terms of which to organize the findings of contemporary science. (But meanwhile, of course, contemporary science in the hands of contemporary men and women is engaged in destroying, not only things and lives, but entire patterns of civilization. So we find ourselves faced with yet another set of question marks.)
For the artist or intellectual, who happens also to be interested in reality and desirous of liberation, the way out would seem to lie, as usual, along a knife-edge.
He has to remember, first, that what he does as an artist or intellectual won’t bring him to knowledge of the divine Ground, even though his work may be directly concerned with this knowledge. On the contrary, in itself the work is a distraction. Second, that talents are analogous to the gifts of healing or miracle-working. But ‘one ounce of sanctifying grace is worth a hundredweight of those graces which theologians call “gratuitous,” among which is the gift of miracles. It is possible to receive such gifts and be in a state of mortal sin; nor are they necessary to salvation. As a rule, gratuitous graces are given to men less for their own benefit than for the edification of their neighbours.’ But François de Sales might have added that miracles don’t necessarily edify. Nor does even the best art. In both cases, edification is merely a possibility.
The third thing that has to be remembered is that beauty is intrinsically edifying; gossip, day-dreaming and mere self-expression, intrinsically unedifying. In most works of art, these positive and negative elements cancel out. But occasionally the anecdotes and the day-dreams are thought of in relation to first principles and set forth in such a way that the intervals between their component elements create some new unprecedented kind of beauty. When this happens, the possibilities of edification are fully realized, and the gratuitous grace of a talent finds its justification. True, the composition of such consummate works of art may be no less of a distraction than the composition of swing music or advertising copy. It is possible to write about God and, in the effort to write well, close one’s mind completely to God’s presence. There is only one antidote to such forgetting — constant recollection.
Well, he couldn’t say that he hadn’t given himself due warning, Sebastian reflected with a smile, as he turned the page. ‘Minimum Working Hypothesis’ was the heading to the next note.
Research by means of controlled sense-intuitions into material reality — research motivated and guided by a working hypothesis, leading up through logical inference to the formulation of a rational theory, and resulting in appropriate technological action. That is natural science.
No working hypothesis means no motive for starting the research, no reason for making one experiment rather than another, no rational theory for bringing sense or order to the observed facts.
Contrariwise, too much working hypothesis means finding only what you know, dogmatically, to be there and ignoring all the rest.
Among other things, religion is also research. Research by means of pure intellectual intuition into non-sensuous, non-psychic, purely spiritual reality, descending to rational theories about its results and to appropriate moral action in the light of such theories.
To motivate and (in its preliminary stages) guide this research, what sort and how much of a working hypothesis do we need?
Non
e, say the sentimental humanists; just a little bit of Wordsworth, say the blue-dome-of-nature boys. Result: they have no motive impelling them to make the more strenuous investigations; they are unable to explain such non-sensuous facts as come their way; they make very little progress in Charity.
At the other end of the scale are the Papists, the Jews, the Moslems, all with historical, one-hundred-per-cent, revealed religions. These people have a working hypothesis about non-sensuous reality — which means that they have a motive for doing something to get to know about it. But because their working hypotheses are too elaborately dogmatic, most of them discover only what they were taught to believe. But what they believe is a hotch-potch of good, less good and even bad. Records of the infallible intuitions of great saints into the highest spiritual reality are mixed up with records of the less reliable and infinitely less valuable intuitions of psychics into lower levels of non-sensuous existence; and to these are added mere fancies, discursive reasonings and sentimentalisms, projected into a kind of secondary objectivity and worshipped as though they were divine facts. But at all times and in spite of the handicap imposed by these excessive working hypotheses, a passionately persistent few continue the research to the point where they become aware of the Intelligible Light and are united with the divine Ground.
For those of us who are not congenitally the members of any organized church, who have found that humanism and blue-domeism are not enough, who are not content to remain in the darkness of spiritual ignorance, the squalor of vice or that other squalor of mere respectability, the minimum working hypothesis would seem to be about as follows:
That there is a Godhead or Ground, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestation.