Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“What’s a not-sensation?”
“It’s the raw material for sensation that my not-self provides me with.”
“And you can pay attention to your not-self?”
“Of course.”
Will turned to the little nurse. “You too?”
“To myself,” she answered, “and at the same time to my not-self. And to Ranga’s not-self, and to Ranga’s self, and to Ranga’s body, and to my body and everything it’s feeling. And to all the love and the friendship. And to the mystery of the other person — the perfect stranger, who’s the other half of your own self, and the same as your not-self. And all the while one’s paying attention to all the things that, if one were sentimental, or worse, if one were spiritual like the poor old Rani, one would find so unromantic and gross and sordid even. But they aren’t sordid, because one’s also paying attention to the fact that, when one’s fully aware of them, those things are just as beautiful as all the rest, just as wonderful.”
“Maithuna is dhyana,” Ranga concluded. A new word, he evidently felt, would explain everything.
“But what is dhyana?” Will asked.
“Dhyana is contemplation.”
“Contemplation.”
Will thought of that strawberry-pink alcove above the Charing Cross Road. Contemplation was hardly the word he would have chosen. And yet even there, on second thoughts, even there he had found a kind of deliverance. Those alienations in the changing light of Porter’s Gin were alienations from his odious daytime self. They were also, unfortunately, alienations from all the rest of his being — alienations from love, from intelligence, from common decency, from all consciousness but that of an excruciating frenzy by corpse-light or in the rosy glow of the cheapest, vulgarest illusion. He looked again at Radha’s shining face. What happiness! What a manifest conviction, not of the sin that Mr Bahu was so determined to make the world safe for, but of its serene and blissful opposite! It was profoundly touching. But he refused to be touched. Noli me tangere — it was a categorical imperative. Shifting the focus of his mind, he managed to see the whole thing as reassuringly ludicrous. What shall we do to be saved? The answer is in four letters.
Smiling at his own little joke, “Were you taught maithuna at school?” he asked ironically.
“At school,” Radha answered with a simple matter-of-factness that took all the Rabelaisian wind out of his sails.
“Everybody’s taught it,” Ranga added.
“And when does the teaching begin?”
“About the same time as trigonometry and advanced biology. That’s between fifteen and fifteen and a half.”
“And after they’ve learned maithuna, after they’ve gone out into the world and got married — that is if you ever do get married.”
“Oh, we do, we do,” Radha assured him.
“Do they still practice it?”
“Not all of them, of course. But a good many do.”
“All the time?”
“Except when they want to have a baby.”
“And those who don’t want to have babies, but who might like to have a little change from maithuna — what do they do?”
“Contraceptives,” said Ranga laconically.
“And are the contraceptives available?”
“Available! They’re distributed by the government. Free, gratis and for nothing — except of course that they have to be paid for out of taxes.”
“The postman,” Radha added, “delivers a thirty-night supply at the beginning of each month.”
“And the babies don’t arrive?”
“Only those we want. Nobody has more than three, and most people stop at two.”
“With the result,” said Ranga, reverting, with the statistics, to his pedantic manner, “that our population is increasing at less than a third of one per cent per annum. Whereas Rendang’s increase is as big as Ceylon’s — almost three per cent. And China’s is two per cent, and India’s about one point seven.”
“I was in China only a month ago,” said Will. “Terrifying! And last year I spent four weeks in India. And before India in Central America, which is outbreeding even Rendang and Ceylon. Have either of you been in Rendang-Lobo?”
Ranga nodded affirmatively.
“Three days in Rendang,” he explained. “If you get into the Upper Sixth, it’s part of the advanced sociology course. They let you see for yourself what the Outside is like.”
“And what did you think of the Outside?” Will enquired.
He answered with another question. “When you were in Rendang-Lobo, did they show you the slums?”
“On the contrary, they did their best to prevent me from seeing the slums. But I gave them the slip.”
Gave them the slip, he was vividly remembering, on his way back to the hotel from that grisly cocktail party at the Rendang Foreign Office. Everybody who was anybody was there. All the local dignitaries and their wives — uniforms and medals, Dior and emeralds. All the important foreigners — diplomats galore, British and American oilmen, six members of the Japanese trade mission, a lady pharmacologist from Leningrad, two Polish engineers, a German tourist who just happened to be a cousin of Krupp von Bohlen, an enigmatic Armenian representing a very important financial consortium in Tangiers, and, beaming with triumph, the fourteen Czech technicians who had come with last month’s shipment of tanks and cannon and machine guns from Skoda. “And these are the people,” he had said to himself as he walked down the marble steps of the Foreign Office into Liberty Square, “these are the people who rule the world. Twenty-nine hundred millions of us at the mercy of a few scores of politicians, a few thousands of tycoons and generals and money-lenders. Ye are the cyanide of the earth — and the cyanide will never, never lose its savour.”
After the glare of the cocktail party, after the laughter and the luscious smells of canapés and Chanel-sprayed women, those alleys behind the brand new Palace of Justice had seemed doubly dark and noisome, those poor wretches camping out under the palm trees of Independence Avenue more totally abandoned by God and man than even the homeless, hopeless thousands he had seen sleeping like corpses in the streets of Calcutta. And now he thought of that little boy, that tiny pot-bellied skeleton, whom he had picked up, bruised and shaken by a fall from the back of the little girl, scarcely larger than himself, who was carrying him — had picked up and, led by the other child, had carried back, carried down, to the windowless cellar that, for nine of them (he had counted the dark ringwormy heads) was home.
“Keeping babies alive,” he said, “healing the sick, preventing the sewage from getting into the water supply — one starts with doing things that are obviously and intrinsically good. And how does one end? One ends by increasing the sum of human misery and jeopardizing civilization. It’s the kind of cosmic practical joke that God seems really to enjoy.”
He gave the young people one of his flayed, ferocious grins.
“God has nothing to do with it,” Ranga retorted, “and the joke isn’t cosmic, it’s strictly man-made. These things aren’t like gravity or the second law of thermo-dynamics; they don’t have to happen. They happen only if people are stupid enough to allow them to happen. Here in Pala we haven’t allowed them to happen, so the joke hasn’t been played on us. We’ve had good sanitation for the best part of a century — and still we’re not overcrowded, we’re not miserable, we’re not under a dictatorship. And the reason is very simple: we chose to behave in a sensible and realistic way.”
“How on earth were you able to choose?” Will asked.
“The right people were intelligent at the right moment,” said Ranga. “But it must be admitted — they were also very lucky. In fact Pala as a whole has been extraordinarily lucky. It’s had the luck, first of all, never to have been anyone’s colony. Rendang has a magnificent harbour. That brought them an Arab invasion in the Middle Ages. We have no harbour, so the Arabs left us alone and we’re still Buddhists or Shivaites — that is, when we’re not Tantrik agnostics.”
/> “Is that what you are?” Will enquired. “A Tantrik agnostic?”
“With Mahayana trimmings,” Ranga qualified. “Well, to return to Rendang. After the Arabs it got the Portuguese. We didn’t. No harbour, no Portuguese. Therefore no Catholic minority, no blasphemous nonsense about its being God’s will that people should breed themselves into subhuman misery, no organized resistance to birth control. And that isn’t our only blessing: after a hundred and twenty years of the Portuguese, Ceylon and Rendang got the Dutch. And after the Dutch came the English. We escaped both those infestations. No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labour, no cash crops for export, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs.”
“You certainly were lucky.”
“And on top of that amazing good luck,” Ranga went on, “there was the amazing good management of Murugan the Reformer and Andrew MacPhail. Has Dr Robert talked to you about his great-grandfather?”
“Just a few words, that’s all.”
“Did he tell you about the founding of the Experimental Station?”
Will shook his head.
“The Experimental Station,” said Ranga, “had a lot to do with our population policy. It all began with a famine. Before he came to Pala, Dr Andrew spent a few years in Madras. The second year he was there, the monsoon failed. The crops were burnt up, the tanks and even the wells went dry. Except for the English and the rich, there was no food. People died like flies. There’s a famous passage in Dr Andrew’s memoirs about the famine. A description and then a comment. He’d had to listen to a lot of sermons when he was a boy, and there was one he kept remembering now, as he worked among the starving Indians. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone’ — that was the text, and the preacher had been so eloquent that several people were converted. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’ But without bread, he now saw, there is no mind, no spirit, no inner light, no Father in Heaven. There is only hunger, there is only despair and then apathy and finally death.”
“Another of the cosmic jokes,” said Will. “And this one was formulated by Jesus himself. ‘To those who have shall be given, and from those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have’ — the bare possibility of being human. It’s the cruellest of all God’s jokes, and also the commonest. I’ve seen it being played on millions of men and women, millions of small children — all over the world.”
“So you can understand why that famine made such an indelible impression on Dr Andrew’s mind. He was resolved, and so was his friend the Raja, that in Pala, at least, there should always be bread. Hence their decision to set up the Experimental Station. Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics was a great success. In a few years we had new strains of rice and maize and millet and breadfruit. We had better breeds of cattle and chickens. Better ways of cultivating and composting; and in the fifties, we built the first superphosphate factory east of Berlin. Thanks to all these things people were eating better, living longer, losing fewer children. Ten years after the founding of Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics the Raja took a census. The population had been stable, more or less, for a century. Now it had started to rise. In fifty or sixty years, Dr Andrew foresaw, Pala would be transformed into the kind of festering slum that Rendang is today. What was to be done? Dr Andrew had read his Malthus. ‘Food production increases arithmetically; population increases geometrically. Man has only two choices: he can either leave the matter to Nature, who will solve the population problem in the old familiar way, by famine, pestilence and war: or else (Malthus being a clergyman) he can keep down his numbers by moral restraint.’”
“Mor-ral R-restr-raint,” the little nurse repeated rolling her r’s in the Indonesian parody of a Scottish divine. “Mor-ral r-restr-raint! Incidentally,” she added, “Dr Andrew had just married the Raja’s sixteen-year-old niece.”
“And that,” said Ranga, “was yet another reason for revising Malthus. Famine on this side, restraint on that. Surely there must be some better, happier, humaner way between the Malthusian horns. And of course there was such a way even then, even before the age of rubber and spermicides. There were sponges, there was soap, there were condoms made of every known waterproof material from oiled silk to the blind gut of sheep. The whole armoury of Paleo-Birth Control.”
“And how did the Raja and his subjects react to Paleo-Birth Control? With horror?”
“Not at all. They were good Buddhists, and every good Buddhist knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven’s sake don’t go about putting superfluous victims on to the Wheel. For a good Buddhist, birth control makes metaphysical sense. And for a village community of rice growers, it makes social and economic sense. There must be enough young people to work the fields and support the aged and the little ones. But not too many of them; for then neither the old nor the workers nor their children will have enough to eat. In the old days, couples had to have six children in order to raise two or three. Then came clean water and the Experimental Station. Out of six children five now survived. The old patterns of breeding had ceased to make sense. The only objection to Paleo-Birth Control was its crudity. But fortunately there was a more aesthetic alternative. The Raja was a Tantrik initiate and had learned the yoga of love. Dr Andrew was told about maithuna and, being a true man of science, agreed to try it. He and his young wife were given the necessary instruction.”
“With what results?”
“Enthusiastic approval.”
“That’s the way everybody feels about it,” said Radha.
“Now, now, none of your sweeping generalizations! Some people feel that way, others don’t. Dr Andrew was one of the enthusiasts. The whole matter was lengthily discussed. In the end they decided that contraceptives should be like education — free, tax-supported and, though not compulsory, as nearly as possible universal. For those who felt the need for something more refined, there would be instruction in the yoga of love.”
“Do you mean to tell me that they got away with it?”
“It wasn’t really so difficult. Maithuna was orthodox. People weren’t being asked to do anything against their religion. On the contrary, they were being given a flattering opportunity to join the elect by learning something esoteric.”
“And don’t forget the most important point of all,” the little nurse chimed in. “For women — all women, and I don’t care what you say about sweeping generalizations — the yoga of love means perfection, means being transformed and taken out of themselves and completed.” There was a brief silence. “And now,” she resumed in another, brisker tone, “it’s high time we left you to your siesta.”
“Before you go,” said Will, “I’d like to write a letter. Just a brief note to my boss to say that I’m alive and in no immediate danger of being eaten by the natives.”
Radha went foraging in Dr Robert’s study and came back with paper, pencil and an envelope.
“Veni, vidi,” Will scrawled. “I was wrecked, I met the Rani and her collaborator from Rendang, who implies that he can deliver the goods in return for baksheesh to the tune (he was specific) of twenty thousand pounds. Shall I negotiate on this basis? If you cable, Proposed article OK, I shall go ahead. If No hurry for article I shall let the matter drop. Tell my mother I am safe and shall soon be writing.”
“There,” he said as he handed the envelope, sealed and addressed, to Ranga. “May I ask you to buy me a stamp and get this off in time to catch tomorrow’s plane.”
“Without fail,” the boy promised.
Watching them go, Will felt a twinge of conscience. What charming young people! And here he was, plotting with Bahu and the forces of history, to subvert their world. He comforted himself with the thought that, if he didn’t do it, somebody else would. And even if Joe Aldehyde did get his concession, they could still go on making love in the style to which they were
accustomed. Or couldn’t they?
From the door the little nurse turned back for a final word. “No reading now,” she wagged her finger at him. “Go to sleep.”
“I never sleep during the day,” Will assured her with a certain perverse satisfaction.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HE COULD NEVER go to sleep during the day; but when he looked next at his watch, the time was twenty-five past four, and he was feeling wonderfully refreshed. He picked up Notes on What’s What, and resumed his interrupted reading.
“Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.”
This was as far as he had got this morning; and now here was a new section, the fifth.
“Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact — sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, towards decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is home-made and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Will turned the page. A sheet of notepaper fluttered on to the bed. He picked it up and glanced at it. Twenty lines of small clear writing and at the bottom of the page the initials S.M. Not a letter evidently; a poem and therefore public property. He read:
Somewhere between brute silence and last
Sunday’s
Thirteen hundred thousand sermons;
Somewhere between
Calvin on Christ (God help us!) and the lizards;
Somewhere between seeing and speaking,
somewhere
Between our soiled and greasy currency of words
And the first star, the great moths fluttering