Hateful experience! But it had at least one good point; it made it impossible for one to cherish the illusion that one was identical with a body that behaved in direct opposition to all one’s wishes and resolutions. Neti, neti — not this, not this. There could be no possible doubt about it. And, of course, he reflected, there hadn’t been any doubt in the old days, when he wanted to say no to his sensuality and couldn’t. The only difference was that, in those circumstances, it had been fun to surrender to one’s alien body, whereas, in these, it was atrocious.
The telephone bell rang; he picked up the receiver and said, ‘Hullo.’
‘Sebastian darling!’
For a second he thought it was Cynthia Poyns and immediately started to think of excuses for refusing the impending invitation.
‘Sebastian?’ the voice questioned, when he didn’t reply; and to his enormous relief he realized that he had made a mistake.
‘Oh, it’s you, Susan!’ he said. ‘Thank goodness!’
‘Who did you think it was?’
‘Oh, somebody else….’
‘One of the ex-girl friends, I suppose. Ringing up to make a scene of jealousy.’ Susan’s tone was playfully, but still reproachfully sarcastic. ‘She wasn’t pretty enough for you — was that it?’
‘That was it,’ Sebastian agreed. But Cynthia Poyns wasn’t only passively good-looking; she was also actively a sentimentalist and literary snob, with a notorious weakness, in spite of her being such an exemplary young mother, for men. ‘Oughtn’t we to be wishing one another a Happy New Year?’ he asked, in another tone.
‘That’s what I rang up for,’ said Susan.
And she went on to hope that he’d started the year auspiciously, to wish and pray that 1944 might finally bring peace. But meanwhile, all three children had colds and Robin was even running a temperature. Nothing to worry about, of course — but all the same one couldn’t help worrying. But her mother, happily, was much better, and she had just heard from Kenneth that there was a chance of his being transferred to a job in England — and what a marvellous New Year’s present that would be!
Then Aunt Alice took over the instrument and opened with her favourite gambit: ‘How’s literature?’
‘Still conscious,’ Sebastian answered. ‘But sinking fast.’
Jocularity, whenever one talked to Aunt Alice about art or philosophy or religion, was always de rigueur.
‘I hope you’ve got another play on the way,’ came the bright, perky voice.
‘Luckily,’ he said, ‘I’ve still got something left of what I earned with the last one, five years ago.’
‘Well, take my advice; don’t invest it in the Far East.’
Gallantly making a joke of financial ruin, Aunt Alice uttered a little peal of laughter; then asked him if he had heard the story about the American corporal and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
He had, several times; but not wishing to deprive her of a pleasure, Sebastian begged to hear it. And when she duly told it, he made all the appropriate noises.
‘But here’s that Susan again,’ she concluded.
And Susan had forgotten to ask him if he remembered Pamela, the girl with a snub nose who was at that progressive school. Lost sight of her for years till just a few weeks ago. A really wonderful girl! So intelligent and well-informed! Working on statistics for the Government, and really very attractive in that piquant, original kind of way — you know.
Sebastian smiled to himself. Another of those prospective wives that Susan was always indefatigably digging up for him. Well, one day she might dig up the right one — and of course he’d be very grateful. But meanwhile …
Meanwhile, Susan was saying, Pamela would be in London again next week. They’d all have to get together.
She was finished at last, and he hung up, feeling that curious mixture of humorous tenderness and complete despair which conversations like these always seemed to evoke in him. It was the problem, not of evil, but of goodness — the excruciating problem of sound, honest, better-than-average goodness.
He thought of dear Aunt Alice, indefatigably full of good works in spite of the never-ending discomfort of her rheumatism. Carrying on undramatically, without ever trying to play the part (and what a juicy part!) of one who carries on. Bearing her misfortunes with the same unaffected simplicity. Poor Jim killed in Malaya; her house burnt by an incendiary with all her possessions in it; nine-tenths of their savings wiped out by the fall of Singapore and Java; Uncle Fred breaking down under the shock and strain, and escaping at last into insanity. She didn’t talk too much about these things, and she didn’t talk too little, too repressedly. And meanwhile the old, rather metallic brightness of manner was still maintained, the little jokes and the pert answers were still uttered. As though she had resolved to go down with her sense of humour still flying and nailed to the mast.
And then there was Susan, there were the three admirably brought up babies, there were the all too priceless letters from Kenneth, somewhere in the Middle East, and Susan’s own comments on war and peace, life and death, good and evil, bubbling up from the depths of a still almost untroubled upper-middle-class Weltanschauung.
Mother, daughter, son-in-law — looking at them with a playwright’s eyes, he could see them as three deliciously comic characters. But in the other sense of that word and from the moralist’s viewpoint, they were three characters of the most solid worth. Courageous and reliable and self-sacrificing as he himself had never been and could only humbly hope he might become. An absolutely sterling goodness, but limited by an impenetrable ignorance of the end and purpose of existence.
Without Susan and Kenneth and Aunt Alice and all their kind, society would fall to pieces. With them, it was perpetually attempting suicide. They were the pillars, but they were also the dynamite; simultaneously the beams and the dry-rot. It was thanks to their goodness that the system worked as smoothly as it did; and thanks to their limitations that the system was fundamentally insane — so insane that Susan’s three charming babies would almost certainly grow up to become cannon fodder, plane fodder, tank fodder, fodder for any one of the thousand bigger and better military gadgets with which bright young engineers like Kenneth would by that time have enriched the world.
Sebastian sighed and shook his head. There was only one remedy, of course; but that they didn’t want to try.
He picked up the loose-leaf book lying on the floor beside his chair. Fifty or sixty pages of random notes, jotted down at intervals during the last few months. This first day of the year was a good time to take stock. He started to read:
There is a higher utilitarianism as well as the ordinary, common or garden utilitarianism.
‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all the rest shall be added.’ That is the classic expression of the higher utilitarianism — together with: ‘I show you sorrow’ (the world of ordinary, nice, unregenerate people) ‘and the ending of sorrow’ (the world of people who have achieved unitive knowledge of the divine Ground).
Set against these the slogans implicit in the lower, popular utilitarianism. ‘I show you sorrow’ (the world as it is now) ‘and the ending of sorrow’ (the world as it will be when Progress and a few more indispensable wars, revolutions and liquidations have done their work). And then, ‘Seek ye first all the rest — creditable virtues, social reform, instructive chats on the radio and the latest in scientific gadgets — and some time in the twenty-first or twenty-second century the kingdom of God will be added.’
All men are born with an equal and inalienable right to disillusionment. So, until they choose to waive that right, it’s three cheers for Technological Progress and a College Education for Everybody.
Read Aeschylus on the subject of Nemesis. His Xerxes comes to a bad end for two reasons. First, because he is an aggressive imperialist. Second, because he tries to get too much control over nature — specifically by bridging the Hellespont. We understand the devilishness of the political manifestations of the lust for power; but have
so completely ignored the evils and dangers inherent in the technological manifestations that, in the teeth of the most obvious facts, we continue to teach our children that there is no debit side to applied science, only a continuing and ever-expanding credit. The idea of Progress is based on the belief that one can be overweening with impunity.
The difference between metaphysics now and metaphysics in the past is the difference between word-spinning which makes no difference to anybody and a system of thought associated with a transforming discipline. ‘Short of the Absolute, God cannot rest, and having reached that goal He is lost and religion with Him.’ That is Bradley’s view, the modern view. Sankara was as strenuously an Absolutionist as Bradley — but with what an enormous difference! For him, there is not only discursive knowledge about the Absolute, but the possibility (and the final necessity) of a direct intellectual intuition, leading the liberated spirit to identification with the object of its knowledge. ‘Among all means of liberation, Bhakti or devotion is supreme. To seek earnestly to know one’s real nature — this is said to be devotion. In other words, devotion can be defined as the search for the reality of one’s own Atman.’· And the Atman, of course, is the spiritual principle in us, which is identical with the Absolute. The older metaphysicians did not lose religion; they found it in the highest and purest of all possible forms.
The fallacy of most philosophies is the philosopher. Enjoying as we do the privilege of Professor X’s acquaintance, we know that whatever he personally may think up about the nature and value of existence cannot possibly be true. And what (God help us!) about our great thoughts? But fortunately there have been saints who could write. We and the Professor are free to crib from our betters.
It is wonderfully easy to escape the vices towards which one doesn’t happen to be drawn. I hate sitting long over meals, am indifferent to ‘good food’ and have a stomach that is turned by more than an ounce or two of alcohol; no wonder, then, that I am temperate. And what about the love of money? Too squeamish and retiring to want to show off, too exclusively concerned with words and notions to care about real estate or first editions or ‘nice things,’ too improvident and too sceptical to be bothered about investments, I have always (except during a year or two of undergraduate idiocy) had more than enough for my needs. And for someone with my musculature, my kind of gift and my disastrous capacity for getting away with murder, the lust for power is even less of a problem than the lust for money. But when it comes to the subtler forms of vanity and pride, when it comes to indifference, negative cruelty and the lack of charity, when it comes to being afraid and telling lies, when it comes to sensuality …
I remember, I remember the house where j’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans, where emotion is recollected in tranquillity and there is nessun maggior dolore che death in life, the days that are no more. And all the rest, all the rest. For the nine Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne; memory is of the very stuff and substance of poetry. And poetry, of course, is the best that human life can offer. But there is also the life of the spirit, and the life of the spirit is the analogue, on a higher turn of the spiral, of the animal’s life. The progression is from animal eternity into time, into the strictly human world of memory and anticipation; and from time, if one chooses to go on, into the world of spiritual eternity, into the divine Ground. The life of the spirit is life exclusively in the present, never in the past or future; life here, now, not life looked forward to or recollected. There is absolutely no room in it for pathos, or remorse, or a voluptuous rumination of the delicious cuds of thirty years ago. Its Intelligible Light has nothing whatever to do either with the sunset radiance of those heart-rendingly good old days before the last war but three, or with the neon glow from those technological New Jerusalems beyond the horizons of the next revolution. No, the life of the spirit is life out of time, life in its essence and eternal principle. Which is why they all insist — all the people best qualified to know — that memory must be lived down and finally died to. When one has succeeded in mortifying the memory, says John of the Cross, one is in a state that is only a degree less perfect and profitable than the state of union with God. It is an assertion that, at a first reading, I found incomprehensible. But that was because at that time, my first concern was with the life of poetry, not of the spirit. Now I know, by humiliating experience, all that memory can do to darken and obstruct the knowledge of the eternal Ground. Mortification is always the condition of proficiency.
‘Mortification’ — the word had sent his mind flying off on a tangent. Instead of thinking about the dangers of memory, he was remembering. Remembering Paul De Vries in 1939 — poor old Paul, as he had sat, so monotonously eager, so intelligently absurd, leaning across the table in the little café at Villefranche and talking, talking. The subject, of course, was one of those famous ‘bridge-ideas,’ with which he loved to link the island universes of discourse. A particularly ‘exciting’ idea, he insisted, harping on the word that had always irritated Sebastian so much — a generalization that spanned, a little precariously perhaps, the gulfs separating art, science, religion and ethics. The bridge, surprisingly enough, was mortification. Mortification of prejudice, cocksureness and even common sense, for the sake of objectivity in science; mortification of the desire to own or exploit, for the sake of contemplating an existing beauty or creating a new one; mortification of the passions, for the sake of an ideal of rationality and virtue; mortification of the self in all its aspects, for the sake of liberation, of union with God. He had listened, Sebastian remembered, with a good deal of interest — but patronizingly, as one listens to a very clever man who is also a fool, and with whose wife, moreover, one happens, the previous evening, to have committed adultery. It was the evening, incidentally, that Veronica had copied out for him that sonnet of Verlaine’s:
Ah! les oaristys! les premières maîtresses!
Vor des cheveux, l’azur des yeux, la fleur des chairs,
Et puis, parmi l’odeur des corps jeunes et chers
La spontanéité craintive des caresses….
Only in Veronica’s case there was nothing timid about that surgical spontaneity and, in spite of Elizabeth Arden, the body was now thirty-five years old; while as for ‘dear’ — that it had never been, never. It had been only irresistible, the dreaded and fascinating vehicle of an alienation more total than that which he had known with anyone else of all the women he had loved or allowed himself to be loved by. And in the same instant he remembered his wife, unutterably weary under the burden of a pregnancy that seemed so strangely irrelevant to a being so small, bird-quick and fragile as Rachel had been. Remembered the promises he had made her, when he left Le Lavandou to go and stay with the De Vrieses, the vows of fidelity which he knew, even as he made them, that he wasn’t going to keep — even though she was certain to find out. And of course she had found out, much sooner than he had expected. Sebastian remembered her as she lay in the hospital a month later, after the miscarriage, when the blood-poisoning had set in. ‘It’s all your fault,’ she whispered reproachfully; and when he knelt beside her, in tears, she had turned her face away from him. When he came the next morning, Dr. Buloz waylaid him on the stairs. ‘Some courage, my friend! We’ave some bad newses about your wife.’
Bad newses, and it was all his fault, his fault parmi l’odeur des corps, amid the smell of iodoform and the memory of tuberoses on the coffin. Rachel’s coffin, Uncle Eustace’s coffin. And beside both the graves had stood Veronica, monastically elegant in mourning, with only the extremities of that warm white instrument of alienation projecting from under her disguise. And within two weeks of Rachel’s funeral, once again the cannibals in bedlam…. ‘It’s all your fault.’ The phrase had gone on repeating itself even in the extremities of an experience of otherness almost as absolute, on its own level, as the otherness of God. But he had gone on, just because it was such a vileness and for the express purpose of enjoying yet another repulsive taste of that mixture of sensuality, abhorr
ence and self-hatred which had become for him the all too fascinating theme of what turned out to be a whole volume of verses.
It was with one of those poems that he had been deliciously struggling when somebody sat down beside him on his favourite bench on the Promenade des Anglais. He turned irritably to see who had trespassed on his sacred privacy. It was Bruno Rontini — but Bruno ten years after, Bruno the ex-prisoner, now in exile and far gone in his last illness. An old man, bent and horribly emaciated. But in the beaked skull the blue bright eyes were full of joy, alive with an intense and yet somehow disinterested tenderness.
Speechless with a kind of terror, he took the dry skeleton hand that was held out to him. This was his doing! And what made it worse was the fact that, all these years, he had done everything he could to obliterate the consciousness of his offence. It had begun with excuses and alibis. He had been a child; and after all, who was there who didn’t tell an occasional fib? And his fib, remember, had been told out of mere weakness, not from interest or malice. Nobody would have dreamed of making a fuss about it, if it hadn’t been for that unfortunate accident. And, obviously, Bruno had it coming to him; Bruno had been on their bad books for years. That wretched little business of the drawing happened to have been made the pretext of an action which would have been taken anyhow, sooner or later. By no stretch of the imagination could he, Sebastian, be held responsible. And a couple of days after the arrest he was on his way home; and his father had taken him electioneering — which had been the greatest fun. And the next term he had worked tremendously hard for a scholarship which, to his own and everyone else’s surprise, he had won. And when he went up to Oxford that autumn, Daisy Ockham secretly gave him a cheque for three hundred pounds, to supplement his allowance; and what with the intoxicating excitement of spending it, what with the new freedom, the new succession of amorous adventures, it ceased to be necessary to find excuses or establish alibis: he just forgot. The incident slipped away into insignificance. And now suddenly, out of the grave of his oblivion, this old dying man with the blue eyes had risen like some irrepressible Lazarus — for what purpose? To reproach, to judge, to condemn?
Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 261
