Island (39 page)
Authors: Aldous Huxley
“Thank the Lord!” he said, and the love which had shrunk away in fear came flowing back in a tide of happiness.
“Thank Him for what?”
“For having given you the grace of sensuality.”
She smiled again. “So
that
cat’s out of the bag.”
“All that power,” he said, “all that admirable, terrible will! You might have been Lucifer. But fortunately, providentially…” He disengaged his right hand and with the tip of its stretched forefinger touched her lips. “The blessed gift of sensuality—it’s been your salvation.
Half
your salvation,” he qualified, remembering the gruesomely loveless frenzies in the pink alcove, “
one
of your salvations. Because, of course, there’s this other thing, this knowing who in fact you are.” He was silent for a moment. “Mary with swords in her heart,” he went on, “and Circe, and Ninon de Lenclos and now—who? Somebody like Juliana of Norwich or Catherine of Genoa. Are you really all these people?”
“Plus an idiot,” she assured him. “Plus a rather worried and not very efficient mother. Plus a bit of the little prig and day-dreamer I was as a child. Plus, potentially, the old dying woman who looked out at me from the mirror the last time we took the
moksha
-medicine together. And then Dugald looked and saw what
he
would be like in another forty years. Less than a month later,” she added, “he was dead.”
One slips back too easily, one slips back too often…Half in mysterious darkness, half mysteriously glowing with golden light, her face had turned once again into a mask of suffering. Within their shadowy orbits the eyes, he could see, were closed. She had retreated into another time and was alone, somewhere else, with the swords and her open wound. Outside, the cocks were crowing again, and a second mynah bird had begun to call, half a tone higher than the first, for compassion.
“
Karuna
.”
“Attention. Attention.”
“
Karuna
.”
Will raised his hand once more and touched her lips.
“Do you hear what they’re saying?”
It was a long time before she answered. Then, raising her hand, she took hold of his extended finger and pressed it hard against her lower lip. “Thank you,” she said, and opened her eyes again.
“Why thank me?
You
taught me what to do.”
“And now it’s you who have to teach your teacher.”
Like a pair of rival gurus each touting his own brand of spirituality, “
Karuna
, attention,” shouted the mynah birds; then, as they drowned out one another’s wisdom in overlapping competition, “Runattenshkarattunshon.” Proclaiming that he was the never-impotent owner of all females, the invincible challenger of every spurious pretender to maleness, a cockerel in the next garden shrilly announced his divinity.
A smile broke through the mask of suffering; from her private world of swords and memory, Susila had returned to the present. “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” she said. “How I love him! Just like Tom Krishna when he goes around asking people to feel his muscles. And those preposterous mynah birds, so faithfully repeating the good advice they can’t understand. They’re just as adorable as my little bantam.”
“And what about the other kind of biped?” he asked. “The less adorable variety.”
For all answer she leaned forward, caught him by the forelock and, pulling his head down, kissed him on the tip of his nose. “And now it’s time you moved your legs,” she said. Climbing to her feet, she held out her hand to him. He took it and she pulled him up from his chair.
“Negative crowing and parroted antiwisdom,” she said. “That’s what some of the other kind of bipeds go in for.”
“What’s to guarantee that I shan’t return to my vomit?” he asked.
“You probably will,” she cheerfully assured him. “But you’ll also probably come back again to this.”
There was a spurt of movement at their feet.
Will laughed. “There goes my poor little scrabbling incarnation of evil.”
She took his arm, and together they walked over to the open window. Announcing the near approach of dawn, a little wind fitfully rattled the palm fronds. Below them, rooted invisibly in the moist, acrid-smelling earth, was a hibiscus bush—a wild profusion of bright glossy leaves and vermilion trumpets, evoked from the double darkness of night and overarching trees by a shaft of lamplight from within the room.
“It isn’t possible,” he said incredulously. He was back again with God-the-Fourteenth-of-July.
“It isn’t possible,” she agreed. “But like everything else in the universe, it happens to be a fact. And now that you’ve finally recognized my existence, I’ll give you leave to look to your heart’s content.”
He stood there motionless, gazing, gazing through a timeless succession of mounting intensities and ever-profounder significances. Tears filled his eyes and overflowed at last onto his cheeks. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away.
“I can’t help it,” he apologized.
He couldn’t help it because there was no other way in which he could express his thankfulness. Thankfulness for the privilege of being alive and a witness to this miracle, of being, indeed, more than a witness—a partner in it, an aspect of it. Thankfulness for these gifts of luminous bliss and knowledgeless understanding. Thankfulness for being at once this union with the divine unity and yet this finite creature among other finite creatures.
“Why should one cry when one’s grateful?” he said as he put his handkerchief away. “Goodness knows. But one does.” A
memory bubble popped up from the sludge of past reading. “‘Gratitude is heaven itself,’” he quoted. “Pure gibberish! But now I see that Blake was just recording a simple fact. It is heaven itself.”
“And all the more heavenly,” she said, “for being heaven on earth and not heaven in heaven.”
Startlingly, through the crowing and the croaking, through the insect noises and the duet of the rival gurus, came the sound of distant musketry.
“What on earth is that?” she wondered.
“Just the boys playing with fireworks,” he answered gaily.
Susila shook her head. “We don’t encourage those kinds of fireworks. We don’t even possess them.”
From the highway beyond the walls of the compound a roar of heavy vehicles climbing in low gear swelled up louder and louder. Over the noise, a voice at once stentorian and squeaky bellowed incomprehensibly through a loudspeaker.
In their setting of velvet shadow the leaves were like thin shavings of jade and emerald, and from the heart of their gem-bright chaos fantastically sculptured rubies flared out into five-pointed stars. Gratitude, gratitude. His eyes filled again with tears.
Snatches of the shrill bellowing resolved themselves into recognizable words. Against his will, he found himself listening.
“People of Pala,” he heard; then the voice blasted into amplified inarticulateness. Squeak, roar, squeak, and then, “Your Raja speaking…remain calm…welcome your friends from across the Strait…”
Recognition dawned. “It’s Murugan.”
“And he’s with Dipa’s soldiers.”
“Progress,” the uncertain excited voice was saying. “Modern life…” And then, moving on from Sears, Roebuck to the Rani and Koot Hoomi, “Truth,” it squeaked, “values…genuine spirituality…oil.”
“Look,” said Susila, “look! They’re turning into the compound.”
Visible in a gap between two clumps of bamboos, the beams of a procession of headlamps shone for a moment on the left cheek of the great stone Buddha by the lotus pool and passed by, hinted again at the blessed possibility of liberation and again passed by.
“The throne of my father,” bawled the gigantically amplified squeak, “joined to the throne of my mother’s ancestors…Two sister nations marching forward, hand in hand, into the future…To be known henceforth as the United Kingdom of Rendang and Pala…The United Kingdom’s first prime minister, that great political and spiritual leader, Colonel Dipa…”
The procession of headlamps disappeared behind a long range of buildings and the shrill bellowing died down into incoherence. Then the lights re-emerged and once again the voice became articulate.
“Reactionaries,” it was furiously yelling. “Traitors to the principles of the permanent revolution…”
In a tone of horror, “They’re stopping at Dr. Robert’s bungalow,” Susila whispered.
The voice had said its last word, the headlamps and the roaring motors had been turned off. In the dark expectant silence the frogs and the insects kept up their mindless soliloquies, the mynah birds reiterated their good advice. “Attention,
Karuna
.” Will looked down at his burning bush and saw the Suchness of the world and his own being blazing away with the clear light that was also (how obviously now!) compassion—the clear light that, like everyone else, he had always chosen to be blind to, the compassion to which he had always preferred his tortures, endured or inflicted, in a bargain basement, his squalid solitudes, with the living Babs or the dying Molly in the foreground, with Joe Aldehyde in the middle distance and, in the remoter background, the great world of impersonal forces and proliferating
numbers, of collective paranoias, and organized diabolism. And always, everywhere, there would be the yelling or quietly authoritative hypnotists; and in the train of the ruling suggestion givers, always and everywhere, the tribes of buffoons and hucksters, the professional liars, the purveyors of entertaining irrelevances. Conditioned from the cradle, unceasingly distracted, mesmerized systematically, their uniformed victims would go on obediently marching and countermarching, go on, always and everywhere, killing and dying with the perfect docility of trained poodles. And yet in spite of the entirely justified refusal to take yes for an answer, the fact remained and would remain always, remain everywhere—the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshiper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion.
There was the sound of a single shot; then a burst of shots from an automatic rifle.
Susila covered her face with her hands. She was trembling uncontrollably.
He put an arm round her shoulders and held her close.
The work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night. And yet the fact remained—the fact of the ending of sorrow as well as the fact of sorrow.
The starters screeched; engine after engine roared into action. The headlamps were turned on and, after a minute of noisy maneuvering, the cars started to move slowly back along the road by which they had come.
The loudspeaker brayed out the opening bars of a martial and at the same time lascivious hymn tune, which Will recognized as the national anthem of Rendang. Then the Wurlitzer was switched off, and here once again was Murugan.
“This is your Raja speaking,” the excited voice proclaimed. After which,
da capo
, there was a repetition of the speech about
Progress, Values, Oil, True Spirituality. Abruptly, as before, the procession disappeared from sight and hearing. A minute later it was in view again, with its wobbly countertenor bellowing the praises of the newly united kingdom’s first prime minister.
The procession crawled on and now, from the right this time, the headlamps of the first armored car lit up the serenely smiling face of enlightenment. For an instant only, and then the beam moved on. And here was the Tathagata for the second time, the third, the fourth, the fifth. The last of the cars passed by. Disregarded in the darkness, the fact of enlightenment remained. The roaring of the engines diminished, the squeaking rhetoric lapsed into an inarticulate murmur, and as the intruding noises died away, out came the frogs again, out came the uninterruptable insects, out came the mynah birds.
“
Karuna. Karuna
.”
And a semitone lower, “Attention.”
About the author
Aldous Huxley: A Life of the Mind
About the book
“Mind at Large” by Aldous Huxley
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Aldous Huxley
A Life of the Mind
P
OET, PLAYWRIGHT, NOVELIST
, short story writer, travel writer, essayist, critic, philosopher, mystic, and social prophet, Aldous Huxley was one of the most accomplished and influential English literary figures of the mid-twentieth century. In the course of an extraordinarily prolific writing career, which began in the early 1920s and continued until his death in 1963, Huxley underwent a remarkable process of self-transformation from a derisive satirist of England’s chattering classes to a deeply religious writer preoccupied with the human capacity for spiritual transcendence. Yet in everything Huxley wrote, from the most frivolous to the most profound, there runs the common thread of his search to explain the meaning and possibilities of human life and perception.
Aldous Huxley was born in Surrey, England, in 1894, the son of Leonard Huxley, editor of the prestigious
Cornhill
magazine; and of Julia Arnold, niece of the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, and sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. He was the grandson of T. H. Huxley, the scientist. Thus by “birth and disposition,” as one biographer put it, Huxley belonged to England’s intellectual aristocracy.
As Sybille Bedford writes in her fascinating biography,
Aldous Huxley
(Alfred A. Knopf / Harper & Row, 1974): “What we know about him as a young child is the usual residue of anecdote and
snapshot. During his first years his head was proportionately enormous, so that he could not walk till he was two because he was apt to topple over. ‘We put father’s hat on him and it fitted.’ In another country, at a great distance in time and place, when he lay ill and near his end in southern California, a friend, wanting to distract him, said, ‘Aldous, didn’t you ever have a nickname when you were small?’ and Aldous, who hardly ever talked about his childhood or indeed about himself (possibly because one did not ask) said promptly, ‘They called me Ogie. Short for Ogre.’
“The Ogre was a pretty little boy, the photographs…show the high forehead, the (then) clear gaze, the tremulous mouth and a sweetness of expression, an alertness beyond that of other angelic little boys looking into a camera. Aldous, his brother, Julian, tells us, sat quietly a good deal of the time ‘contemplating the strangeness of things.’
“‘I used to watch him with a pencil,’ said his cousin and contemporary Gervas Huxley, ‘you see, he was always drawing…. My earliest memory of him is sitting—absorbed—to me it was magic, a little boy of my own age drawing so beautifully.’
“He was delicate; he had mischievous moods; he could play. He carried his rag doll about him for company until he was eight. He was fond of grumbling. They gave him a milk mug which bore the inscription:
Oh, isn’t the world extremely flat / With nothing whatever to grumble at
.
“…And Aldous aged six being taken with all the Huxleys to the unveiling of the statue of his grandfather at the Natural History Museum by the Prince of Wales, and his
mother trying, in urgent whispers, to persuade Julian, then a young Etonian, to give up his top hat—a very young Etonian and a very new top hat—to Aldous, queasy, overcome, to be sick in.”
When Huxley was a sixteen-year-old student at Eton, he contracted a disease that left him almost totally blind for two years and seriously impaired his vision for years to come. The loss of sight was an “event,” Huxley later wrote, “which prevented me from becoming a complete public school English-gentleman.” It also ended his early dreams of becoming a doctor. Yet, in a curious way, though he abandoned science for literature, Huxley’s outlook remained essentially scientific. As his brother, the zoologist Julian Huxley, wrote, science and mysticism were overlapping and complementary realms in Aldous Huxley’s mind: “The more [science] discovers and the more comprehension it gives us of the mechanisms of existence, the more clearly does the mystery of existence itself stand out.”
“The loss of sight was an ‘event,’ Huxley later wrote, ‘which prevented me from becoming a complete public school English-gentleman.’”
Huxley took his undergraduate degree in literature at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1916, and spent several years during World War I working in a government office. After teaching briefly at Eton, he launched his career as a professional writer in 1920 by taking a job as a drama critic for the
Westminster Gazette
, and a staff writer for
House and Garden
and
Vogue
. Possessed of seemingly infinite literary energy, he wrote poetry, essays, and fiction in his spare time, publishing his first novel,
Crome Yellow
, in 1921. This bright, sharp, mildly shocking
satire of upper-class artists won Huxley an immediate reputation as a dangerous wit. He swiftly composed several more novels in a similar vein, including
Antic Hay
(1923) and
Those Barren Leaves
(1925).
In
Point Counter Point
(1928), considered by many critics his strongest novel, Huxley broke new ground, both stylistically and thematically. In a narrative that jumps abruptly from scene to scene and character to character, Huxley confronts modern man’s disillusionment with religion, art, sex, and politics. The character Philip Quarles, a novelist intent on “transform[ing] a detached intellectual skepticism into a way of harmonious all-round living,” is the closest Huxley came to painting his own portrait in fiction.
Brave New World
(1932), though less experimental in style than
Point Counter Point
, is more radical in its pessimistic view of human nature. Huxley’s antiutopia, with its eerie combination of totalitarian government and ubiquitous feel-good drugs and sex, disturbed many readers of his day; but it has proven to be his most enduring and influential work.
During the 1930s, Huxley turned increasingly toward an exploration of fundamental questions of philosophy, sociology, politics, and ethics. In his 1936 novel
Eyeless in Gaza
he wrote of a man’s transformation from cynic to mystic, and as war threatened Europe once again, he allied himself with the pacifist movement and began lecturing widely on peace and internationalism.
“During the 1930s, Huxley turned increasingly toward an exploration of fundamental questions of philosophy, sociology, politics, and ethics.”
For a number of years Huxley lived in Italy, where he formed a close relationship
with D. H. Lawrence, whose letters he edited in 1933. In 1937, Huxley and his Belgian-born wife, Maria Nys, and their son, Matthew, left Europe to live in Southern California for the rest of his life. Maria Huxley died of cancer in 1955, and the following year Huxley married the Italian violinist and psychotherapist Laura Archera.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Huxley changed direction yet again as he became fascinated by the spiritual life, in particular with the possibility of direct communication between people and the divinity. Huxley read widely in the writings of the mystics and assembled an anthology of mystical writing called
The Perennial Philosophy
(1945). Around this time he began experimenting with mind-altering drugs like mescaline and LSD, which he came to believe gave users essentially the same experiences that mystics attained through fasting, prayer, and meditation.
The Doors of Perception
(1954) and
Heaven and Hell
(1956), Huxley’s books about the effects of what he termed psychedelic drugs, became essential texts for the counterculture during the 1960s. Yet Huxley’s brother Julian cautions against the image of Aldous as a kind of spiritual godfather to hippies: “One of Aldous’s major preoccupations was how to achieve self-transcendence while yet remaining a committed social being—how to escape from the prison bars of self and the pressures of here and now into realms of pure goodness and pure enjoyment.”
“‘One of Aldous’s major preoccupations was how to achieve self-transcendence while yet remaining a committed social being.’”
Huxley pursued his quest for “pure goodness and pure enjoyment” right up to the end of his life on November 22, 1963.
Today he is remembered as one of the great explorers of twentieth-century literature, a writer who continually reinvented himself as he pushed his way deeper and deeper into the mysteries of human consciousness.
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