Олдос Хаксли - Those Barren Leaves

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘Till you’ve got to the bottom of the cosmos, eh?’

Calamy smiled. ‘That’s about it.’

‘Splendid,’ said Mr. Cardan, patting him on the arm, ‘splendid. I envy you. God, what wouldn’t I give to be your age? What wouldn’t I give?’ He shook his head sadly. ‘And, alas,’ he added, ‘what could I give, in point of actual fact? I put it at about twelve hundred quid at the present time. My total fortune. Shouldn’t we sit down?’ he added on another note.

Calamy led the way down the little path. Along the front of the cottage, under the windows, ran a long bench. The three men sat down. The sun shone full upon them; it was pleasantly warm. Beneath them was the narrow valley with its smoky shadows; opposite, the black hills, cloud–capped and silhouetted against the brightness of the sky about the sun.

‘And the trip to Rome,’ Calamy inquired, ‘was that agreeable?’

‘Tolerably,’ said Chelifer, with precision.

‘And Miss Elver?’ he addressed himself politely to Mr. Cardan.

Mr. Cardan looked up at him. ‘Hadn’t you heard?’ he asked.

‘Heard what?’

‘She’s dead.’ Mr. Cardan’s face became all at once very hard and still.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Calamy. ‘I didn’t know.’ He thought it more tactful to proffer no further condolences. There was a silence.

‘That’s something,’ said Mr. Cardan at last, ‘that you’ll find it rather difficult to contemplate away, however long and mystically you stare at your navel.’

‘What?’ asked Calamy.

‘Death,’ Mr. Cardan answered. ‘You can’t get over the fact that, at the end of everything, the flesh gets hold of the spirit, and squeezes the life out of it, so that a man turns into something that’s no better than a whining sick animal. And as the flesh sickens the spirit sickens, manifestly. Finally the flesh dies and putrefies; and the spirit presumably putrefies too. And there’s an end of your omphaloskepsis, with all its by–products, God and justice and salvation and all the rest of them.’

‘Perhaps it is,’ said Calamy. ‘Let’s admit it as certain, even. I don’t see that it makes the slightest difference….’

‘No difference?’

Calamy shook his head. ‘Salvation’s not in the next world; it’s in this. One doesn’t behave well here for the sake of a harp and wings after one is dead—or even for the sake of contemplating throughout eternity the good, the true and the beautiful. If one desires salvation, it’s salvation here and now. The kingdom of God is within you—if you’ll excuse the quotation,’ he added, turning with a smile to Mr. Cardan. ‘The conquest of that kingdom, now, in this life—that’s your salvationist’s ambition. There may be a life to come, or there may not; it’s really quite irrelevant to the main issue. To be upset because the soul may decay with the body is really mediaeval. Your mediaeval theologian made up for his really frightful cynicism about this world by a childish optimism about the next. Future justice was to compensate for the disgusting horrors of the present. Take away the life to come and the horrors remain, untempered and unpalliated.’

‘Quite so,’ said Chelifer.

‘Seen from the mediaeval point of view,’ Calamy went on, ‘the prospect is most disquieting. The Indians—and for that matter the founder of Christianity—supply the corrective with the doctrine of salvation in this life, irrespective of the life to come. Each man can achieve salvation in his own way.’

‘I’m glad you admit that,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘I was afraid you’d begin telling us that we all had to live on lettuces and look at our navels.’

‘I have it from no less an authority than yourself,’ Calamy answered, laughing, ‘that there are—how many?—eighty–four thousand—isn’t it?—different ways of achieving salvation.’

‘Fully,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘and a great many more for going to the devil. But all this, my young friend,’ he pursued, shaking his head, ‘doesn’t in any way mitigate the disagreeableness of slowly becoming gaga , dying and being eaten by worms. One may have achieved salvation in this life, certainly; but that makes it none the less insufferable that, at the end of the account, one’s soul should inevitably succumb to one’s body. I, for example, am saved—I put the case quite hypothetically, mind you—I have been living in a state of moral integrity and this–worldly salvation for the last half–century, ever since I reached the age of puberty. Let this be granted. Have I, for this reason, any the less cause to be distressed by the prospect, in a few years’ time, of becoming a senile imbecile, blind, deaf, toothless, witless, without interest in anything, partially paralysed, revolting to my fellows—and all the rest of the Burtonian catalogue? When my soul is at the mercy of my slowly rotting body, what will be the use of salvation then?’

‘It will have profited during the fifty years of healthy life,’ said Calamy.

‘But I’m talking about the unhealthy years,’ Mr. Cardan insisted, ‘when the soul’s at the mercy of the body.’

Calamy was silent for a moment. ‘It’s difficult,’ he said pensively, ‘it’s horribly difficult. The fundamental question is this: Can you talk of the soul being at the mercy of the body, can you give any kind of an explanation of mind in terms of matter? When you reflect that it’s the human mind that has invented space, time and matter, picking them out of reality in a quite arbitrary fashion—can you attempt to explain a thing in terms of something it has invented itself? That’s the fundamental question.’

‘It’s like the question of the authorship of the Iliad ,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘The author of that poem is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name. Similarly, philosophically and even, according to the new physics, scientifically speaking, matter may not be matter, really . But the fact remains that something having all the properties we have always attributed to matter is perpetually getting in our way, and that our minds do, in point of fact, fall under the dominion of certain bits of this matter, known as our bodies, changing as they change and keeping pace with their decay.’

Calamy ran his fingers perplexedly through his hair. ‘Yes, of course, it’s devilishly difficult,’ he said. ‘You can’t help behaving as if things really were as they seem to be. At the same time, there is a reality which is totally different and which a change in our physical environment, a removal of our bodily limitations, would enable us to get nearer to. Perhaps by thinking hard enough … ’ He paused, shaking his head. ‘How many days did Gotama spend under the bo–tree? Perhaps if you spend long enough and your mind is the right sort of mind, perhaps you really do get, in some queer sort of way, beyond the limitations of ordinary existence. And you see that everything that seems real is in fact entirely illusory— maya , in fact, the cosmic illusion. Behind it you catch a glimpse of reality.’

‘But what bosh your mystics talk about it,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘Have you ever read Boehme, for example? Lights and darknesses, wheels and compunctions, sweets and bitters, mercury, salt and sulphur—it’s a rigmarole.’

‘It’s only to be expected,’ said Calamy. ‘How is a man to give an account of something entirely unlike the phenomena of known existence in a language invented to describe these phenomena? You might give a deaf man a most detailed verbal description of the Fifth Symphony; but he wouldn’t be much the wiser for it, and he’d think you were talking pure balderdash—which from his point of view you would be….’