Олдос Хаксли - Those Barren Leaves

‘True,’ said Mr. Cardan; ‘but I have my doubts whether any amount of sitting under bo–trees really makes it possible for any one to wriggle out of human limitations and get behind phenomena.’

‘Well, I’m inclined to think that it does make it possible,’ said Calamy. ‘There we must agree to differ. But even if it is impossible to get at reality, the fact that reality exists and is manifestly very different from what we ordinarily suppose it to be, surely throws some light on this horrible death business. Certainly, as things seem to happen, it’s as if the body did get hold of the soul and kill it. But the real facts of the case may be entirely different. The body as we know it is an invention of the mind. What is the reality on which the abstracting, symbolizing mind does its work of abstraction and symbolism? It is possible that, at death, we may find out. And in any case, what is death, really ?’

‘It’s a pity,’ put in Chelifer, in his dry, clear, accurate voice, ‘it’s a pity that the human mind didn’t do its job of invention a little better while it was about it. We might, for example, have made our symbolic abstraction of reality in such a way that it would be unnecessary for a creative and possibly immortal soul to be troubled with the haemorrhoids.’

Calamy laughed. ‘Incorrigible sentimentalist!’

‘Sentimentalist?’ echoed Chelifer, on a note of surprise.

‘A sentimentalist inside out,’ said Calamy, nodding affirmatively. ‘Such wild romanticism as yours—I imagined it had been extinct since the deposition of Louis–Philippe.’

Chelifer laughed good–humouredly. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘Though I must say I myself should have handed out the prize for sentimentality to those who regard what is commonly known as reality—the Harrow Road, for example, or the Café de la Rotonde in Paris—as a mere illusion, who run away from it and devote their time and energy to occupations which Mr. Cardan sums up and symbolizes in the word omphaloskepsis. Aren’t they the soft–heads, the all–too–susceptible and sentimental imbeciles?’

‘On the contrary,’ Calamy replied, ‘in point of historical fact they’ve generally been men of the highest intelligence. Buddha, Jesus, Lao–tsze, Boehme, in spite of his wheels and compunctions, his salt and sulphur, Swedenborg. And what about Sir Isaac Newton, who practically abandoned mathematics for mysticism after he was thirty? Not that he was a particularly good mystic; he wasn’t. But he tried to be; and it can’t be said that he was remarkable for the softness of his head. No, it’s not fools who turn mystics. It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live. The fools, the innumerable fools, take it all for granted, skate about cheerfully on the surface and never think of inquiring what’s underneath. They’re content with appearances, such as your Harrow Road or Café de la Rotonde, call them realities and proceed to abuse any one who takes an interest in what lies underneath these superficial symbols, as a romantic imbecile.’

‘But it’s cowardice to run away,’ Chelifer insisted. ‘One has no right to ignore what for ninety–nine out of every hundred human beings is reality—even though it mayn’t actually be the real thing. One has no right.’

‘Why not?’ asked Calamy. ‘One has a right to be six foot nine inches high and to take sixteens in boots. One has a right, even though there are not more than three or four in every million like one. Why hasn’t one the right to be born with an unusual sort of mind, a mind that can’t be content with the surface–life of appearances?’

‘But such a mind is irrelevant, a freak,’ said Chelifer. ‘In real life—or if you prefer it, in the life that we treat as if it were real—it’s the other minds that preponderate, that are the rule. The brutish minds. I repeat, you haven’t the right to run away from that. If you want to know what human life is, you must be courageous and live as the majority of human beings actually do live. It’s singularly revolting, I assure you.’

‘There you are again with your sentimentality,’ complained Calamy. ‘You’re just the common variety of sentimentalist reversed. The ordinary kind pretends that so–called real life is more rosy than it actually is. The reversed sentimentalist gloats over its horrors. The bad principle is the same in both cases—an excessive preoccupation with what is illusory. The man of sense sees the world of appearances neither too rosily nor too biliously and passes on. There is the ulterior reality to be looked for; it is more interesting….’

‘Then you’d condemn out of hand all the countless human beings whose life is passed on the surface?’

‘Of course not,’ Calamy replied. ‘Who would be such a fool as to condemn a fact? These people exist; it’s obvious. They have their choice of Mr. Cardan’s eighty–four thousand paths to salvation. The path I choose will probably be different from others. That’s all.’

‘Very likely,’ said Mr. Cardan, who had been engaged in lighting a cigar, ‘very likely they’ll find the road to their salvation more easily than you will find the road to yours. Being simpler, they’ll have within them fewer causes for disharmony. Many of them are still practically in the tribal state, blindly obeying the social code that has been suggested into them from childhood. That’s the pre–lapsarian state; they’ve not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—or rather it’s the whole tribe, not the individual, that has eaten. And the individual is so much a part of the tribe that it doesn’t occur to him to act against its ordinances, any more than it occurs to my teeth to begin violently biting my tongue of their own accord. Those simple souls—and there are still a lot of them left, even among the motor buses—will find their way to salvation very easily. The difficulty begins when the individuals begin to get thoroughly conscious of themselves apart from the tribe. There’s an immense number of people who ought to be tribal savages, but who have been made conscious of their individuality. They can’t obey tribal morality blindly and they’re too feeble to think for themselves. I should say that the majority of people in a modern educated democratic state are at that stage—too conscious of themselves to obey blindly, too inept to be able to behave in a reasonable manner on their own account. Hence that delightful contemporary state of affairs which so rejoices the heart of our friend Chelifer. We fall most horribly between two stools—the tribe and the society of conscious intelligent beings.’

‘It’s comforting to think,’ said Chelifer, ‘that modern civilization is doing its best to re–establish the tribal régime, but on an enormous, national and even international scale. Cheap printing, wireless telephones, trains, motor cars, gramophones and all the rest are making it possible to consolidate tribes, not of a few thousands, but of millions. To judge from the Middle Western novelists, the process seems already to have gone a long way in America. In a few generations it may be that the whole planet will be covered by one vast American–speaking tribe, composed of innumerable individuals, all thinking and acting in exactly the same way, like the characters in a novel by Sinclair Lewis. It’s a most pleasing speculation—though, of course,’ Chelifer added guardedly, ‘the future is no concern of ours.’

Mr. Cardan nodded and puffed at his cigar. ‘That’s certainly a possibility,’ he said. ‘A probability almost; for I don’t see that it’s in the least likely that we shall be able to breed a race of beings, at any rate within the next few thousand years, sufficiently intelligent to be able to form a stable non–tribal society. Education has made the old tribalism impossible and has done nothing—nor ever will do anything—to make the non–tribal society possible. It will be necessary, therefore, if we require social stability, to create a new kind of tribalism, on the basis of universal education for the stupid, using the press, wireless and all the rest as the instruments by which the new order is to be established. In a generation or two of steady conscious work it ought to be possible, as Chelifer says, to turn all but two or three hundred in every million of the inhabitants of the planet into Babbitts.’