Eyeless In Gaza by Aldous Huxley

Author:Aldous Huxley [Aldous Huxley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXII

December 8th 1926

MARK LIVED IN a dingy house off the Fulham Road. Dark, brown brick with terra-cotta trimmings; and, within, patterned linoleum; bits of red Axminster carpet; wallpapers of ochre sprinkled with bunches of cornflowers, of green, with crimson roses; fumed oak chairs and tables; rep curtains; bamboo stands supporting glazed blue pots. The hideousness, Anthony reflected, was so complete, so absolutely unrelieved, that it could only have been intentional. Mark must deliberately have chosen the ugliest surroundings he could find. To punish himself, no doubt – but why, for what offence?

‘Some beer?’

Anthony nodded.

The other opened a bottle, filled a single glass; but himself did not drink.

‘You still play, I see,’ said Anthony, pointing in the direction of the upright piano.

‘A little,’ Mark had to admit. ‘It’s a consolation.’

The fact that the Matthew Passion, for example, the Hammerklavier Sonata, had had human authors was a source of hope. It was just conceivable that humanity might some day and somehow be made a little more John-Sebastian-like. If there were no Well-Tempered Clavichord, why should one bother even to wish for revolutionary change?

‘Turning one kind of common humanity into common humanity of a slightly different kind – well, if that’s all that revolution can do, the game isn’t worth the candle.’

Anthony protested. For a sociologist it was the most fascinating of all games.

‘To watch or to play?’

‘To watch, of course.’

A spectacle bottomlessly comic in its grotesqueness, endlessly varied. But looking closely, one could detect the uniformities under the diversity, the fixed rules of the endlessly shifting game.

‘A revolution to transform common humanity into common humanity of another variety. You find it horrifying. But that’s just what I’d like to live long enough to see. Theory being put to the test of practice. To detect, after your catastrophic reform of everything, the same old uniformities working themselves out in a slightly different way – I can’t imagine anything more satisfying. Like logically inferring the existence of a new planet and then discovering it with the telescope. As for producing more John Sebastians . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You might as well imagine that revolution will increase the number of Siamese twins.’

That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to common-place people is high; in reality, very low.

‘Books are opium,’ said Mark.

‘Precisely. That’s why it’s doubtful if there’ll ever be such a thing as proletarian literature. Even proletarian books will deal with exceptional proletarians. And exceptional proletarians are no more proletarian than exceptional bourgeois are bourgeois. Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth. Hence those geniuses of fiction, those leaders and dukes and millionaires. People who are completely conditioned by circumstances – one can be desperately sorry for them; but one can’t find their lives very dramatic. Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.

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