Island - Aldous Huxley [109]
“Can you distort time?” Will enquired.
Mr. Menon shook his head. “Unfortunately I could never go deep enough. Everything I know had to be learned the long, slow way. Mrs. Narayan was more fortunate. Being one of the privileged twenty percent, she could take all kinds of educational short cuts that were completely closed to the rest of us.”
“What sort of short cuts?” Will asked, turning to the Principal.
“Short cuts to memorizing,” she answered, “short cuts to calculating and thinking and problem solving. One starts by learning how to experience twenty seconds as ten minutes, a minute as half an hour. In deep trance it’s really very easy. You listen to the teacher’s suggestions and you sit there quietly for a long, long time. Two full hours—you’d be ready to take your oath on it. When you’ve been brought back, you look at your watch. Your experience of two hours was telescoped into exactly four minutes of clock time.”
“How?”
“Nobody knows how,” said Mr. Menon. “But all those anecdotes about drowning men seeing the whole of their life unfolding before them in a few seconds are substantially true. The mind and the nervous system—or rather some minds and some nervous systems—happen to be capable of this curious feat; that’s all that anybody knows. We discovered the fact about sixty years ago, and since then we’ve been exploiting it. Exploiting it, among other things, for educational purposes.”
“For example,” Mrs. Narayan resumed, “here’s a mathematical problem. In your normal state it might take you the best part of half an hour to solve. But now you distort time to the point where one minute is subjectively the equivalent of thirty minutes. Then you set to work on your problem. Thirty subjective minutes later it’s solved. But thirty subjective minutes are one clock minute. Without the least sense of rush or strain you’ve been working as fast as one of those extraordinary calculating boys, who turn up from time to time. Future geniuses like Ampére and Gauss, or future idiots like Dase—but all of them, by some built-in trick of time distortion, capable of getting through an hour’s hard work in a couple of minutes—sometimes in a matter of seconds. I’m only an average student; but I could go into deep trance, which meant that I could be taught how to telescope my time into a thirtieth of its normal span. Result: I was able to cover far more intellectual ground than I could possibly have covered if I’d had to do all my learning in the ordinary way. You can imagine what happens when somebody with a genius IQ is also capable of time distortion. The results are fantastic!”
“Unfortunately,” said Mr. Menon, “they’re not very common. In the last two generations we’ve had precisely two time distorters of real genius, and only five or six runners-up. But what Pala owes to those few is incalculable. So it’s no wonder that we keep a sharp lookout for potential somnambulists!”
“Well, you certainly ask plenty of searching questions about your little pupils,” Will concluded after a brief silence. “What do you do when you’ve found the answers?”
“We start educating accordingly,” said Mr. Menon. “For example, we ask questions about every child’s physique and temperament. When we have the answers, we sort out all the shyest, tensest, most overresponsive and introverted children, and assemble them in a single group. Then, little by little, the group is enlarged. First a few children with tendencies towards indiscriminate sociability are introduced. Then one or two little muscle men and muscle women—children with tendencies towards aggressiveness and love of power. It’s the best method, we’ve found, for getting little boys and girls at the three polar extremes to understand and tolerate one another. After a few months of carefully controlled mixing, they’re ready to admit that people with a different kind of hereditary makeup have just as good a right to exist