Island - Aldous Huxley [32]
“You’re right. Everybody should stick to the insanity that God has seen fit to curse him with. Pecca fortiter—that was Luther’s advice. But make a point of sinning your own sins, not someone else’s. And above all don’t do what the people of this island do. Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat—and the boat is perpetually sinking.”
“In spite of which, no rat is justified in leaving it. Is that what you’re saying?”
“A few of them may sometimes try to leave. But they never get very far. History and the other rats will always see to it that they drown with the rest of us. That’s why Pala doesn’t have the ghost of a chance.”
Carrying a tray, the little nurse re-entered the room.
“Buddhist food,” she said, as she tied a napkin round Will’s neck. “All except the fish. But we’ve decided that fishes are vegetables within the meaning of the act.”
Will started to eat.
“Apart from the Rani and Murugan and us two here,” he asked after swallowing the first mouthful, “how many people from the outside have you ever met?”
“Well, there was that group of American doctors,” she answered. “They came to Shivapuram last year, while I was working at the Central Hospital.”
“What were they doing here?”
“They wanted to find out why we have such a low rate of neurosis and cardiovascular trouble. Those doctors!” She shook her head. “I tell you, Mr. Farnaby, they really made my hair stand on end—made everybody’s hair stand on end in the whole hospital.”
“So you think our medicine’s pretty primitive?”
“That’s the wrong word. It isn’t primitive. It’s fifty percent terrific and fifty percent nonexistent. Marvelous antibiotics—but absolutely no methods for increasing resistance, so that antibiotics won’t be necessary. Fantastic operations—but when it comes to teaching people the way of going through life without having to be chopped up, absolutely nothing. And it’s the same all along the line. Alpha Plus for patching you up when you’ve started to fall apart; but Delta Minus for keeping you healthy. Apart from sewerage systems and synthetic vitamins, you don’t seem to do anything at all about prevention. And yet you’ve got a proverb: prevention is better than cure.”
“But cure,” said Will, “is so much more dramatic than prevention. And for the doctors it’s also a lot more profitable.”
“Maybe for your doctors,” said the little nurse. “Not for ours. Ours get paid for keeping people well.”
“How is it to be done?”
“We’ve been asking that question for a hundred years, and we’ve found a lot of answers. Chemical answers, psychological answers, answers in terms of what you eat, how you make love, what you see and hear, how you feel about being who you are in this kind of world.”
“And which are the best answers?”
“None of them is best without the others.”
“So there’s no panacea.”
“How can there be?” And she quoted the little rhyme that every student nurse had to learn by heart on the first day of her training.
“‘I’am a crowd, obeying as many laws
As it has members. Chemically impure
Are all ‘my’ beings. There’s no single cure
For what can never have a single cause.”
“So whether it’s prevention or whether it’s cure, we attack on all the fronts at once. All the fronts,” she insisted, “from diet to autosuggestion, from negative ions to meditation.”
“Very sensible,” was Will’s comment.
“Perhaps a little too sensible,” said Mr. Bahu. “Did you ever try to talk sense to a maniac?” Will shook his head. “I did once.” He lifted the graying lock that slanted obliquely across his forehead. Just below the hairline a jagged scar stood out, strangely pale against the brown skin. “Luckily for me, the bottle he hit me with was pretty flimsy.” Smoothing his ruffled hair, he turned to the little nurse. “Don’t ever forget, Miss Radha; to the senseless nothing is more maddening than sense. Pala is a small island completely surrounded by twenty-nine hundred million mental cases. So beware of being too rational. In the