Island - Aldous Huxley [42]
“And don’t forget the most important point of all,” the little nurse chimed in. “For women—all women, and I don’t care what you say about sweeping generalizations—the yoga of love means perfection, means being transformed and taken out of themselves and completed.” There was a brief silence. “And now,” she resumed in another, brisker tone, “it’s high time we left you to your siesta.”
“Before you go,” said Will, “I’d like to write a letter. Just a brief note to my boss to say that I’m alive and in no immediate danger of being eaten by the natives.”
Radha went foraging in Dr. Robert’s study and came back with paper, pencil and an envelope.
“Veni, vidi,” Will scrawled. “I was wrecked, I met the Rani and her collaborator from Rendang, who implies that he can deliver the goods in return for baksheesh to the tune (he was specific) of twenty thousand pounds. Shall I negotiate on this basis? If you cable Proposed article OK, I shall go ahead. If No hurry for article I shall let the matter drop. Tell my mother I am safe and shall soon be writing.”
“There,” he said as he handed the envelope, sealed and addressed, to Ranga. “May I ask you to buy me a stamp and get this off in time to catch tomorrow’s plane?”
“Without fail,” the boy promised.
Watching them go, Will felt a twinge of conscience. What charming young people! And here he was, plotting with Bahu and the forces of history to subvert their world. He comforted himself with the thought that, if he didn’t do it, somebody else would. And even if Joe Aldehyde did get his concession, they could still go on making love in the style to which they were accustomed. Or couldn’t they?
From the door the little nurse turned back for a final word. “No reading now,” she wagged her finger at him. “Go to sleep.”
“I never sleep during the day,” Will assured her, with a certain perverse satisfaction.
7
HE COULD NEVER GO TO SLEEP DURING THE DAY; BUT WHEN HE looked next at his watch, the time was twenty-five past four, and he was feeling wonderfully refreshed. He picked up Notes on What’s What, and resumed his interrupted reading:
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
This was as far as he had got this morning; and now here was a new section, the fifth:
Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact—sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Will turned the page. A sheet of notepaper fluttered onto the bed. He picked it up and glanced at it. Twenty lines of small clear writing and at the bottom of the page the initials S. M. Not a letter evidently; a poem and therefore public property. He read:
Somewhere between brute silence and last Sunday’s
Thirteen hundred thousand sermons;
Somewhere between
Calvin on Christ (God help us!) and the lizards;
Somewhere between seeing and speaking, somewhere
Between our soiled and greasy currency of words
And the first star, the great moths fluttering
About the ghosts of flowers,
Lies the clear place where I, no longer I,
Nevertheless remember
Love’s nightlong wisdom of the other shore;
And, listening to the wind, remember too
That other night, that first of widowhood,
Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark.
Mine, mine, all mine, mine inescapably!
But I, no longer I,
In this clear place between my thought and silence
See all I had and lost, anguish and joys,
Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass,
Blue, unpossessed and open.
“Like gentians,” Will repeated