Island - Aldous Huxley [74]
“‘Nothing short of everything will really do,’” Will quoted. “I see now what the Old Raja was talking about. You can’t be a good economist unless you’re also a good psychologist. Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician.”
“And don’t forget all the other sciences,” said Dr. Robert. “Pharmacology, sociology, physiology, not to mention pure and applied autology, neurotheology, metachemistry, mycomysticism, and the ultimate science,” he added, looking away so as to be more alone with his thoughts of Lakshmi in the hospital, “the science that sooner or later we shall all have to be examined in—thanatology.” He was silent for a moment; then, in another tone, “Well, let’s go and get washed up,” he said and, opening the blue door, led the way into a long changing room with a row of showers and wash basins at one end and on the opposite wall, tiers of lockers and a large hanging cupboard.
Will took a seat and while his companions lathered themselves at the basins, went on with their conversations.
“Would it be permissible,” he asked, “for a miseducated alien to try a truth-and-beauty pill?”
The answer was another question. “Is your liver in good order?” Dr. Robert enquired.
“Excellent.”
“And you don’t seem to be more than mildly schizophrenic. So I can’t see any counterindication.”
“Then I can make the experiment?”
“Whenever you like.”
He stepped into the nearest shower stall and turned on the water. Vijaya followed suit.
“Aren’t you supposed to be intellectuals?” Will asked when the two men had emerged again and were drying themselves.
“We do intellectual work,” Vijaya answered.
“Then why all this horrible honest toil?”
“For a very simple reason: this morning I had some spare time.”
“So did I,” said Dr. Robert.
“So you went out into the fields and did a Tolstoy act.”
Vijaya laughed. “You seem to imagine we do it for ethical reasons.”
“Don’t you?”
“Certainly not. I do muscular work, because I have muscles; and if I don’t use my muscles I shall become a bad-tempered sitting-addict.”
“With nothing between the cortex and the buttocks,” said Dr. Robert. “Or rather with everything—but in a condition of complete unconsciousness and toxic stagnation. Western intellectuals are all sitting-addicts. That’s why most of you are so repulsively unwholesome. In the past even a duke had to do a lot of walking, even a moneylender, even a metaphysician. And when they weren’t using their legs, they were jogging about on horses. Whereas now, from the tycoon to his typist, from the logical positivist to the positive thinker, you spend nine tenths of your time on foam rubber. Spongy seats for spongy bottoms—at home, in the office, in cars and bars, in planes and trains and buses. No moving of legs, no struggles with distance and gravity—just lifts and planes and cars, just foam rubber and an eternity of sitting. The life force that used to find an outlet through striped muscle gets turned back on the viscera and the nervous system, and slowly destroys them.”
“So you take to digging and delving as a form of therapy?”
“As prevention—to make therapy unnecessary. In Pala even a professor, even a government official, generally puts in two hours of digging and delving each day.”
“As part of his duties?”
“And as part of his pleasure.”
Will made a grimace. “It wouldn’t be part of my pleasure.”
“That’s because you weren’t taught to use your mind-body in the right way,” Vijaya explained. “If you’d been shown how to do things with the minimum of strain and the maximum