Island - Aldous Huxley [81]
A moment later they had left the glare of the open hillside and had plunged into a narrow tunnel of green twilight that zigzagged up between walls of tropical foliage. Creepers dangled from the overarching branches and between the trunks of huge trees grew ferns and dark-leaved rhododendrons with a dense profusion of shrubs and bushes that for Will, as he looked about him, were namelessly unfamiliar. The air was stiflingly damp and there was a hot, acrid smell of luxuriant green growth and of that other kind of life which is decay. Muffled by the thick foliage, Will heard the ringing of distant axes, the rhythmic screech of a saw. The road turned yet once more and suddenly the green darkness of the tunnel gave place to sunshine. They had entered a clearing in the forest. Tall and broad-shouldered, half a dozen almost naked woodcutters were engaged in lopping the branches from a newly felled tree. In the sunshine hundreds of blue and amethyst butterflies chased one another, fluttering and soaring in an endless random dance. Over a fire at the further side of the clearing an old man was slowly stirring the contents of an iron caldron. Nearby a small tame deer, fine-limbed and elegantly dappled, was quietly grazing.
“Old friends,” said Vijaya, and shouted something in Palanese. The woodcutters shouted back and waved their hands. Then the road swung sharply to the left and they were climbing again up the green tunnel between the trees.
“Talk of Muscle Men,” said Will as they left the clearing. “Those were really splendid specimens.”
“That kind of physique,” said Vijaya, “is a standing temptation. And yet among all these men—and I’ve worked with scores of them—I’ve never met a single bully, a single potentially dangerous power lover.”
“Which is just another way,” Murugan broke in contemptuously, “of saying that nobody here has any ambition.”
“What’s the explanation?” Will asked.
“Very simple, so far as the Peter Pans are concerned. They’re never given a chance to work up an appetite for power. We cure them of their delinquency before it’s had time to develop. But the Muscle Men are different. They’re just as muscular here, just as tramplingly extraverted, as they are with you. So why don’t they turn into Stalins or Dipas, or at the least into domestic tyrants? First of all, our social arrangements offer them very few opportunities for bullying their families, and our political arrangements make it practically impossible for them to domineer on any larger scale. Second, we train the Muscle Men to be aware and sensitive, we teach them to enjoy the commonplaces of everyday existence. This means that they always have an alternative—innumerable alternatives—to the pleasure of being the boss. And finally we work directly on the love of power and domination that goes with this kind of physique in almost all its variations. We canalize this love of power and we deflect it—turn it away from people and on to things. We give them all kinds of difficult tasks to perform—strenuous and violent tasks that exercise their muscles and satisfy their craving for domination—but satisfy it at nobody’s expense and in ways that are either harmless or positively useful.”
“So these splendid creatures fell trees instead of felling people—is that it?”
“Precisely. And when they’ve had enough of the woods, they can go to sea, or try their hands at mining, or take it easy, relatively speaking, on the rice paddies.”
Will Farnaby suddenly laughed.
“What’s the joke?”
“I was thinking of my father. A little woodchopping might have been the making of him—not to mention the salvation of his wretched family. Unfortunately he was an English gentleman. Woodchopping was out of the question.”
“Didn’t he have any physical outlet for his energies?”
Will shook his head. “Besides being a gentleman,