Island - Aldous Huxley [93]
“Well, I must call Bahu,” said the Rani. “A bientôt, my dear Farnaby.” And she rang off.
Shrugging his shoulders, Will turned back to the Notes on What’s What. What else was there to do?
Dualism…Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.
“I” affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; “am” denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. “I am.” Two tiny words, but what an enormity of untruth! The religiously-minded dualist calls homemade spirits from the vasty deep; the nondualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.
There was the noise of an approaching car, then silence as the motor was turned off, then the slamming of a door and the sound of footsteps on gravel, on the steps of the veranda.
“Are you ready?” called Vijaya’s deep voice.
Will put down the Notes on What’s What, picked up his bamboo staff, and hoisting himself to his feet, walked to the front door.
“Ready and champing at the bit,” he said as he stepped out onto the veranda.
“Then let’s go.” Vijaya took his arm. “Careful of these steps,” he recommended.
Dressed all in pink and with corals round her neck and in her ears, a plump, round-faced woman in her middle forties was standing beside the jeep.
“This is Leela Rao,” said Vijaya. “Our librarian, secretary, treasurer, and general keeper-in-order. Without her we’d be lost.”
She looked, Will thought as he shook hands with her, like a browner version of one of those gentle but inexhaustibly energetic English ladies who, when their children are grown, go in for good works or organized culture. Not too intelligent, poor dears; but how selfless, how devoted, how genuinely good—and, alas, how boring!
“I was hearing of you,” Mrs. Rao volunteered as they rattled along past the lotus pond and out onto the highway, “from my young friends, Radha and Ranga.”
“I hope,” said Will, “that they approved of me as heartily as I approved of them.”
Mrs. Rao’s face brightened with pleasure. “I’m so glad you like them!”
“Ranga’s exceptionally bright,” Vijaya put in.
And so delicately balanced, Mrs. Rao elaborated, between introversion and the outside world. Always tempted—and how strongly!—to escape into the Arhat’s Nirvana or the scientists’ beautifully tidy little paradise of pure abstraction. Always tempted, but often resisting temptation; for Ranga, the Arhat-scientist, was also another kind of Ranga, a Ranga capable of compassion, ready, if one knew how to make the right kind of appeal, to lay himself open to the concrete realities of life, to be aware, concerned and actively helpful. How fortunate for him and for everyone else that he had found a girl like little Radha, a girl so intelligently simple, so humorous and tender, so richly endowed for love and happiness! Radha and Ranga, Mrs. Rao confided, had been among her favorite pupils.
Pupils, Will patronizingly assumed, in some kind of Buddhist Sunday school. But in fact, as he was now flabbergasted to learn, it was in the yoga of love that this devoted settlement worker had been, for the past six years and in the intervals of librarianship, instructing the young. By the kinds of methods, Will supposed, that Murugan had shrunk from and the Rani, in her all but incestuous possessiveness, had found so outrageous. He opened his mouth to question her. But his reflexes had been conditioned in higher latitude and by settlement workers of another species. The questions simply refused to pass his lips. And now it was too late to ask them. Mrs. Rao had begun to talk about her other avocation.
“If you knew,” she was saying, “what trouble we have with books in this climate! The paper rots, the glue liquefies, the bindings disintegrate, the insects devour. Literature and the tropics are really incompatible.”
“And if one’s to believe your Old Raja,” said Will, “literature is incompatible with a lot of other local features besides your climate—incompatible with human integrity, incompatible with philosophical truth,