Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [166]
The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours. Such amazing meannesses as one’s always coming across, particularly among the rich! Such fantastic extravagances too. Both qualities, often, in the same person. And then the hoarders, the grubbers, the people who are entirely and almost unceasingly preoccupied with money. Nobody’s unceasingly preoccupied with sex in the same way—I suppose because there’s a physiological satisfaction possible in sexual matters, while there’s none where money’s concerned. When the body’s satiated, the mind stops thinking about food or women. But the hunger for money and possessions is an almost purely mental thing. There’s no physical satisfaction possible. That would account for the excesses and perversities of acquisitiveness. Our bodies almost compel the sexual instinct to behave in a normal fashion. Perversions must be violent before they overrule the normal physiological tendencies. But where acquisitiveness is concerned, there’s no regulating body, no lump of too too solid flesh to be pushed out of the grooves of physiological habit. The slightest tendency to perversion is at once made manifest. But perhaps the word ‘perversion’ is meaningless in this context. For perversion implies the existence of a norm from which it departs. What is the norm of acquisitiveness? One guesses vaguely at some golden mean; but is it in fact the true statistical norm? I should imagine myself rather ‘under-acquisitivized’; less interested in money and possessions in general than the average. Illidge would say it’s entirely due to having been brought up in an atmosphere of easy money. It may be partly true. But not entirely, I think. Consider the many people born rich who are preoccupied with nothing but money making. No, my under-acquisitiveness is hereditary as well as acquired. In any case I find myself uninterested in possessions and rather unsympathetic with, and without understanding of, those who are. No predominantly acquisitive character has appeared in any of my stories. It is a defect; for acquisitives are obviously very common in real life. But I doubt if I could make such a character interesting—not being interested myself in the acquisitive passion. Balzac could; circumstances and heredity had made him passionately interested in money. But when one finds a thing boring, one’s apt to be boring about it.
CHAPTER XXIII
The writing table was under the window. Dimmed by the smoky air of Sheffield, a shaft of yellow, viscous-looking sunlight lit up a corner of the table and a patch of red and flowered carpet. Everard Webley was writing a letter. His pen rushed over the paper. Whatever he did was done with rapidity and decision.
‘Dearest Elinor,’ he wrote. ‘_De profundis clamavi_, from the depths of this repulsive hotel bedroom and the even lower depths of this political tour of the North, I call to you.’ (He wrote his I’s as though they were pillars—a strong straight shaft and two little transverse strokes at top and bottom for capital and base. The crosses on his t’s were firm and uncompromising.) ‘But I don’t suppose you listen. I’ve always felt such sympathy for the savages who give their gods a good beating when they don’t answer prayers or respond to sacrifices. England expects that every god this day will do his duty. And if he doesn’t—well, so much the worse for him; he’ll get a taste of the cat-o’-nine-tails. The modern worship of a remote Ineffable, whose acts one doesn’t criticize, seems to me very unsatisfactory. What’s the good of making a contract with somebody who can break it at will and against whom one has no redress? Women have gone the same way as the gods. They mayn’t be questioned. You’re not allowed to compel them to do their duty by their worshippers or fulfil their part in the natural contract between the sexes. I write, I implore. But, like the newfangled god of