Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [226]
Philip leaned back in his chair and laughed. But Rampion turned on him in a fury.
‘You may laugh,’ he said.
‘But don’t imagine you’re any better, really. You and your intellectual, scientific friends. You’ve killed just as much of yourselves as the Christian maniacs. Shall I read you your programme?’ He picked up the book that was lying beside him on the table and began to turn the pages. ‘I came upon it just now, as I was coming here in the ‘bus. Here we are.’ He began to read, pronouncing the French words carefully and clearly. ‘_Plus un obstacle materiel toutes les rapidites gagnees par la science et la richesse. Pas une tare a l’independance. Voir un crime de lese-moi dans toute frequentation, homme ou pays, qui ne serait pas expressement voulu. L’energie, le recueillement, la tension de la solitude, les transporter dans ses rapports avec de vrais semblables. Pas d’amour peut-etre, mais des amities rares, difficiles, exaltees, nerveuses; vivre comme on revivrait en esprit de detachement, d’inquietude et de revanche_.’ Rampion closed the book and looked up. ‘That’s your programme,’ he said to Philip. ‘Formulated by Marie Leneru in 1901. Very brief and neat and complete. And, my God, what a horror! No body, no contact with the material world, no contact with human beings except through the intellect, no love…’
‘We’ve changed that a little since 1901,’ said Philip, smiling.
‘Not really. You’ve admitted promiscuous fornication, that’s all. But not love, not the natural contact and flow, not* the renunciation of mental selfconsciousness, not the abandonment to instinct. No, no. You stick to your conscious will. Everything must be expressement voulu, all the time. And the connections must be purely mental. And life must be lived, not as though it were life in a world of living people, but as though it were solitary recollection and fancy and meditation. An endless masturbation, like Proust’s horrible great book. That’s the higher life. Which is the euphemistic name of incipient death. It’s significant, it’s symbolic that that Leneru woman was deaf and purblind. The outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual truth. Poor creature! She had some excuse for spirituality. But the other HigherLifers, the ones who haven’t any physical defect—they’re not so forgivable. They’ve maimed themselves deliberately, for fun. It’s a pity they don’t develop visible hunch-backs or wall-eyes. One would know better who one was dealing with.’
‘Quite,’ said Philip, nodding, and laughed with an affectation of amusement that was meant to cover the embarrassment he felt at Rampion’s references to physical disability. ‘Quite.’ Nobody should think that, because he had a game leg, he didn’t entirely appreciate the justice of Rampion’s remarks about deformity.
The irrelevant loudness of his laugh made Rampion glance questioningly at him. What was up? He couldn’t be bothered to discover.
‘It’s all a damned lie,’ he went on, ‘and an idiotic lie at that—all this pretending to be more than human. Idiotic because it never comes off. You try to be more than human, but you only succeed in making yourself less than human. Always…’
‘Hear, hear!’ said Philip. ‘“We walk on earth and have no need of wings.”’ And suddenly he heard his father’s loud voice saying, ‘I had wings. I had wings’; he saw his flushed face and feverishly pink pyjamas. Ludicrous and deplorable. ‘Do you know who that’s by?’ he went on. ‘That’s the last line of the poem I wrote for the Newdigate prize at Oxford, when I was twenty-one.