Notes from Miscellaneous Readings 1
Notes from Miscellaneous Readings with a Focus on Aldous Huxley
From or Of Aldous Huxley:
***
Murray, Nicholas. Aldous Huxley. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002.
"Within days of arriving at Garsington in August he was telling
Frances Petersen how he had spent most of the night 'talking with
intelligent people' and sleeping out on the roof in the company of 'an
artistic young woman in short hair and purple pyjamas'--this was Dorothy
Carrington--and being woken at dawn by screaming peacocks on the roof.
He had found what he was to go on finding throughout his life--a small but
exquisite circle of intelligent friends who stimulated him and who in turn
were stimulated by him. 'I keep a little cache of friends there,' he told
Julian, 'and, after all, friendship is the one thing that makes life supremely
worth living'" (Murray 75).
Murray, Nicholas. Aldous Huxley. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002.
***
Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf |
Harper & Row, 1974. [Book Club Edition].
"the intellectual aristocracy . . . insisted that honesty and courtesy were
valuable . . . [and that] life devoted to unravelling the mysteries of mind,
matter, and heart was to be desired" (20)
"[Huxley] inspired . . . affection and protective tenderness" (20)
"If there were moments of appalling discouragement and strain, he never
showed it" (36).
"Aldous . . . the least neurotic of men . . . went his way mildly melancholy,
resolutely cheerful, always contained" (52).
"I never feel I am performing a wholly moral action, except when I am
writing" (96).
" . . . all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die" (145).
[the following is in the Bedford biography, but is quoted at length by
Bedford from Huxley's novel Antic Hay (1923)]
1
, Notes from Miscellaneous Readings 2
"There are quiet places also in the mind . . . But we build
bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately--to put a stop to the
quietness . . . All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head --round
and round, continually . . . What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to
the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't
there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of
everything. Lying awake at night--not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for
sleep--the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits . . .
we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an
inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it
grows--a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes
more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying . . . For one's alone in the
crystal, and there's no support from outside, there's nothing external and
important, nothing external and trivial to pull onself up by or stand on. . .
There's nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows
and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of
something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something
inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer,
nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it
were to seize and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual daily part
of you would die . . . one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet,
arduously in some strange, unheard of manner. Nearer, nearer come the
steps; but one can't face the advancing thing. One daren't........"
[and then continues Bedford in her own words after the borrowing from
Antic Hay] "The passage has affinity with the opening lines of Paul Valéry's
poem "Les Pas:"
Tes pas, enfants de mon silence,
Saintement, lentement placés,
Vers le lit de ma vigilance
Procèdent, muets et glacés. (145)
"Simultaneous existence in a dozen parallel worlds--this is what always
exercised Aldous's mind. What most of us most of the time choose to
ignore because it is too complicated, too out of stride with our daily
requirements and habitual sense perceptions, too dizzy-making in fact,
was for Aldous evident philosophical and literary raw material. He would
think, and what had appeared comprehensible on the routine surface
became utterly mysterious. This fascinated him--how he adored the
extraordinary--it gave him a sense of adventure, of getting off the map,
allowing him to believe that anything might be possible. It informed his
writing" (155).
" . . . So there was even then a kind of ambivalence. I think he [D. H.
Lawrence] would even then have come round to what seems to me a
more balanced view--I mean this whole thing is that we have to make the
2
, Notes from Miscellaneous Readings 3
best of both worlds . . .
"The point is that you must have both. The blood and the flesh
are there--and in certain respects they are wiser than the intellect. I
mean if we interfere with the blood and the flesh with our conscious
minds we get psychosomatic trouble. But on the other hand, we have to
do a lot of things with the conscious mind. I mean why can't we do
both--we have to do both. This is the whole art of life: making the best
of all the worlds.
Here again is one of those fatal examples of trying to make everything
conform to the standard of only one world. Seeing that we are
amphibians--it's no good" (213).
[c. November, 1933] "We had tickets to fly back from Madrid to
Marseilles by Air France. When we got out to the aerodrome, the waiting
plane was marked with the swastika. Lufthansa. (The German line
alternated with the French.) Eva Hermann and I refused to travel on a Nazi
plane. Aldous thought it was a pretty futile protest, but gave in to our
emotional indulgence and eventually we were put on a Spanish plane. It
was a small one and I cannot remember other passengers. The air was
calm, the earth below looked tremendous; Aldous got out his notebook. I
imitated him. Then something went very wrong indeed. The plane lurched
side-ways and dropped to about 25 feet. Lop-sided it proceeded to hug
the coast line of the Costa Brava just clearing bathing-huts and cliffs. The
engine noise was shattering. I looked at Maria for some reassurance, but
her face had an inward look and her lips were moving; she was, she said
matter-of-factly afterwards, composing herself for death. I looked at Aldous--
he was being sick into a paper bag. The plane limped on for a full thirty
minutes; it made Barcelona and we landed. Smiling German airmen in
Lufthansa caps met us by the gangway.
"That night, our last night in Spain, we had dinner in the Plaza de
Cataluña. A bomb had just been thrown. A tram lay overturned, people
had been hurt, there was a lot of police. Aldous did not fail to remark on
the waste and folly. 'Everyone knows that home-made bombs have never
been the slightest bit of use.' What was? What was any use? We talked
about the new Spanish Republic. Eva, rather warmly, expressed hopes--
schools, the vote for women . . . Aldous let it pass. We talked of re-
armament, of Germany--What was one to do? At what cost? At whose
cost? It came back, our talk, as it still does, to the dilemma of the liberal.
What Aldous said was abstract, far-seeing, aloof. In a way it was
maddening. At last one of us said, 'Well, if that's no good either, what
would you do? and Maria came in, 'Yes, darling, do tell us.'
"Aldous's answer, his mood, his exploratory talk, I can no longer
pin down. At the time it was startling. Up to a minute ago he appeared to
be the man who said, 'I have never more passionately felt the need for
using reason jusqu' au bout.' Now it was as if his points of reference had
vanished. I wrote about that evening once before, in a travel book, twenty
years ago (and twenty years nearer the event). I would be tempted to put
it differently today, but find that first account, midway between the past
3
Notes from Miscellaneous Readings with a Focus on Aldous Huxley
From or Of Aldous Huxley:
***
Murray, Nicholas. Aldous Huxley. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002.
"Within days of arriving at Garsington in August he was telling
Frances Petersen how he had spent most of the night 'talking with
intelligent people' and sleeping out on the roof in the company of 'an
artistic young woman in short hair and purple pyjamas'--this was Dorothy
Carrington--and being woken at dawn by screaming peacocks on the roof.
He had found what he was to go on finding throughout his life--a small but
exquisite circle of intelligent friends who stimulated him and who in turn
were stimulated by him. 'I keep a little cache of friends there,' he told
Julian, 'and, after all, friendship is the one thing that makes life supremely
worth living'" (Murray 75).
Murray, Nicholas. Aldous Huxley. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002.
***
Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf |
Harper & Row, 1974. [Book Club Edition].
"the intellectual aristocracy . . . insisted that honesty and courtesy were
valuable . . . [and that] life devoted to unravelling the mysteries of mind,
matter, and heart was to be desired" (20)
"[Huxley] inspired . . . affection and protective tenderness" (20)
"If there were moments of appalling discouragement and strain, he never
showed it" (36).
"Aldous . . . the least neurotic of men . . . went his way mildly melancholy,
resolutely cheerful, always contained" (52).
"I never feel I am performing a wholly moral action, except when I am
writing" (96).
" . . . all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die" (145).
[the following is in the Bedford biography, but is quoted at length by
Bedford from Huxley's novel Antic Hay (1923)]
1
, Notes from Miscellaneous Readings 2
"There are quiet places also in the mind . . . But we build
bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately--to put a stop to the
quietness . . . All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head --round
and round, continually . . . What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to
the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't
there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of
everything. Lying awake at night--not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for
sleep--the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits . . .
we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an
inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it
grows--a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes
more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying . . . For one's alone in the
crystal, and there's no support from outside, there's nothing external and
important, nothing external and trivial to pull onself up by or stand on. . .
There's nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows
and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of
something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something
inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer,
nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it
were to seize and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual daily part
of you would die . . . one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet,
arduously in some strange, unheard of manner. Nearer, nearer come the
steps; but one can't face the advancing thing. One daren't........"
[and then continues Bedford in her own words after the borrowing from
Antic Hay] "The passage has affinity with the opening lines of Paul Valéry's
poem "Les Pas:"
Tes pas, enfants de mon silence,
Saintement, lentement placés,
Vers le lit de ma vigilance
Procèdent, muets et glacés. (145)
"Simultaneous existence in a dozen parallel worlds--this is what always
exercised Aldous's mind. What most of us most of the time choose to
ignore because it is too complicated, too out of stride with our daily
requirements and habitual sense perceptions, too dizzy-making in fact,
was for Aldous evident philosophical and literary raw material. He would
think, and what had appeared comprehensible on the routine surface
became utterly mysterious. This fascinated him--how he adored the
extraordinary--it gave him a sense of adventure, of getting off the map,
allowing him to believe that anything might be possible. It informed his
writing" (155).
" . . . So there was even then a kind of ambivalence. I think he [D. H.
Lawrence] would even then have come round to what seems to me a
more balanced view--I mean this whole thing is that we have to make the
2
, Notes from Miscellaneous Readings 3
best of both worlds . . .
"The point is that you must have both. The blood and the flesh
are there--and in certain respects they are wiser than the intellect. I
mean if we interfere with the blood and the flesh with our conscious
minds we get psychosomatic trouble. But on the other hand, we have to
do a lot of things with the conscious mind. I mean why can't we do
both--we have to do both. This is the whole art of life: making the best
of all the worlds.
Here again is one of those fatal examples of trying to make everything
conform to the standard of only one world. Seeing that we are
amphibians--it's no good" (213).
[c. November, 1933] "We had tickets to fly back from Madrid to
Marseilles by Air France. When we got out to the aerodrome, the waiting
plane was marked with the swastika. Lufthansa. (The German line
alternated with the French.) Eva Hermann and I refused to travel on a Nazi
plane. Aldous thought it was a pretty futile protest, but gave in to our
emotional indulgence and eventually we were put on a Spanish plane. It
was a small one and I cannot remember other passengers. The air was
calm, the earth below looked tremendous; Aldous got out his notebook. I
imitated him. Then something went very wrong indeed. The plane lurched
side-ways and dropped to about 25 feet. Lop-sided it proceeded to hug
the coast line of the Costa Brava just clearing bathing-huts and cliffs. The
engine noise was shattering. I looked at Maria for some reassurance, but
her face had an inward look and her lips were moving; she was, she said
matter-of-factly afterwards, composing herself for death. I looked at Aldous--
he was being sick into a paper bag. The plane limped on for a full thirty
minutes; it made Barcelona and we landed. Smiling German airmen in
Lufthansa caps met us by the gangway.
"That night, our last night in Spain, we had dinner in the Plaza de
Cataluña. A bomb had just been thrown. A tram lay overturned, people
had been hurt, there was a lot of police. Aldous did not fail to remark on
the waste and folly. 'Everyone knows that home-made bombs have never
been the slightest bit of use.' What was? What was any use? We talked
about the new Spanish Republic. Eva, rather warmly, expressed hopes--
schools, the vote for women . . . Aldous let it pass. We talked of re-
armament, of Germany--What was one to do? At what cost? At whose
cost? It came back, our talk, as it still does, to the dilemma of the liberal.
What Aldous said was abstract, far-seeing, aloof. In a way it was
maddening. At last one of us said, 'Well, if that's no good either, what
would you do? and Maria came in, 'Yes, darling, do tell us.'
"Aldous's answer, his mood, his exploratory talk, I can no longer
pin down. At the time it was startling. Up to a minute ago he appeared to
be the man who said, 'I have never more passionately felt the need for
using reason jusqu' au bout.' Now it was as if his points of reference had
vanished. I wrote about that evening once before, in a travel book, twenty
years ago (and twenty years nearer the event). I would be tempted to put
it differently today, but find that first account, midway between the past
3
