Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [113]
‘The lizards died of having too much body and too little head,’ said Rampion in explanation.’so at least the scientists are never tired of telling us. Physical size is a handicap after a certain point. But what about mental size? These fools seem to forget that they’re just as top-heavy and clumsy and disproportioned as any diplodocus. Sacrificing physical life and affective life to mental life. What do they imagine’s going to happen?’
Burlap nodded his agreement. ‘That’s what I’ve always asked. Man can’t live without a heart.’
‘Not to mention bowels and skin and bones and flesh,’ said Rampion. ‘They’re just marching towards extinction. And a damned good thing too. Only the trouble is that they’re marching the rest of the world along with them. Blast their eyes! I must say, I resent being condemned to extinction because these imbeciles of scientists and moralists and spiritualists and technicians and literary and political uplifters and all the rest of them haven’t the sense to see that man must live as a man, not as a monster of conscious braininess and soulfulness. Grr! I’d like to kill the lot of them.’ He put the drawing back into the portfolio and extracted another. ‘Here are two Outlines of History, the one on the left according to H. G. Wells, the one on the right according to me….’
Burlap looked, smiled, laughed outright. ‘Excellent!’ he said. The drawing on the left was composed on the lines of a simple crescendo. A very small monkey was succeeded by a very slightly larger pithecanthropus, which was succeeded in its turn by a slightly larger Neanderthal man. Paleolithic man, neolithic man, bronze-age Egyptian and Babylonian man, iron-age Greek and Roman man—the figures slowly increased in size. By the time Galileo and Newton had appeared on the scene, humanity had grown to quite respectable dimensions. The crescendo continued’ uninterrupted through Watt and Stephenson, Faraday and Darwin, Bessemer and Edison, Rockefeller and Wanamaker, to come to a contemporary consummation in the figures of Mr. H. G. Wells himself and Sir Alfred Mond. Nor was the future neglected. Through the radiant mist of prophecy the forms of Wells and Mond, growing larger and larger at every repetition, wound away in a triumphant spiral clean off the paper, towards Utopian infinity The drawing on the right had a less optimistic composition of peaks and declines. The small monkey very soon blossomed into a good-sized bronze-age man, who gave place to a very large Greek and a scarcely smaller Etruscan. The Romans grew smaller again. The monks of the Thebaid were hardly distinguishable from the primeval little monkeys. There followed a number of good-sized Florentines, English, French. They were succeeded by revolting monsters labelled Calvin and Knox, Baxter and Wesley. The stature of the representative men declined. The Victorians had begun to be dwarfish and misshapen. Their twentieth-century successors were abortions. Through the mists of the future one could see a diminishing company of little gargoyles and foetuses with heads too large for their squelchy bodies, the tails of apes and the faces of our most eminent contemporaries, all biting and scratching and disembowelling one another with that methodical and systematic energy which belongs only to the very highly civilized.
‘I’d like to have one or two of these for the World,’ said Burlap, when they had looked through the contents of the portfolio. ‘We don’t generally reproduce drawings. We’re frankly missionaries, not an art for art concern. But these things of yours are parables as well as pictures. I must say,’ he added, ‘I envy you your power of saying things so immediately and economically. It would take me hundreds and thousands of words to say the same things less vividly in an essay.’
Rampion nodded. ‘That’s why I’ve almost given up writing for the moment. Writing’s not much good for saying what I find I want to say now. And what a comfort to escape from words! Words, words, words, they shut one off from the universe. Three-quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them. And often not even with those