Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [116]
‘I want to ask your advice about some gramophone shares I’ve got,’ said Beatrice. ‘They’ve been rising so violently.’
‘Gramophones!’ said Burlap. ‘Ah…’ He advised.
CHAPTER XVII
It had been raining for days. To Spandrell it seemed as though the fungi and the mildew were sprouting even in his soul. He lay in bed, or sat in his dismal room, or leaned against the counter in a public house, feeling the slimy growth within him, watching it with his inward eyes.
‘But if only you’d do something,’ his mother had so often implored. ‘Anything.’
And all his friends had said the same thing, had gone on saying it for years.
But he was damned if he’d do anything. Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare—all that tripe and nonsense. ‘Work!’ he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, ‘work’s no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. Work’s simply a drug, that’s all. It’s humiliating that men shouldn’t be able to live without drugs, soberly; it’s humiliating that they shouldn’t have the courage to see the world and themselves as they really are. They must intoxicate themselves with work. It’s stupid. The gospel of work’s just a gospel of stupidity and funk. Work may be prayer; but it’s also hiding one’s head in the sand, it’s also making such a din and a dust that a man can’t hear himself speak or see his own hand before his face. It’s hiding yourself from yourself. No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big business men are such enthusiasts for work. Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important. If they stopped working, they’d realize that they simply weren’t there at all, most of them. Just holes in the air, that’s all. Holes with perhaps a rather nasty smell in them. Most Smilesian souls must smell rather nasty, I should think. No wonder they daren’t stop working. They might find out what they really are, or rather aren’t. It’s a risk they haven’t the courage to take.’
‘And what has your courage permitted you to find out about yourself? ‘ asked Philip Quarles.
Spandrell grinned rather melodramatically. ‘It needed some courage,’ he said, ‘to go on looking at what I discovered. If I hadn’t been such a brave man, I’d have taken to work or morphia long ago.’
Spandrell dramatized himself a little, made his conduct appear rather more rational and romantic than it really was. If he did nothing, it was out of habitual laziness as well as on perverse and topsy-turvy moral principle. The sloth, indeed, had preceded the principle and was its root. Spandrell would never have discovered that work was a pernicious opiate, if he had not had an invincible sloth to find a reason and a justification for. But that it did require some courage on his part to do nothing was true; for he was idle in spite of the ravages of a chronic boredom that could become, at moments like the present, almost unbearably acute. But the habit of idleness was so deeply ingrained that to break it would have demanded more courage than to bear the agonies of boredom to which it gave rise. Pride had reinforced his native laziness—the pride of an able man who is not quite able enough, of an admirer of great achievements who realizes that he lacks the talent to do original work and who will not humiliate himself by what he knows will be an unsuccessful attempt to create, or by stooping, however successfully, to some easier task.
‘It’s all very well you talking about work,’ he had said to Philip. ‘But you can do something, I can’t. What do you want me to do? Bank clerking? Commercial travelling?’
‘There are other professions,’ said Philip. ‘And since you’ve got some money, there’s all scholarship, all natural history…
‘Oh, you want me to be an ant collector, do you? Or a writer of theses on the use of soap among the Angevins. A dear old Uncle Toby with a hobby to ride. But I tell you, I don’t want to be an Uncle Toby. If I’m no real good, I prefer to be just frankly no good. I don