Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [219]
‘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. The subject was “King Arthur,” if I remember rightly. Needless to say I didn’t get the prize. But it’s a good line.’
‘A pity you didn’t live up to it,’ said Rampion, ‘instead of whoring after abstractions. But of course, there’s nobody like the lover of abstraction for denouncing abstractions. He knows by experience how lifedestroying they are. The ordinary man can afford to take them in his stride. He can afford to have wings too, so long as he also remembers that he’s got feet. It’s when people strain themselves to fly all the time that they go wrong. They’re ambitious of being angels; but all they succeed in being is either cuckoos and geese on the one hand or else disgusting vultures and carrion crows on the other.’
‘But all this,’ said Spandrell, breaking a long silence, ‘is just the gospel of animalism. You’re just advising us to behave like beasts.’
‘I’m advising you to behave like human beings,’ said Rampion. ‘Which is slightly different. And anyhow,’ he added, ‘it’s a damned sight better to behave like a beast—a real genuine undomesticated animal, I mean—than to invent a devil and then behave like one’s invention.’
There was a brief silence.’suppose I were to tell them,’ Spandrell was thinking,’suppose I were to tell them that I’d just jumped out on a man from behind a screen and hit him on the side of the head with an Indian club.’ He took another sip of brandy. ‘No,’ he said aloud, ‘I’m not so sure of what you say. Behaving like an animal is behaving like a creature that’s below good and evil. You must know what good is before you can start behaving like the devil.’ And yet it had all been just stupid and sordid and disgusting. Yes, and profoundly silly, an enormous stupidity. At the core of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he had found, not fire and poison, but only a brown disgusting putrefaction and a few small maggots. ‘Things exist only in terms of their opposites,’ he went on, frowning at his own thoughts. ‘The devil implies God.’
‘No doubt,’ said Rampion impatiently. ‘A devil of absolute evil implies a God of absolute good. Well, what of it? What’s that got to do with you or me?’
‘A good deal, I should have thought.’
‘It’s got about as much to do with us as the fact of this table being made of electrons, or an infinite series of waves undulating in an unknown medium, or a large number of point-events in a four-dimensional continuum, or whatever else Philip’s scientific friends assure us it is made of. As much as that. That is to say, practically nothing. Your absolute God and absolute devil belong to the class of irrelevant nonhuman facts. The only things that concern us are the little relative gods and devils of history and geography, the little relative goods and evils of individual casuistry. Everything else is nonhuman and beside the point; and if you allow yourself to be influenced by nonhuman, absolute considerations, then you inevitably make either a fool of yourself, or a villain, or perhaps both.