Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley (100 books to read txt) 📕

yellings and brandished sticks. Would he be living quietly and cheerfully the life of a young patriarch, happy in his children, his wife, his flocks and herds? Would he be happy to live thus, close to the earth, earthily, an ancient, instinctive, animally sagacious life? It seemed hardly imaginable. And yet, after all, it was likely enough. It needs a very strong, a passionately ardent spirit to disengage itself from childish tradition, from the life which circumstances impose upon it. Was his such a spirit?

He was startled out of his speculations by the sound of his own name, loudly called from a little distance. He turned round and saw Mr. Cardan and Chelifer striding up the road towards him. Calamy waved his hand and went to meet them. Was he pleased to see them or not? He hardly knew.

“Well,” said Mr. Cardan, twinkling jovially, as he approached, “how goes life in the Thebaïd? Do you object to receiving a couple of impious visitors from Alexandria?”

Calamy laughed and shook their hands without answering.

“Did you get wet?” he asked, to change the conversation.

“We hid in a cave,” said Mr. Cardan. He looked round at the view. “Pretty good,” he said encouragingly, as though it were Calamy who had made the landscape, “pretty good, I must say.”

“Agreeably Wordsworthian,” said Chelifer in his precise voice.

“And where do you live?” asked Mr. Cardan.

Calamy pointed to the cottage. Mr. Cardan nodded comprehendingly.

“Hearts of gold, but a little niffy, eh?” he asked, lifting his raised white eyebrow still higher.

“Not to speak of,” said Calamy.

“Charming girls?” Mr. Cardan went on. “Or goitres?”

“Neither,” said Calamy.

“And how long do you propose to stay?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Till you’ve got to the bottom of the cosmos, eh?”

Calamy smiled. “That’s about it.”

“Splendid,” said Mr. Cardan, patting him on the arm, “splendid. I envy you. God, what wouldn’t I give to be your age? What wouldn’t I give?” He shook his head sadly. “And, alas,” he added, “what could I give, in point of actual fact? I put it at about twelve hundred quid at the present time. My total fortune. Shouldn’t we sit down?” he added on another note.

Calamy led the way down the little path. Along the front of the cottage, under the windows, ran a long bench. The three men sat down. The sun shone full upon them; it was pleasantly warm. Beneath them was the narrow valley with its smoky shadows; opposite, the black hills, cloud-capped and silhouetted against the brightness of the sky about the sun.

“And the trip to Rome,” Calamy inquired, “was that agreeable?”

“Tolerably,” said Chelifer, with precision.

“And Miss Elver?” he addressed himself politely to Mr. Cardan.

Mr. Cardan looked up at him. “Hadn’t you heard?” he asked.

“Heard what?”

“She’s dead.” Mr. Cardan’s face became all at once very hard and still.

“I’m sorry,” said Calamy. “I didn’t know.” He thought it more tactful to proffer no further condolences. There was a silence.

“That’s something,” said Mr. Cardan at last, “that you’ll find it rather difficult to contemplate away, however long and mystically you stare at your navel.”

“What?” asked Calamy.

“Death,” Mr. Cardan answered. “You can’t get over the fact that, at the end of everything, the flesh gets hold of the spirit, and squeezes the life out of it, so that a man turns into something that’s no better than a whining sick animal. And as the flesh sickens the spirit sickens, manifestly. Finally the flesh dies and putrefies; and the spirit presumably putrefies too. And there’s an end of your omphaloskepsis, with all its byproducts, God and justice and salvation and all the rest of them.”

“Perhaps it is,” said Calamy. “Let’s admit it as certain, even. I don’t see that it makes the slightest difference.⁠ ⁠…”

“No difference?”

Calamy shook his head. “Salvation’s not in the next world; it’s in this. One doesn’t behave well here for the sake of a harp and wings after one is dead⁠—or even for the sake of contemplating throughout eternity the good, the true and the beautiful. If one desires salvation, it’s salvation here and now. The kingdom of God is within you⁠—if you’ll excuse the quotation,” he added, turning with a smile to Mr. Cardan. “The conquest of that kingdom, now, in this life⁠—that’s your salvationist’s ambition. There may be a life to come, or there may not; it’s really quite irrelevant to the main issue. To be upset because the soul may decay with the body is really medieval. Your medieval theologian made up for his really frightful cynicism about this world by a childish optimism about the next. Future justice was to compensate for the disgusting horrors of the present. Take away the life to come and the horrors remain, untempered and unpalliated.”

“Quite so,” said Chelifer.

“Seen from the medieval point of view,” Calamy went on, “the prospect is most disquieting. The Indians⁠—and for that matter the founder of Christianity⁠—supply the corrective with the doctrine of salvation in this life, irrespective of the life to come. Each man can achieve salvation in his own way.”

“I’m glad you admit that,” said Mr. Cardan. “I was afraid you’d begin telling us that we all had to live on lettuces and look at our navels.”

“I have it from no less an authority than yourself,” Calamy answered, laughing, “that there are⁠—how many?⁠—eighty-four thousand⁠—isn’t it?⁠—different ways of achieving salvation.”

“Fully,” said Mr. Cardan, “and a great many more for going to the devil. But all this, my young friend,” he pursued, shaking his head, “doesn’t in any way mitigate the disagreeableness of slowly becoming gaga, dying and being eaten by worms. One may have achieved salvation in this life, certainly; but that makes it none the less insufferable that, at the end of the account, one’s soul should inevitably succumb to one’s body. I, for example, am saved⁠—I put the case quite hypothetically, mind you⁠—I have been living in a state of moral integrity and this-worldly salvation for the last half-century, ever since I reached the age of puberty. Let this be granted. Have I, for this reason, any the less cause to be distressed by the prospect, in a few years’ time, of becoming a