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

“Look,” cried Miss Elver, pointing down, “look. All the cats!”

And there they were. On the sun-warmed marble of a fallen column basked a large tabby. A family of ginger kittens were playing on the ground below. Small tigers stalked between the blocks of masonry. A miniature black panther was standing up on its hind legs to sharpen its claws on the bark of a little tree. At the foot of the column lay an emaciated corpse.

“Puss, puss,” Miss Elver shrilly yelled.

“No good,” said Mr. Cardan. “They only understand Italian.”

Miss Elver looked at him. “Perhaps I’d better learn a little, then,” she said. “Cat’s Italian.”

Mrs. Chelifer meanwhile was looking down very earnestly into the forum. “Why, there are at least twenty,” she said. “How do they get there?”

“People who want to get rid of their cats just come and drop them over the railing into the forum,” Mr. Cardan explained.

“And they can’t get out?”

“So it seems.”

An expression of distress appeared on Mrs. Chelifer’s gentle face. She made a little clicking with her tongue against her teeth and sadly shook her head. “Dear, dear,” she said, “dear, dear. And how do they get fed?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Mr. Cardan. “Perhaps they feed on one another. People throw things down from time to time, no doubt.”

“There’s a dead one there, in the middle,” said Mrs. Chelifer; and a note of something like reproach came into her voice, as though she found that Mr. Cardan was to blame for the deadness of the little corpse at the foot of the triumphal column.

“Very dead,” said Mr. Cardan.

They walked on. Mrs. Chelifer did not speak; she seemed preoccupied.

“An pris caruns flucuthukh”; Mr. Cardan beckoned to the guide. “Bring the lamp a little nearer,” he said in Italian, and when the light had been approached, he went on slowly spelling out the primitive Greek writing on the wall of the tomb: “flucuthukh nun tithuial khues khathc anulis mulu vizile ziz riin puiian acasri flucuper pris an ti ar vus ta aius muntheri flucuthukh.” He straightened himself up. “Charming language,” he said, “charming! Ever since I learned that the Etruscans used to call the god of wine Fufluns, I’ve taken the keenest interest in their language. Fufluns⁠—how incomparably more appropriate that is than Bacchus, or Liber, or Dionysos! Fufluns, Fufluns,” he repeated with delighted emphasis. “It couldn’t be better. They had a real linguistic genius, those creatures. What poets they must have produced! ‘When Fufluns flucuthukhs the ziz’⁠—one can imagine the odes in praise of wine which began like that. You couldn’t bring together eight such juicy, boozy syllables as that in English, could you?”

“What about ‘Ale in a Saxon rumkin’ then?” suggested Chelifer.

Mr. Cardan shook his head. “It doesn’t compare with the Etruscan,” he said. “There aren’t enough consonants. It’s too light, too fizzy and trivial. Why, you might be talking about soda water.”

“But for all you know,” said Chelifer, “flucuthukh in Etruscan may mean soda water. Fufluns, I grant you, is apposite. But perhaps it was just a fluke. You have no evidence to show that they fitted sound to sense so aptly in other words. ‘When Fufluns flucuthukhs the ziz’ may be the translation of ‘When Bacchus drowns the hock with soda.’ You don’t know.”

“You’re quite right,” Mr. Cardan agreed. “I don’t. Nor does anyone else. My enthusiasm for Fufluns carried me away. Flucuthukh may not have the fruity connotation that a word with a sound like that ought to have; it may even, as you say, mean soda water. Still, I continue to hope for the best; I believe in my Etruscans. One day, when they find the key to this fossilized language, I believe I shall be justified; flucuthukh will turn out to be just as appropriate as Fufluns⁠—you mark my words! It’s a great language, I insist; a great language. Who knows? A couple of generations hence some new Busby or Keat may be drumming Etruscan syntax and Etruscan prosody into the backsides of British boyhood. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction. Latin and Greek have a certain infinitesimal practical value. But Etruscan is totally and absolutely useless. What better basis for a gentleman’s education could possibly be discovered? It’s the great dead language of the future. If Etruscan didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it.”

“Which is precisely what the pedagogues will have to do,” said Chelifer, “there being no Etruscan literature beyond the inscriptions and the rigmarole on the mummy-wrappings at Agram.”

“So much the better,” replied Mr. Cardan. “If we wrote it ourselves, we might find Etruscan literature interesting. Etruscan literature composed by Etruscans would be as boring as any other ancient literature. But if the epics were written by you, the Socratic dialogues by me, the history by some master of fiction like Miss Thriplow⁠—then we’d possess a corpus in which the rare schoolboys who can derive some profit from their education could take a real interest. And when, a generation hence, we have become as much out of date in our ideas as Tully or Horace, the literature of Etruria will be rewritten by our descendants. Each generation will use the dead language to express its own ideas. And expressed in so rich an idiom as I take Etruscan to be, the ideas will seem the more significant and memorable. For I have often noticed that an idea which, expressed in one’s native language, would seem dull, commonplace and opaque, becomes transparent to the mind’s eye, takes on a new significance when given a foreign and unfamiliar embodiment. A cracker-motto in Latin sounds much weightier and truer than the same motto in English. Indeed, if the study of dead languages has any use at all, which I should be sorry to admit, it consists in teaching us the importance of the verbal medium in which thoughts are expressed. To know the same thing in several languages is to know it (if you have any