After the Fireworks by Aldous Huxley

from the big towns. (Country people are different; they still have the remains of the old substitutes for culture—religion, folk-lore, tradition. The town fellows have lost the substitutes without acquiring the genuine article.) Get to know those people; they’ll make you see the point of culture. Just as the Sahara’ll make you see the point of water. And for the same reason: they’re arid.”
    â€œThat’s all very well; but what about people like Professor Cobley?”
    â€œWhom I’ve happily never met,” he said, “but can reconstruct from the expression on your face. Well, all that can be said about those people is: just try to imagine them if they’d never been irrigated. Gobi or Shamo.”
    â€œWell, perhaps.” She was dubious.
    â€œAnd anyhow the biggest testimony to culture isn’t the soulless philistines—it’s the soulful ones. My sweet Pamela,” he implored, laying a hand on her bare brown arm, “for heaven’s sake don’t run the risk of becoming a soulful philistine.”
    â€œBut as I don’t know what that is,” she answered, trying to persuade herself, as she spoke, that the touch of his hand was giving her a tremendous frisson —but it really wasn’t.
    â€œIt’s what the name implies,” he said. “A person without culture who goes in for having a soul. An illiterate idealist. A Higher Thinker with nothing to think about but his—or more often, I’m afraid, her —beastly little personal feelings and sensation. They spend their lives staring at their own navels and in the intervals trying to find other people who’ll take an interest and come and stare too. Oh, figuratively,” he added, noticing the expression of astonishment which had passed across her face. “ En tout bien, tout honneur * . At least, sometimes and to begin with. Though I’ve known cases . . .” But he decided it would be better not to speak about the lady from Rochester, N. Y. Pamela might be made to feel that the cap fitted. Which it did, except that her little head was such a charming one. “In the end,” he said, “they go mad, these soulful philistines. Mad with self-consciousnessand vanity and egotism and a kind of hopeless bewilderment; for when you’re utterly without culture, every fact’s an isolated, unconnected fact, every experience is unique and unprecedented. Your world’s made up of a few bright points floating about inexplicably in the midst of an unfathomable darkness. Terrifying! It’s enough to drive any one mad. I’ve seen them, lots of them, gone utterly crazy. In the past they had organized religion, which meant that somebody had once been cultured for them, vicariously. But what with protestantism and the modernists, their philistinism’s absolute now. They’re alone with their own souls. Which is the worst companionship a human being can have. So bad, that it sends you dotty. So beware, Pamela, beware! You’ll go mad, if you think only of what has something to do with you. The Etruscans will keep you sane.”
    â€œLet’s hope so.” She laughed. “But aren’t we there?”
    The cab drew up at the door of the villa; they got out.
    â€œAnd remember that the things that start with having nothing to do with you,” said Fanning, as he counted out the money for the entrance tickets, “turn out in the long run to have a great deal to do with you. Because they become a part of you and you of them. A soul can’t know or fully become itself without knowing and therefore to some extent becoming what isn’t itself. Which it does in various ways. By loving, for example.”
    â€œYou mean . . . ?” The flame of interest brightened in her eyes.
    But he went on remorselessly. “And by thinking of things that have nothing to do with you.”
    â€œYes, I see.” The flame had dimmed