Eyeless In Gaza by Aldous Huxley Page A

remember, to put the lid on everything. Whereas actually, of course, it merely restated the doctrine of free will. For ifreflexes can be conditioned, then, obviously, they can be re-conditioned. Learning to use the self properly, when one has been using it badly – what is it but re-conditioning one’s reflexes?
    Lunched with my father. More cheerful than I’ve seen him recently, but old and, oddly, rather enjoying it. Making much of getting out of his chair with difficulty, of climbing very slowly up the stairs. A way, I suppose, of increasing his sense of importance. Perhaps also a way of commanding sympathy whenever he happens to want it. Baby cries so that mother shall come and make a fuss of him. It goes on from the cradle to the grave. Miller says of old age that it’s largely a bad habit. Use conditions function. Walk about as if you were a martyr to rheumatism and you’ll impose such violent muscular strains upon yourself that a martyr to rheumatism you’ll really be. Behave like an old man and your body will function like an old man’s, you’ll think and feel as an old man. The lean and slippered pantaloon – literally a part that one plays. If you refuse to play it and learn how to act on your refusal, you won’t become a pantaloon. I suspect this is largely true. Anyhow, my father is playing his present part with gusto. One of the great advantages of being old, provided that one’s economic position is reasonably secure and one’s health not too bad, is that one can afford to be serene. The grave is near, one has made a habit of not feeling anything very strongly; it’s easy, therefore, to take the God’s-eye view of things. My father took it about peace, for example. Yes, men were made, he agreed; there would be another war quite soon – about 1940, he thought. (A date, significantly, when he was practically certain to be dead!) Much worse than the last war, yes; and would probably destroy the civilization of Western Europe. But did it really matter so much? Civilization would go on in other continents, would built itself up anew in the devastated areas. Our time scale was all wrong. We shouldthink of ourselves, not as living in the thirties of the twentieth century, but as at a point between two ice ages. And he ended up by quoting Goethe –
alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss
. All which is doubtless quite true, but not the whole truth. Query: how to combine belief that the world is to a great extent illusory with belief that it is none the less essential to improve the illusion? How to be simultaneously dispassionate and not indifferent, serene like an old man and active like a young one?

C HAPTER VIII
August 30th 1933
    â€˜THESE VILE HORSE-FLIES!’ Helen rubbed the reddening spot on her arm. Anthony made no comment. She looked at him for a little in silence. ‘What a lot of ribs you’ve got!’ she said at last.
    â€˜Schizothyme physique,’ he answered from behind the arm with which he was shielding his face from the light. ‘That’s why I’m here. Predestined by the angle of my ribs.’
    â€˜Predestined to what?’
    â€˜To sociology; and in the intervals to this.’ He raised his hand, made a little circular gesture and let it fall again on the mattress.
    â€˜But what’s “this?”’ she insisted.
    â€˜This?’ Anthony repeated. ‘Well . . .’ He hesitated. But it would take too long to talk about that temperamental divorce between the passions and the intellect, those detached sensualities, those sterilized ideas. ‘Well,
you
,’ he brought out at last.
    â€˜Me?’
    â€˜Oh, I admit it might have been someone else,’ he said, and laughed, genuinely amused by his own cynicism.
    Helen also laughed, but with a surprising bitterness. ‘I
am
somebody else.’
    â€˜Meaning what?’ he asked, uncovering his face to look at