Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley Read Free Book Online

had no place for him. There were times when he thought of suicide.
    ‘If only he’d sow a few wild oats!’ his father had complained. But the young man was, if possible, even less interested in debauchery than in politics. ‘And he’s not even a sportsman,’ the accusation continued. It was true. The massacre of birds, even in the company of the Prince of Wales, left Lord Edward quite unmoved, except perhaps by a faint disgust. He preferred to sit at home and read, vaguely, desultorily, a little of everything. But even reading seemed to him unsatisfactory. The best that could be said of it was that it kept his mind from brooding and killed time. But what was the good of that? Killing time with a book was not intrinsically much better than killing pheasants and time with a gun. He might go on reading like this for the rest of his days; but it would never help him to achieve anything.
    On the afternoon of April 18th, 1887, he was sitting in the library at Tantamount House, wondering whether life was worth living and whether drowning were preferable, as a mode of dying, to shooting. It was the day that the Times had published the forged letter, supposed to be Parnell’s, condoning the Phoenix Park murders. The fourth marquess had been in a state of apoplectic agitation ever since breakfast. At the clubs men talked of nothing else. ‘I suppose it’s very important,’ Lord Edward kept saying to himself. But he found it impossible to take much interest either in Parnellism or in crime. After listening for a little to what people were saying at the club, he went home in despair. The library door was open; he entered and dropped into a chair, feeling utterly exhausted as though he had come in from a thirty-mile walk. ‘I must be an idiot,’ he assured himself, when he thought of other people’s political enthusiasms and his own indifference. He was too modest to attribute the idiocy to the other people. ‘I’m hopeless, hopeless.’ He groaned aloud, and in the learned silence of the vast library the sound was appalling. Death; the end of everything; the river; the revolver…. Time passed. Even about death, Lord Edward found, he could not think consecutively and attentively. Even death was a bore. The current Quarterl1y lay on the table beside him. Perhaps it would bore him less than death was doing. He picked it up, opened it casually and found himself reading a paragraph in the middle of an article about someone called Claude Bernard. He had never previously heard of Claude Bernard. A Frenchman, he supposed. And what, he wondered, was the glycogenic function of the liver? Some scientific business, evidently. His eyes skimmed over the page There were inverted commas; it was a quotation from Claude Bernard’s own writings.
    ‘The living being does not form an exception to the great natural harmony which makes things adapt themselves to one another; it breaks no concord; it is neither in contradiction to, nor struggling against, general cosmic forces. Far from that, it is a member of the universal concert of things, and the life of the animal, for example, is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.’
    He read the words, idly first, then more carefully, then several times with a strained attention. ‘The life of the animal is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.’ Then what about suicide? A fragment of the universe would be destroying itself? No, not destroying; it couldn’t destroy itself even if it tried. It would be changing its mode of existence. Changing…. Bits of animals and plants became human beings. What was one day a sheep’s hind leg and leaves of spinach was the next part of the hand that wrote, the brain that conceived the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony. And another day had come when thirty-six years of pleasures, pains, hungers, loves, thoughts, music, together with infinite unrealized potentialities of melody and harmony had manured an unknown corner of a Viennese