Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley Read Free Book Online Page A

cemetery, to be transformed into grass and dandelions, which in their turn had been transformed into sheep, whose hind legs had in their turn been transformed into other musicians, whose bodies in their turn … It was all obvious, but to Lord Edward an apocalypse. Suddenly and for the first time he realized his solidarity with the world. The realization was extraordinarily exciting; he rose from his chair and began to walk agitatedly up and down the room. His thoughts were confused, but the muddle was bright and violent, not dim, not foggily languid as at ordinary times. ‘Perhaps when I was at Vienna last year, I actually consumed a piece of Mozart’s substance. It might have been in a Wiener Schnitzel, or a sausage, or even a glass of beer. Communion, physical communion. And that wonderful performance of The Magic Flute—another sort of communion, or perhaps the same, really. Transubstantiation, cannibalism, chemistry. It comes down to chemistry in the end, of course. Legs of mutton and spinach … all chemistry. Hydrogen, oxygen … What are the other things? God, how infuriating, how infuriating not to know! All those years at Eton. Latin verses. What the devil was the good? En! distenta ferunt perpingues ubera vaccae. Why didn’t they teach me anything sensible? “A member of the universal concert of things.” It’s all like music; harmonies and counterpoint and modulations. But you’ve got to be trained to listen. Chinese music… we can’t make head or tail of it. The universal concert—that’s Chinese music for me, thanks to Eton. Glycogenic function of the liver… it might be in Bantu, so far as I’m concerned. What a humiliation! But I can learn, I will learn, I will…’
    Lord Edward was filled with an extraordinary exultation; he had never felt so happy in his life before.
    That evening he told his father that he was not going to stand for Parliament. Still agitated by the morning’s revelations of Parnellism, the old gentleman was furious. Lord Edward was entirely unmoved; his mind was made up. The next day he advertised for a tutor. In the spring of the following year he was in Berlin working under Du Bois Reymond.
    Forty years had passed since then. The studies of osmosis, which had indirectly given him a wife, had also given him a reputation. His work on assimilation and growth was celebrated. But what he regarded as the real task of his life—the great theoretical treatise on physical biology—was still unfinished. ‘The life of the animal is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.’ Claude Bernard’s words had been his lifelong theme as well as his original inspiration. The book on which he had been working all these years was but an elaboration, a quantitative and mathematical illustration of them.
    Upstairs in the laboratory the day’s work had just begun. Lord Edward preferred to work at night. He found the daylight hours disagreeably noisy. Breakfasting at halfpast one, he would walk for an hour or two in the afternoon and return to read or write till lunch-time at eight. At nine or halfpast he would do some practical work with his assistant, and when that was over they would sit down to work on the great book or to discussion of its problems. At one, Lord Edward had his supper, and at about four or five he would go to bed.
    Diminished and in fragments the B minor Suite came floating up from the great hall to the ears of the two men in the laboratory. They were too busy to realize that they were hearing it.
    ‘Forceps,’ said Lord Edward to his assistant. He had a very deep voice, indistinct and without, so to speak, a clearly defined contour. ‘A furry voice,’ his daughter Lucy had called it, when she was a child.
    Illidge handed him the fine bright instrument. Lord Edward made a deep noise that signified thanks and turned back with the forceps to the anaesthetized newt that lay stretched out on the diminutive operating table. Illidge watched him critically, and