48
" what about your new way of looking at things? We seem to have wandered rather a long way from that.’ ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Philip, ‘we haven’t. All these camisoles en flanelle and pickled onions and bishops of cannibal islands are really quite to the point. Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,’ he nodded after the retreating group, ‘thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once. With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes, homme moyen sensuel eyes . . .’ ‘Loving eyes too.’ He smiled at her and stroked her hand. ‘The result . . .’ he hesitated. ‘Yes, what would the result be?’ she asked. ‘Queer,’ he answered. ‘A very queer picture indeed.’ ‘Rather too queer, I should have thought.’ ‘But it can’t be too queer,’ said Philip. ‘However queer the picture is, it can never be half so odd as the original reality. We take it all for granted; but the moment you start thinking, it becomes queer. And the more you think, the queerer it grows. That’s what I want to get in this book—the astonishingness of the most obvious things. Really any plot or situation would do. Because everything’s implicit in anything. The whole book could be written about a walk from Piccadilly Circus to Charing Cross. Or you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea. Really, nothing could be queerer than that. When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organisation, that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing round obstacles, so that there’s a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with energy to live and think—when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.’ ‘All the same,’ said Elinor, after a long silence, ‘I wish one day you’d write a simple straightforward story about a young man and a young woman who fall in love and get married and have difficulties, but get over them, and finally settle down.’ ‘Or "
― Aldous Huxley , Point Counter Point
53
" Thousands upon thousands of millions of minute and diverse individuals had come together and the product of their mutual dependence, their mutual hostility had been a human life. Their total colony, their living hive had been a man. The hive was dead. But in the lingering warmth many of the component individuals still faintly lived; soon they also would have perished. And meanwhile, from the air, the invisible hosts of saprophytics had already begun their unresisted invasion. They would live among the dead cells, they would grow, and prodigiously multiply and in their growing and procreation all the chemical building of the body would be undone, all the intricacies and complications of its matter would be resolved, till by the time their work was finished a few pounds of carbon, a few quarts of water, some lime, a little phosphorus and sulphur, a pinch of iron and silicon, a handful of mixed salts--all scattered and recombined with the surrounding world--would be all that remained of Everard Webley's ambition to rule and his love for Elinor, of his thoughts about politics and his recollections of childhood, of his fencing and good horsemanship, of that soft strong voice and that suddenly illuminating smile, of his admiration for Mantegna, his dislike of whiskey, his deliberately terrifying rages, his habit of stroking his chin, his belief in God, his incapacity to whistle a tune correctly, his unshakeable determinations and his knowledge of Russian. "
― Aldous Huxley , Point Counter Point
56
" She wanted to laugh, but she was oppressed by a sudden realization of the mysteries and complexities of life, the terrible inscrutabilities of the future. Here was her child--but he was also Philip, he was also herself, he was also Walter, her father, her mother; and now, with that upward tilting of the chin, he had suddenly revealed himself as the deplorable Mr. Quarles. And he might be hundreds of other people too. Might be? He certainly was. He was aunts and cousins she hardly ever saw; grandfathers and great-uncles she had only known as a child and utterly forgotten; ancestors who had died long ago, back to the beginning of things. A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts and would go on dictating and controlling. "
― Aldous Huxley , Point Counter Point
