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A review by moosegurl
Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
3.0
"He had loved, not Susan, but the mental image of Susan and the idea of love ... His ardours for this phantom, and the love of love, the passion for passion which he had managed to squeeze out of his inner consciousness, conquered Susan, who imagined that they had some connection with herself."
"'That's what I want to get in this book--the astonishingess of the most obvious things. Really, any plot or situation would do. ... 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 organization 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.'"
"It's incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one's fellows and to have satisfactory relations with one's friends and lovers, one's wife and children. Living's much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics."
"'In the abstract you know that music exists and is beautiful. But don't therefore pretend, when you hear Mozart, to go into raptures which you don't feel. ... Unable to distinguish Bach from Wagner, but mooing with ecstasy as soon as the fiddles strike up. It's exactly the same with God. The world's full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren't really alive, who've never done any vital act, who aren't in any living relation with anything; people who haven't the slightest personal or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose to call God.'"
Ouch.
"'That's what I want to get in this book--the astonishingess of the most obvious things. Really, any plot or situation would do. ... 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 organization 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.'"
"It's incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one's fellows and to have satisfactory relations with one's friends and lovers, one's wife and children. Living's much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics."
"'In the abstract you know that music exists and is beautiful. But don't therefore pretend, when you hear Mozart, to go into raptures which you don't feel. ... Unable to distinguish Bach from Wagner, but mooing with ecstasy as soon as the fiddles strike up. It's exactly the same with God. The world's full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren't really alive, who've never done any vital act, who aren't in any living relation with anything; people who haven't the slightest personal or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose to call God.'"
Ouch.