I seem to be in a compiling mood. Perhaps the head cold and excessive studying have brought out the medieval monk in me (or not... never mind). They didn't have much of a copyright then, though, did they?

This actually goes back to a previous post of mine, where I promised, if I'm not much mistaken, something along the lines of a dissertation on shyness. This won't quite be that which I had promised (isn't that sentence lovely? rather unreadable!). Instead, I'll simply go back to the source of my inspiration for said topic: namely, Aldous Huxley's "Time Must Have a Stop", which I read in its entirety, barring the last 17 pages of the epilogue, on my Easter holidays.

[In a nutshell, if that is at all possible for me, I liked it, but the fact that I didn't finish it, given my ghoulish determination in finishing all books that I have started, says a lot. The style, I loved; the theme, perhaps too anchored in the floaty tinsel world of Great Men's Profound Ideas and Thoughts for my taste. It was my first forage into Huxley terrain, but probably not my last; I'd like to read Brave New World like all the popular kids ( =D ), and a friend recommended Point Counter Point.]

[If you can stick that in a nutshell, I just might eat my shoe -- like Werner Herzog; if you have access to the New Yorker issue I mentioned in my last post, by all means read his personal profile, it's long and fascinating]

[and if you ask real nice, or just ask, I'll probably grab hold of my quill with my ink-stained fingers and transcribe a few choice passages for your enjoyment]


So, finally, here we are:

[Sebastian is the protagonist, a 17-year-old pretty boy whose acutely self-centred internal monologues give the book a generous part of its girth. He is a poet in the making and very shy -- perhaps awkward is a better word. Mrs. Thwale is a 40ish-year-old unmarried lady-in-waiting, for whom Sebastian has the hots, to put it briefly. Mrs. Thwale's employer (a very rich, blind, cranky old lady; Sebastian's uncle's mother-in-law) ordered her to give Sebastian speaking lessons to cure him of his mumbling]

Time Must Have a Stop
by Aldous Huxley

Chapter XVI

"Well," said Mrs Thwale, as Foxy's barking and the thin croak of the Queen Mother's endearments died away into the distance, "now you're my pupil. Perhaps I ought to have provided myself with a birch. Do you get birched at school?"

Sebastian shook his head.

"No? What a pity! I've always thought that birching had considerable charm."

She looked at him with a faint smile; then turned away to sip her coffee. There was a long silence.

Sebastian raised his eyes and surreptitiouslystudied her averted face (...) And here she sat, decorously in black among all the colored richness of the room, utterly unaware of the part she had played in his private universe, the things she had done and submitted to. Messalina inside his skull, Lucretia inside hers. But of course she wasn't Lucretia, not with those eyes of hers, not with that way of silently impregnating the space around her with her physically feminine presence.

Mrs. Thwale looked up.

"Obviously," she said, "the first thing is to discover why you mumble, when it's just as easy to speak clearly and coherently. Why do you?"

"Well, if one feels shy..."

"If one feels shy," said Mrs. Thwale, "the best thing to do, I've always found, is to imagine how the person you're shy of would look if he or she were squatting in a hip bath."

Sebastian giggled.

"It's almost infallible," she continued. "The old and ugly ones look so grotesque that you can hardly keep a straight face. Whereas the young, good-looking ones look so attractive that you lose all alarm and even all respect. Now, shut your eyes and try it."

Sebastian glanced at her, and the blood rushed into his face.

"You mean... ?"

He found himself unable to finish the question.

"I have no objection," said Mrs. Thwale composedly.

He shut his eyes; and there [she] was in black lace, on a pink divan in the attitude of Boucher's Petite Morphil.

"Well, do you feel less shy now?" she asked when he had reopened his eyes.

Sebastian looked at her for a moment; then, overwhelmed by embarrasment at the thought that she now knew something of what was happening in the world of his phantasy, emphatically shook his head.

"You don't?" said Mrs. Thwale, and the low voice modulated upwards on a rising coo. "That's bad. It almost looks as if yours were a case for surgery. S-surgery," she repeated, and took another sip of coffee, looking at him all the time with bright ironic eyes over the top of her cup.

"However," she added, as she wiped her mouth, "it may still be possible to achieve a cure by psychological methods. There's the technique of outrage, for example."

Sebastian repeated the words on a tone of inquiry.

"Well, you know what an outrage is," she said. "A non sequitur in action. For example, rewarding a child for being good by giving it a sound whipping and sending it to bed. Or better still, whipping it and sending it to bed for no reason at all. That's the perfect outrage--completely disinterested, absolutely platonic."

She smiled to herself. Those last words were the ones her father liked to use, when he talked about Christian charity. That damned charity, with which he had poisoned all her childhood and adolescence. Surrounding himself, in its name, with a rabble of the unfortunate and the worthy. Turning what should have been their home into a mere waiting room and public corridor. Bringing her up among the squalors and uglinesses of poverty. Blackmailing her into a service she didn't want to give. Forcing her to spend her leisure with dull and ignorant strangers, when all she desired was to be alone. And as though to add insult to injury, he made her recite I Corinthians XIII every Sunday evening.

"Absolutely platonic," Mrs. Thwale repeated, looking up again at Sebastian. "Like Dante and Beatrice." And after a second or two she added pensively, "One day that pretty face of yours is going to get you into trouble."

Sebastian laughed uncomfortably, and tried to change the subject.

"But where does shyness come in?" he asked.

"It doesn't," she answered. "It goes out. The outrage drives it out."

"What outrage?"

"Why, the outrage you commit when you simply don't know what else to do or say."

"But how can you? I mean, if you're shy..."

"You've got to do violence to yourself. As if you were committing suicide. Put the revolver to your temple. Five more seconds, and the world will come to an end. Meanwhile, nothing matters."

"But it does matter," Sebastian objected. "And the world doesn't really come to an end."

"No; but it's really transformed. The outrage creates an entirely novel situation."

"An unpleasant situation."

"So unpleasant," Mrs. Thwale agreed, "that you can't think of being shy any more."

Sebastian looked doubtful.

"You don't believe me?" she said. "Well, we'll stage a rehearsal. I'm Mrs. Gamble asking you to tell me how you write a poem."

"God, wasn't that ghastly!" cried Sebastian.

"And why was it ghastly? Because you didn't have the sense to see that it was the sort of question that couldn't be answered except by an outrage. It made me laugh to hear you humming and hawing over psychological subtleties, which the old lady couldn't possibly have understood, even if she had wanted to. Which of course she didn't."

"But what else could I have done? Seeing that she wanted to know how I wrote."

"I'll tell you," said Mrs. Thwale. "You shouldn't have spoken for at least five seconds, then very slowly and distinctly you should have said: 'Madam, I do it with an indelible pencil on a roll of toilet paper.' Now, say it."

"No, I can't... really..."

He gave her one of his appealing, irresistible smiles. But, instead of melting, Mrs. Thwale contemptuously shook her head.

"No, no," she said, "I'm not a bit fond of children. And as for you, you ought to be ashamed of playing those tricks. At seventeen a man ought to be begetting babies, not trying to imitate them."

Sebastian blushed and uttered a nervous laugh. Her frankness had been horribly painful; and yet with a part of his being he was glad that she should have spoken as she did, glad that she didn't want, like all the rest, to treat him as a child.

"And now," Mrs. Thwale went on, "this time you'll say it--do you understand?"

The tone was so coolly imperious that Sebastian obeyed without further protest or demur.

"Madam, I do it with an indelible pencil," he began.

"That's not an outrage," said Mrs. Thwale. "That's a bleat."

"I do it with an indelible pencil," he repeated more loudly.

"Fortissimo!"

"... With an indelible pencil on a roll of toilet paper..."

Mrs. Thwale clapped her hands.

"Excellent!"

She uttered a delicate grunt of laughter. More boisterously, Sebastian joined in.

"And now," she went on, "I ought to box your ears. Hard, so that it hurts. And you'll be so startled and angry that you'll shout. 'You bloody old bitch,' or words to that effect. And then the fun will begin. I'll start screeching like a macaw, and you'll start..."

The door of the drawing room was thrown open.