Time Must Have a
Stop – Aldous Huxley
Huxley is best-known for Brave New
World, his most accessible novel. This novel is less accessible. For
instance, a mystic stand-in for the author says, the difficulty of living is
becoming “your inner not-self in God while remaining your outer self in the
world.” I mean, I count myself as one of
the one in ten million readers that can swing with “your inner not-self in
God”. So, not for everybody but for those that like a novel of ideas,
especially mystical ones.
The time is the late 1920s, the places England and Italy.
The center of the story is Sebastian Barnack, a seventeen-year-old schoolboy but
already a poet of unusual gifts and accomplishments. Huxley captures how
strange it must be to be a young artist – alternating between bursts of
ecstatic pleasure in creation with mere words and awkwardness and self-consciousness
found in any teenager.
Sebastian’s looks are such that they attract women of all
ages, which is decidedly a mixed blessing. He gets pretty much whatever he
wants simply by smiling. Sebastian isn’t skillful at delaying gratification or
thinking things through due to his own temperament and the fact he’s a teenager
whose brain wiring for ethics hasn’t developed yet.
Not that the people around him help with ethical
development. His father in England is wrapped up in the futile pursuit of
politics. In Italy, Sebastian goes to stay with an uncle of artistic and
hedonistic tastes. Huxley presents the milieu of the idle moneyed class in
sharp satire. Eustace Barnack is an epicurean with a small ‘e,’ a lover of
food, wine, and a good cigar. An unfortunate coronary event brought on by
excessive pleasures of the flesh takes Eustace to the extra-mundane plane,
where he literally refuses to go into the light, illustrating Huxley’s view
that it is free will all the way, baby. We decide – yes or no, with every
decision we take - whether we are going to live according to nature and develop
our self-control and wisdom enough to accept the things we can’t control, to
change the things we can control (i.e., our responses to change and fortune), and to foster the courage and fairness to know
the difference.
Sebastian tells a lie and the lie has terrible
repercussions that will call to mind the consequences of a petty crime in
Tolstoy’s The
Forged Coupon. The book, however, is wrapped up quickly with extracts from
Sebastian's diary, made during an air-raid in London during WWII (Huxley wrote
this book in 1943). Absorbing as the final chapter is, it seems an abrupt way
to end this novel. When I re-read this novel – and Huxley always pays
re-reading, nobody will get the point reading it only once – it will probably work better for me.
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