ALDOUS HUXLEY
Time Must Have a Stop
But thought’s the slave of life, and life's time's fool,
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop. SHAKESPEARE
1953
Chatto & Windus
LONDONPUBLISHED DY
Chatto & Windus
LONDON
*
\ Clarke, Irwin & Company Ltd
TORONTO
Applications regarding translation rights in any
work by Aldous Huxley should be addressed
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London, W.C.2
FIRST PUBLISHED 1945
FIFTH IMPRESSION 1950
FIRST ISSUED IN THIS COLLECTED
EDITION 1953 3 REPRINTED 1953
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDCHAPTER ONE
EBASTIAN BARNACK came out of the reading room of
the public library and paused in the vestibule to put on his
shabby overcoat. Looking at him, Mrs. Ockham felt a sword in
her heart. This small and exquisite creature with the seraphic
face and the pale curly hair was the living image of her own, her
only, her dead and vanished darling.
The boy’s lips were moving, she noticed, as he struggled into
his coat. Talking to himself—just as her Frankie used to do.
He turned and began to walk past the bench on which she was
sitting, towards the door.
‘It’s araw evening,’ she said aloud, acting on a sudden impulse
to detain this living phantom, to turn the sharp memory in her
wounded heart.
Startled out of his preoccupying thoughts, Sebastian halted,
turned and, for a second or two, stared at her uncomprehending.
Then he took in the significance of that yearningly maternal
smile. His eyes hardened. This sort of thing had happened
before. She was treating him as though he were one of those
delicious babies one pats the heads of in perambulators. He’d
teach the old bitch! But as usual he lacked the necessary courage
and presence of mind. In the end he just feebly smiled and said,
Yes, it was a raw evening.
Mrs. Ockham, meanwhile, had opened her bag and pulled out
a white cardboard box.
‘Would you like one of these?’
She held out the box. It was French chocolate, Frankie’s
fayourite—her own too, for that matter. Mrs. Ockham had a
weakness for sweet things.
Sebastian considered her uncertainly. Her accent was all
right, and in their rather shapeless tweedy way the clothes were
ITIME MUST HAVE A STOP
substantial and of good quality. But she was fat and old—at
least forty, he guessed. He hesitated, torn between a desire to
put this tiresome creature in her place and a no less urgent desire
for those delicious langues de chat. Like a pug,he said to himself,
as he looked at that blunt, soft face ofhers. A pink, hairless pug
with a bad complexion. After which he felt that he could accept
the chocolates without compromising his integrity.
‘Thanks,’ he said, and gave her one of those enchanting smiles
which middle-aged ladies always found completely irresistible.
To be seventeen, to have a mind which one felt to be agelessly
adult, and to look like a Della Robbia angel of thirteen—it was
an absurd and humiliating fate. But last Christmas he had read
Nietzsche, and since then he had known that he must Love his
Fate. Amor Fati—but tempered with a healthy cynicism. If
people were ready to pay one for looking less than one’s age,
why not give them what they wanted?
‘How good!’
He smiled at her again, and the corners of his mouth were
brown with chocolate. The sword in Mrs. Ockham’s heart gave
another agonizing twist.
‘Take the whole box,’ she said. Her voice trembled, her eyes
were bright with tears.
‘No, no, I couldn’t...”
“Take it,’ she insisted, ‘take it.” And she pressed it into his
hand—into Frankie’s hand.
“Oh, thank you. ...’ It was just what Sebastian had hoped,
even expected. He had had experience of these sentimental old
dodoes.
‘Thad a boy once,’ Mrs. Ockham went on brokenly. ‘So like
youhe was. The same hair and eyes...’ The tears overflowed
on to her cheeks. She took off her glasses and wiped them;
then, blowing her nose, she got up and hurried into the reading
room.
Sebastian stood looking after her until she was out of sight.
All at once he felt horribly guilty and mean. He looked at the
2CHAPTER ONE
box in his hand. A boy had died in order that he might have
these Jangues de chat: and if his own mother were alive, she
would be nearly as old now as that poor creature in the spectacles.
And if he had died, she’d have been just as unhappy and senti-
mental. Impulsively, he made a movement to throw the
chocolates away; then checked himself. No, that would be just
silliness and superstition. He slipped the box into his pocket
and walked out into the foggy twilight.
‘Millions and millions,’ he whispered to himself; and the
enormity of the evil seemed to grow with every repetition of the
word. All over the world, millions of men and women lying in
pain; millions dying, at this very moment; millions more
grieving over them, their faces distorted, like that poor old hag’s,
the tears running down their cheeks. And millions starving,
miillions frightened, and sick, and anxious. Millions being cursed
and kicked and beaten by other brutal millions. And everywhere
the stink of garbage and drink and unwashed bodies, everywhere
the blight of stupidity and ugliness. The horror was always
there, even when one happened to be feeling well and happy—
always there, just round the corner and behind almostevery door.
As he walked down Haverstock Hill, Sebastian felt himself
evercome by a vast impersonal sadness. Nothing else seemed to
exist now, or to matter, except death and agony.
And then that phrase of Keats’s came back to him—‘The
giant agony of the world!’ The giant agony. He racked
his memory to find the other lines. ‘None may usurp this
height...’ How did it go?
None may usurp this height, returned that shade,
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest...
How exactly right that was! And perhaps Keats had thought of
it one cold spring evening, walking down the hill from Hamp-
stead, just as he himself was doing now. Walking down, and
stopping sometimes to cough up a morsel of his lungs and think
a* 3TIME MUST HAVE A STOP
of his own death as well as of other people’s. Sebastian began
again, whispering articulately to himself.
None may usurp this height, returned that shade,
But those...
But, good heavens, how awful it sounded when you spoke it
aloud! None may usurp this height, returned that shade, but
those . . . How could he have let a thing like that get past him?
But, of course, old Keats was pretty careless sometimes. And
being a genius didn’t preserve him from the most ghastly lapses
into bad taste. There were things in Endymion that made one
shudder. And when one reflected that it was supposed to be
Greek . .. Sebastian smiled to himself with compassionate irony.
One of these days he’d show them what could be done with
Greek mythology. Meanwhile, his mind went back to the
phrases that had come to him just now in the library, while he
was reading Tarn’s book on Hellenistic civilization. ‘Ignore the
dried figs!’ that was how it was to begin. ‘Ignore the dried
figs...’ But, after all, dried figs can be good figs. For slaves
there would never be anything but the spoilage and refuse of the
crop. ‘Ignore the stale figs,’ then. Besides, in this particular
context of sound, ‘stale’ carried the proper vowel.
Ignore the stale figs, the weevils and the whippings,
The old men terrified of death . . .
But that was horribly flat. Steam-rolled and macadamized, like
bad Wordsworth. What about ‘scared of dying’?
The old men scared of dying, the women...
He hesitated, wondering how to sum up that dismal life of the
Gyneceum. Then, from the mysterious source of light and
energy at the back of his skull, out popped the perfect phrase:
‘,.. the women in cages.”
Sebastian smiled at the image that bobbed up—a whole zoo
of ferocious and undomesticable girls, a deafening aviary of
4CHAPTER ONE
dowagers. But these would be for another poem—a poem in
which he would take vengeance on the whole female sex. At
the moment his business was with Hellas—with the historical
squalor that was Greece and the imaginary glory. Imaginary,
of course, so far as a whole people was concerned, but surely
realizable by an individual, a poet above all, Some day, some-
how, somewhere, that glory would be within his grasp; of that
Sebastian was convinced. But meanwhile it was important not
to make a fool of oneself. The passion of his nostalgia would
have to be tempered, in the expression, with a certain irony,
the splendour of the longed-for ideal with a spice of the absurd.
Forgetting all about the dead boy and the giant agony of the
world, he helped himself to a Jangue de chat from the store in his
pocket and, his mouth full, resumed the intoxicating labour of
composition.
Ignore the stale figs, the weevils and the whippings,
The old men scared of dying, the women in cages.
So much for history. Now for imagination.
In a perpetual June...
He shook his head. ‘Perpetual’ was like the headmaster
talking about the climate of Ecuador in those asinine geography
lessons of his. ‘Chronic’ suggested itself as an alternative. The
associations with varicose veins and the language of Cockney
charwomen delighted him.
In a chronic June, what Akibiadeses
Surround the beard of Plato!
Vile! This was no place for proper names. ‘What muscu-
latures’ perhaps? Then, like manna, ‘what heavyweights’ fell
from heaven. Yes, yes; ‘what highbrow heavyweights.’ He
laughed aloud. And substituting ‘wisdom’ for ‘Plato’ you got:
Ina chronic June, what highbrow heavyweights
Surround the beard of wisdom!
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