Point Counter Point

Pyrrho, before you get back to the obvious in which the non-intellectuals have always remained. And one must hasten to make it clear that these non-intellectuals aren’t the modern canaille who read the picture papers and listen-in and jazz and are preoccupied with making money and having the awful modern “good time.” No, no; one isn’t paying a compliment to the hardheaded business man or the lowbrow. For, in spite of their stupidity and tastelessness and vulgarity and infantility (or rather because of all these defects), they aren’t the non-intellectuals I’m talking about. They take the main intellectualist axiom for granted⁠—that there’s an intrinsic superiority in mental, conscious, voluntary life over physical, intuitive, instinctive, emotional life. The whole of modern civilization is based on the idea that the specialized function which gives a man his place in society is more important than the whole man, or rather is the whole man, all the rest being irrelevant or even (since the physical, intuitive, instinctive, and emotional part of man doesn’t contribute appreciably to making money or getting on in an industrialized world) positively harmful and detestable. The lowbrow of our modern industrialized society has all the defects of the intellectual and none of his redeeming qualities. The non-intellectuals I’m thinking of are very different beings. One might still find a few of them in Italy (though Fascism has probably turned them all into bad imitations of Americans and Prussians by this time); a few perhaps in Spain, in Greece, in Provence. Not elsewhere in modern Europe. There were probably quite a lot of them three thousand years ago. But the combined efforts of Plato and Aristotle, Jesus, Newton, and big business have turned their descendants into the modern bourgeoisie and proletariat. The obvious that the intellectual gets back to, if he goes far enough, isn’t, of course, the same as the obvious of the non-intellectuals. For their obvious is life itself and his recovered obvious is only the idea of that life. Not many can put flesh and blood on the idea and turn it into reality. The intellectuals who, like Rampion, don’t have to return to the obvious, but have always believed in it and lived it, while at the same time leading the life of the spirit, are rarer still.

Being with Rampion rather depresses me; for he makes me see what a great gulf separates the knowledge of the obvious from the actual living of it. And oh, the difficulties of crossing that gulf! I perceive now that the real charm of the intellectual life⁠—the life devoted to erudition, to scientific research, to philosophy, to aesthetics, to criticism⁠—is its easiness. It’s the substitution of simple intellectual schemata for the complexities of reality; of still and formal death for the bewildering movements of life. 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. The intellectual life is child’s play; which is why intellectuals tend to become children⁠—and then imbeciles and finally, as the political and industrial history of the last few centuries clearly demonstrates, homicidal lunatics and wild beasts. The repressed functions don’t die; they deteriorate, they fester, they revert to primitiveness. But meanwhile it’s much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man. That’s why (among other reasons) there’s such a demand for higher education. The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life. Some drown their sorrows in alcohol, but still more drown them in books and artistic dilettantism; some try to forget themselves in fornication, dancing, movies, listening-in, others in lectures and scientific hobbies. The books and lectures are better sorrow-drowners than drink and fornication; they leave no headache, none of that despairing post coitum triste feeling. Till quite recently, I must confess, I too took learning and philosophy and science⁠—all the activities that are magniloquently lumped under the title of “The Search for Truth”⁠—very seriously. I regarded the Search for Truth as the highest of human tasks and the Searchers as the noblest of men. But in the last year or so I have begun to see that this famous Search for Truth is just an amusement, a distraction like any other, a rather refined and elaborate substitute for genuine living; and that Truth-Searchers become just as silly, infantile, and corrupt in their way as the boozers, the pure aesthetes, the business men, the Good-Timers in theirs. I also perceived that the pursuit of Truth is just a polite name for the intellectual’s favourite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality. But seeking Truth is much easier than learning the art of integral living (in which, of course, Truth-Seeking will take its due and proportionate place along with the other amusements, like skittles and mountain climbing). Which explains, though it doesn’t justify, my continued and excessive indulgence in the vices of informative reading and abstract generalization. Shall I ever have the strength of mind to break myself of these indolent habits of intellectualism and devote my energies to the more serious and difficult task of living integrally? And even if I did try to break these habits, shouldn’t I find that heredity was at the bottom of them and that I was congenitally incapable of living wholly and harmoniously?

XXVII

John Bidlake and his third wife had never definitely or officially parted company. They simply didn’t see one another very often, that was all. The arrangement suited John very well. He hated everything in