1 like musical stars in the lap of nothing.
2 Do you remember, during the war and in the prosperous time immediately following, when the workers for the first time in history were paid a wage that enabled them to live in something like comfort, do you remember how furiously, with what a black atrabilious overflow of hatred, the middle classes denounced the riotous excesses of the idle poor? Why, the monsters even bought pianos — pianos! The pianos have all been sold again, long since.
3 Marina di Vezza, p. 315 ; Those Barren Leaves, p. 249.
4 I read a page of Wittgenstein, I play a little Bach (…).
5 Marina di Vezza, p. 97 ; Those Barren Leaves, p. 79.
6 Voir le poème Theatre of Varieties (dans le recueil Arabia Infelix, 1929, ou le recueil The Cicadas, 1931).
7 Cf. Point Counter Point, p. 429.
8 Fanny Logan felt the tears coming into her eyes. She was easily moved, especially by music; and when she felt an emotion, she did not try to repress it, but abandoned herself whole-heartedly to it. How beautiful this music was, how sad, and yet how comforting! She felt it within her, as a current of exquisite feeling, running smoothly but irresistibly through all the labyrinthine intricacies of her being.
9 Ibid., p. 30.
10 Euclidean axioms made holiday with the formulae of elementary statics. Arithmetic held a wild saturnalian kermesse ; algebra cut capers. The music came to an end in an orgy of mathematical merry-making.
11 Ibid., p. 41.
12 Pongileoni’s blowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking on to it vibrating; and this in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward’s apartment on the further side. The shaking air rattled Lord Edward’s membrana tympani; the interlocked malleus, incus and stirrup bones were set in a motion so as to agitate the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth. The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edward ecstatically whispered «Bach!»
13 Ibid., p. 38.
14 For he belonged to that not inconsiderable class of persons who love music, not wisely, but too well — love it sensually and viscerally, with their nerves, their solar plexus, their palpitating heart and yearning bowels.
15 Variations on a Philosopher (Themes and Variations, p. 112).
16 Voir première partie, chapitre 2, note 160.
17 Cf. Point counter Point, p. 429-430.
18 Green Tunnels
19 Mortal Coils
20 Words and Their Meanings
21 Cf. Green Tunnels (Mortal Coils, p. 110).
22 They are able to move at will from the world, say, of atomic physics to the world of art, from the universe of discourse called «chemistry» to the universe of discourse called «ethics». Between these various universes philosophy and science have not as yet succeeded in constructing any bridges. How, for example, is an electron, or a chemical molecule, or even a living cell related to the G Minor quintet of Mozart or the mystical theology of St John of the Cross? Frankly, we don’t know.
23 Words and Their Meanings, p. 11.
24 when we want to pass from one to another, we have to jump.
25 Ibid.
26 Cf. A note on Dogma (Proper Studies, p. 205).
27 from pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death.
28 The Rest is Silence (Music at Night, p. 19).
29 Voir l’épigraphe à la première partie de cette étude.
30 as perfect wholes (perfect and whole, that is to say, in respect to each listener’s capacity to have any given experience), however partial, however obscurely confused may have been the originals thus recalled.
31 The Rest is Silence (Music at Night, p. 19).
32 what he have always felt, but never been able to express.
33 Ibid., p. 20.
34 In a different mode, on another plane of being, music is the equivalent of man’s most significant and most inexpressible experiences.
35 Ibid., p. 19.
36 Il convient de rappeler ici que Huxley souhaite à l’art non représentatif du XXe siècle un retour à la littérarité en raison même de la qualité formelle que cet art aux visées littéraires a eue par le passé, richesse qu’on chercherait en vain dans l’art dit abstrait.
37 Listening to expressive music, we have, not of course the artist’s original experience (which is quite beyond us, for grapes do not grow on thistles), but the best experiences in its kind of which our nature is capable — a better and completer experience than in fact we ever had before listening to the music.
38 The Rest is Silence (Music at Night, p. 20). Dans Literature and Science, Huxley se demande, à propos du langage purifié de la littérature, s’il se peut même que parfois le degré de poétisation de l’expérience artistique du lecteur dépasse le degré poétique de l’expérience originaire du poète. Cf. Literature and Science, p. 34.
39 Cf. Literature and Science, ibid.
40 the greatest of all verbal artists.
41 uttering in words whatever words can possibly be made to signify.
42 music’s ability to express the inexpressible.
43 The Rest is Silence (Music at Night, p. 20-21).
44 Mr Barbecue-Smith came down to the drawing-room at ten to eight. He was in a good humour, and, as he descended the stairs, he smiled to himself and rubbed his large white hands together. In the drawing-room someone was playing softly and ramblingly on the piano. He wondered who it could be. One of the young ladies, perhaps. But not, it was only Denis, who got up hurriedly and with some embarrassment as he came into the room.
«Do go on, do go on,» said Mr Barbecue-Smith. «I am very fond of music.» «Then I couldn’t possibly go on,» Denis replied. «I only make noises.» There was a silence.
45 Crome Yellow, p. 30.
46 «Do you like music?» Dr Robert asked. «More than most things.»
47 Ile, p. 184 ; Island p. 143-144.
48 the silent areas of the brain.
49 Ile, p. 183 ; Island, p. 143.
50 Even if it doesn’t refer to anything outside itself, it’s still the most important thing that ever happened to you. Like music, only incomparably more so.
51 Ile, p. 184 ; Island, p. 144.
52 Who cares? The fact remains that the experience can open one’s eyes and make one blessed and transform one’s whole life.
There was a long silence.
53 Ibid.
54 imprisoned, as it were, within the white spaces between the lines of a poem, between the notes of music, in the apertures between groups of sculpture.
55 Cité par Christophe ISHERWOOD dans Julian HUXLEY (éd.) : Aldous Huxley, A Memorial Volume, 1965, p. 158. La citation est tirée d’une déclaration faite par l’écrivain à propos de la relation entre son art d’écrivain et son intérêt pour la mystique.
56 transformed into a hieroglyph, a succession of hieroglyphs, of attitudes modulating from significance to significance like a poem or a piece of music.
57 Island, p. 231.
58 Point Counter Point, p. 251.
59 Ibid.
60 Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart’s music and the stigmata of St Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.
61 Ibid.
62 fantastically mysterious.
63 Ibid.
64 universal concert of things.
65 Ibid., p. 34.
66 Perhaps when I was at Vienna last year, I actually consumed a piece of Mozart’s substance. It might have been in a Wiener Schnitzel, or a sausage, or even a glass of beer. Communion, physical communion. And that wonderful performance of The Magic Flute — another sort of communion, or perhaps the same, really. (…) All those years at Eton. Latin verses. What the devil was the good? Eu! distenta ferunt perpingues ubera vaccae. Why didn’t they teach me anything sensible? «A member of the universal concert of thing.» It’s all like music; harmonies and counterpoint and modulations. But you’ve got to be trained to listen. Chinese music… we can’t make head or tail of it. The universal concert — that’s Chinese music for me, thanks to Eton.
67 Ibid., p. 35.
68 the atom with the spiral nebula and both with his morning’s breakfast, the music of Bach, the pottery of neolithic China, what you will.
69 Ends and Means, p. 196.
70 Tunes or pebbles, processes or substantial things? «Tunes,» answer Buddhism and modern science. «Pebbles,» say the classical philosophers of the West. Buddhism and modern science think of the world in terms of music.
71 Island, p. 178.
72 Ibid.
73 Point Counter Point, p. 29.
74 The parts live their separate lives; they touch, their paths cross, they combine for a moment to create a seemingly final and perfected harmony, only to break apart again. Each is always alone and separate and individual. «I am I,» asserts the violin; «the world revolves round me.» «Round me,» calls the cello. «Round me,» the flute insists. And all are equally right and equally wrong; and none of them will listen to the others.
75 Ibid.
76 Cf. ibid.
77 Cf. les Auguries of Innocence de W. Blake.
78 the description of the subject of a picture in an artist’s own terms.
79 K. CLARKE dans Julian HUXLEY (éd.) : Aldoux Huxley, A Memorial Volume, 1965, p. 15.
80 It was a wonderful experience to hear him extolling the Canterbury Tales or Candide, Beethoven’s posthumous quartets or Verdi’s Requiem, Bernini’s sculpture or early Mayan art (…).
81 Julian HUXLEY, op. cit., p. 23.
82 At school when they taught us what was technically known as English, they used to tell us to «express in our own words» some passage from whatever play of Shakespeare was at the moment being rammed, with all its annotations — particularly the annotations, — down our reluctant throasts.
83 Music at Night (Music at Night, p. 45-46).
84 their original expression in terms of music.
85 Ibid., p. 46.
86 It is strictly impossible to be a human being and not to have views of some kind about the universe at large, very difficult to be a human being and not to express those views, at any rate by implication. Now, it is a matter of observation that painters and musicians are not monsters. Therefore… The conclusion follows, unescapably.
87 Ibid., p. 47-48.
88 Strauss en concluant que toute bonne musique est donc de la musique à programme !
89 a jumping-off place.
90 Cf. Music at Night (Music at Night, p. 51).
91 Cf. Island, p. 277.
92 This long pure note was the meaning of her words, the audible expression of her silence. But always, flowing through and along with the heavenly emptiness of that contemplative fluting was the rich sound, vibration within passionate vibration, of the violin. And surrounding them both — the notes of contemplative detachment and the notes of passionate involvement — was the network of sharp dry tones plucked from the wires of the harpsichord. Spirit and instinct, action and vision — and around them the web of intellect. They were comprehended by discursive thought, but comprehended, it was obvious, only from outside, in terms of an order of experience radically different from that which discursive thinking professes to explain.
93 Ile, p. 358 ; Island, p. 277.
94 And here, dancing in and out between them, was the Logical Positivist, absurd but indispensable, trying to explain, in a language incommensurable with the facts, what it was all about.
95 Ile, p. 359 ; Island, p. 278.
96 musical statements.
97 Cf. Music at Night (Music at Night, p. 50).
98 beauty-truth.
99 Cf. la lettre à Valéry du 4 janvier 1930, citée dans le premier chapitre.
100 The best we can do is to indicate in the most general terms the nature of the musical beauty-truth under consideration and to refer curious truth-seekers to the original.
101 Music at Night (Music at Night, p. 50).
102 Cf. la définition de G. HAYDON, Introduction to Musicology, Musical Aesthetics, New York, Prentice-Hall, 1941, 1946, p. 124.
103 Thus, the introduction to the Benedictus in the Missa Solemnis is a statement about the blessedness that is at the heart of things.
104 Music at Night, ibid.
105 If we want to know, we must listen — on a still June night, by preference, with the breathing of the invisible sea for background to the music and the scent of lime trees drifting through the darkness, like some exquisite soft harmony apprehended by another sense.
106 Ibid, p. 51.
107 A kind of tingling warmth had expanded within him as he listened to her last words. It was like the sensation he had when he read the last scene of Measure for Measure, or listened to Joachim in the Beethoven Concerto.
108 Eyeless in Gaza, p. 67.
109 But in those days 1 imagined that love ought always to be mixed up with affection and admiration, with worship and an intellectual rapture, as unflagging as that which one experiences during the playing of a symphony.
110 Marina di Vezza, p. 154 ; Those Barren Leaves, p. 124.
111 There was a whirring sound. From the shallows of his mind, a bubble of recognition reached the surface of consciousness. Susila had been putting a record on the turn-table of a gramophone and now the machine was in motion.
«Johann Sebastian Bach,» he heard her saying. «The music that’s closest to silence, closest in spite of its being so highly organized, to pure, one-hundred-degree proof Spirit.»
The whirring gave place to musical sounds. Another bubble of recognition came shooting up; he was listening to the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto.
112 Ile, p. 355-356 ; Island, p. 275.
113 Cf. Island, p. 275.
114 Tonight, for the first time his awareness of a piece of music was completely unobstructed. Between mind and sound, mind and pattern, mind and significance, there was no longer any babel of biographical irrelevances to drown the music or make a senseless discord. Tonight’s Fourth Brandenburg was a pure datum — no, a blessed donum — uncorrupted by the personal history, the second-hand notions, the ingrained stupidities with which, like every self, the poor idiot, who wouldn’t (and in art plainly couldn’t) take yes for an answer, had overlaid the gifts of immediate experience.
115 Ile, p. 356-357 ; Island, p. 276.
116 here and now, out there and nowhere.
117 Island, p. 275.
118 great present Event.
119 Ibid.
120 He sat there motionlessly attentive, following with ear and inward eye the interwoven streams of sound, the interwoven streams of congruous and equivalent lights, that flowed on tunelessly from one sequence to another. And every phrase of this well-worn familiar music was an unprecedented revelation of beauty that went pouring upwards, like a multitudinous fountain, into another revelation as novel and amazing as itself. Stream within stream — the stream of the solo violin, the streams of the two recorders, the manifold streams of the harpsichord and the little orchestra of assorted strings. Separate, distinct, individual — and yet each of the stream was a function of all the rest, each was itself in virtue of its relationship to the whole of which it was a component.
121 Ile, p. 357-358 ; Island, p. 276-277.
122 knowledgeless understanding.
123 Ibid., p. 279.
124 Ibid., p. 278.
125 Cf. ibid., p. 275.
126 out of no-what nowhere into something somewhere.
127 Ibid., p. 278.
128 What a jolly little rococo deathmarch ! Left, right ; left, right…
129 Ibid., p. 284.
130 hell beyond hell of utterly pointless suffering.
131 ibid., p. 285.
132 which is sometimes considerably more difficult.
133 Ibid., p. 288.
134 Point Counter Point, p. 29-30. Il s’agit de la description de la sarabande de la suite en si mineur de J.S. Bach.
135 It is a beauty, a goodness, a unity that no intellectual research can discover, that analysis dispels, but of whose reality the spirit is from time to time suddenly and overwhelmingly convinced. A girl singing to herself under the clouds suffices to create the certitude. Even a fine morning is enough. Is it illusion or the revelation of profoundest truth? Who knows? Pongileoni blew, the fiddlers drew their rosined horse-hair across the stretched intestines of lambs; through the long Sarabande the poet slowly meditated his lovely and consoling certitude.
136 Contrepoint, p. 36 ; Point Counter Point, p. 30.
137 Cf. ibid., p. 31.
138 Evil is the accentuation of division; good, whatever makes for unity with other lives and other beings.
139 Eyeless in Gaza, p. 386.
140 Cf. ibid.
141 It’s all like music; harmonies and counterpoint and modulations.
142 Point Counter Point, p. 35.
143 Cf. Ape and Essence, p. 140.
144 Cf. Eyeless in Gaza, p. 387.
145 From one argument to another, step by step, towards a consummation where there is no more discourse, only experience, only unmediated knowledge, as of a colour, a perfume, a musical sound.
146 Ibid., p. 399.
147 unity beyond the turmoil of separations and divisions.
148 Ibid., p. 388.
149 skate about cheerfully on the surface.
150 Those Barren Leaves, p. 312.
151 the cloudless heaven perceived by another sense.
152 The Desert dans le recueil Adonis and the Alphabet (Collected Essays, p. 19). Cf. Juliette HUXLEY dans le Memorial Volume, p. 50.
153 The bulldozers roar, the concrete is mixed and poured, the jet planes go crashing through the air, the rockets soar aloft with their cargoes of white mice and electronic instruments. And yet for all this, «nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.» And not merely the dearest, but the strangest, the most wonderfully unlikely.
154 The Desert (Collected Essays, p. 23).
155 Cf. les Collected Letters, p. 323-325, 375, 769, et 779-780. Huxley a souvent insisté sur le lien étroit entre l’art et la philosophie. Voir aussi A. DE VRIES, De muziek in het œuvre van Proust en Huxley, p. 987-990, et H. MONROE, La musique dans l’œuvre d’Aldous Huxley, p. 2 et 19.
156 goodness beyond the possibility of evil.
157 Eyeless in Gaza, p. 388.
158 intangible in its complexity as the play of light on water.
159 a wave of human sound.
160 Y. MENUHIN dans le Memorial Volume, p. 88.
161 a little more John-Sebastian-like.
162 Eyeless in Gaza, p. 204
163 Whisk, whisk — and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk — and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem, and the Middle Kingdom — all were gone. Whisk — the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk…
164 Le meilleur des mondes, p. 52-53 ; Brave New World, p. 38.