Posted by Kenneth Anderson:
Aldous Huxley
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_09_13-2009_09_19.shtml#1253412804
Ann Althouse mentions [1]looking for an Aldous Huxley quote. Here is
my favorite Aldous Huxley quote:
I have been told by an eminent academic critic that I am a sad
symptom of the failure of an intellectual class in time of crisis.
The implication being, I suppose, that the professor and his
colleagues are hilarious symptoms of success. The benefactors of
humanity deserve due honor and commemoration. Let us build a
Pantheon for professors. It should be located among the ruins of
one of the gutted cities of Europe or Japan, and over the entrance
to the ossuary I would inscribe, in letters six or seven feet high,
the simple words: Sacred to the memory of the world's educators. SI
MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS, CIRCUMSPICE.
This, from the preface to the second edition of Brave New World. Brave
New World was the first genuine adult literary novel I had ever read,
apart from science fiction such as Foundation; my brother brought it
home when I was in the fifth grade. I must have read the novel a
hundred times, and could recite lengthy passages from memory, without
exactly understanding everything. Well, without understanding a lot,
starting with the origin of 'Brave New World'. Or - something I
wondered about for several years even after I understood the American
version - "she was wonderfully pneumatic."
The preface was also the first true essay I ever read - I was deeply
impressed by the voice, even without understanding the context or
theme or what he was driving at. I understood that it was witty, and I
understood the cadence of his wit, years before I had any
understanding of the content. Another book that fell into exactly that
category, one that I read a year or two later, was Camus's The Fall. I
still remember phrases and sentences from it. "Modern man - he
fornicated and read the newspapers, and after that, if I may say so,
the subject was exhausted." It was a long time before I got the joke,
but I immediately knew that it was witty. I loved the cadence of
French wit before I understood what it was about.
References
1.
ttp://althouse.blogspot.com/2009/09/who-lives-longer-man-who-takes-heroin.html
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
