Vexing Huxley
Hmm.
Grappling with Aldous is quite some thing - all in its own class.
'Eyeless in Gaza'. An extremely frustrating read, gets you all fickle and fretting and phasing out every 5 minutes to fumigate in the freezing balcony. Yet his observations are so penetrating, cutting so deep into the psyche of each of his characters, with such a haunting cadence in his pace, populated with subtle byways into his fixations with the metaphysical, mystical and mesmeric.
Nothing escapes his incisive nib - children, men with scattered emotional lives, women with dubious morality, the social theatre and such. The most devastating aspect is his understanding and rendering of the stress and strain of fragile innocence, and the ungainly gait of growing up while losing step with the deep rivers of one's soul, in the lives both infantile and juvenile.
Yet, his writing so feels like a grand rhythm in an overview, but with innocuousness all through upon close inspection...picture this: a mesmering necklace, handmade, painstaking, precious, but strung together with rare gems not quite matching either in character or contrast. Yet, somehow, they make sense and a beautiful necklace.
Except, when you wear it, Huxley's comprehension of the human life will turn it into a biting choker.
Sigh. The point remains, the case just won't rest:
Oh, be vexed with Huxley, and dare you veer away, but in vain.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
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2 comments:
There was a phase when Point Counterpoint was referred to as my 'Bible' by my sister! :)
hi Shankari. You made me glad, a reader who went through the blog till the first post.
Huxley, Woolf, Greene... incredible, incisive expressions. I can well see your sister's point, the counter point of which is that other, lowly souls like me should deter from labouring the point. :P
These chaps all get quite difficult and personal, the authors i mentioned. reason why i've stayed away from 'finnegan's wake' all these years.
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