Huxley zet de tijd even stil (5 en slot)

Tot besluit een bloemlezing uit de vele kernachtige passages in Huxleys roman' Time Must Have a Stop'.

‘Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets.’

‘Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.’

‘And then the Triumph of Education -- that deity to which his poor father had offered fifty thousand pounds and a Polytechnic Institute in yellow brick. Education, compulsory and gratuitous. Everybody had been taught to read, and the result was Northcliffe (staat voor de roddelpers - hk) and advertisements for cigarettes and laxatives and whiskey. Everybody went to school, and everywhere the years of schooling had been made a prelude to military conscription. And what fine courses in false history and self-congratulation! What a thorough grounding in the religions of nationalism! No God any more; but forty-odd Foreign Offices.’

'“Seek ye first all the rest” -- creditable virtues, social reform, instructive chats on the radio and the latest in scientific gadgets -- and some time in the twenty-first or twenty-second century the kingdom of God will be added.’

'To the surprise of Humanists and Liberal Churchmen, the abolition of God left a perceptible void. But Nature abhors vacuums. Nation, Class and Party, Culture and Art have rushed in to fill the empty niche. For politicians and for those of us who happen to be born with a talent, the new pseudo-religions have been, still are and (until they destroy the entire social structure) will continue to be extremely profitable superstitions. But regard them dispassionately, sub specie aeternitatis. How unutterably odd, silly and satanic!’

‘The world was full of septuagenarians playing at being in their thirties of even in their teens, when they ought to have been preparing for death, ought to have been trying to unearth the spiritual reality, which they have spent a lifetime burying under a mountain of garbage.’