"Aldous Huxley - The Doors Of Perception" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huxley Aldous)

jeweled books in the shelves, at the legs of my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair. "This is how one
ought to see, how things really are." And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this,
one would never want to do anything else. Just looking, just being the divine Not-self of flower, of
book, of chair, of flannel. That would be enough. But in that case what about other people? What about
human relations? In the recording of that morning's conversations I find the question constantly repeated,
"What about human relations?" How could one reconcile this timeless bliss of seeing as one ought to see
with the temporal duties of doing what one ought to do and feeling as one ought to feel? "One ought to
be able," I said, "to see these trousers as infinitely important and human beings as still more infinitely
important." One ought-but in practice it seemed to be impossible. This participation in the manifest glory
of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence, above
all for concerns involving persons. For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-
self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-
self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of
other selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of the
categories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant. Compelled by the investigator to
analyze and report on what I was doing (and how I longed to be left alone with Eternity in a flower,
Infinity in four chair legs and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!), I realized that I was
deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with me in the room, deliberately refraining from being
too much aware of them. One was my wife, the other a man I respected and greatly liked; but both
belonged to the world from which, for the moment, mescalin had delivered me "e world of selves, of
time, of moral judgments and utilitarian considerations, the world (and it was this aspect of human life
which I wished, above all else, to forget) of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of overvalued words and
idolatrously worshiped notions.
At this stage of the proceedings I was handed a large colored reproduction of the well-known self-
portrait by C6zanne-the head and shoulders of a man in a large straw hat, red-cheeked, red-lipped,
with rich black whiskers and a dark unfriendly eye. It is a magnificent painting; but it was not as a
painting that I now saw it. For the head promptly took on a third dimension and came to life as a small
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goblin-like man looking out through a window in the page before me. I started to laugh. And when they
asked me why, "What pretensions!" I kept repeating. "Who on earth does he think he is?" The question
was not addressed to Cezanne in particular, but to the human species at large. Who did they all think
they were?
"It's like Arnold Bennett in the Dolomites," I said, suddenly remembering a scene, happily
immortalized in a snapshot, of A.B., some four or five years before his death, toddling along a wintry
road at Cortina d'Ampezzo. Around him lay the virgin snow; in the background was a more than gothic
aspiration of red crags. And there was dear, kind, unhappy A.B., consciously overacting the role of his
favorite character in fiction, himself, the Card in person. There he went, toddling slowly in the bright
Alpine sunshine, his thumbs in the armholes of a yellow waistcoat which bulged, a little lower down, with
the graceful curve of a Regency bow window at Brighton - his head thrown back as though to aim some
stammered utterance, howitzer-like, at the blue dome of heaven. What he actually said, I have forgotten;
but what his whole manner, air and posture fairly shouted was, "I'm as good as those damned
mountains." And in some ways, of course, he was infinitely better; but not, as he knew very well, in the
way his favorite character in fiction liked to imagine.
Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite
character in fiction. And the fact, the almost infinitely unlikely fact, of actually being Cezanne makes no
difference. For the consummate painter, with his little pipeline to Mind at Large by-passing the brain
valve and ego-filter, was also and just as genuinely this whiskered goblin with the unfriendly eye. For
relief I turned back to the folds in my trousers. "This is how one ought to see," I repeated yet again. And
I might have added,' 'These are the sort of things one ought to look at." Things without pretensions,
satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their Suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go