Carolina QuotesThe place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment's notice wherever the fancy may suggest — it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something — the house, Mrs. Inman, Dobbs, facetious Truby from the parsonage, the tulips in the garden, and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something — for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder?
Aldous Huxley Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Ch. 19
- work
- Point Counter Point (1928)
- year
- 1928
Cite this record
“The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated t…” Aldous Huxley. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-C942C7C2FF. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/c942c7c2ff
More from Aldous Huxley
Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man — a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create, and, having created, would become the battleground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry.
Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat — and the boat is perpetually sinking.
You can do everything with bayonets except sit on them. If you want to preserve your power indefinitely you have to get the consent of the ruled. And this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave new World", and partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious, and his deeper emotions, and his physiology, even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean I think this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations when they oughtn't be happy.