"Man, according to Blake (and, after him, according to Proust, according to Lawrence), is simply a succession of states. Good and evil can be predicated only of states, not of individuals, who in fact don’t exist, except as the places where the states occur.
It is the end of personality in the old sense of the word. Is it the beginning of a new kind of personality ? That of the total man, unbowdlerized, unselected, uncanalized, to change the metaphor, down any one particular drainpipe of Weltanschauung — of the man, in a word, who actually is what he may be.
Such a man is the antithesis of any of the variants on the fundamental Christian man of our history. And yet in a certain sense he is also the realization of that ideal personality conceived by the Jesus of the Gospel. Like Jesus’s ideal personality, the total, unexpurgated, non-canalized man is:
(i) not pharisaic,
that is to say, not interested in convention and social position, not puffed up with the pride of being better than other men ;
(2) humble,
in his acceptance of himself, in his refusal to exalt himself above his human station ;
(3) poor in spirit,
inasmuch as “he” — his ego — lays no lasting claims on anything, is content with what, for a personality of the old type, would seem psychological and philosophical destitution ;
(4) like a little child,
in his acceptance of the immediate datum of experience for
its own sake, in his refusal to take thought for the morrow, in his readiness to let the dead bury their dead ;
(5) not a hypocrite or a liar,
since there is no fixed model which individuals must pretend to be like.
(s 145, Eyeless in Gaza)
Under Huxley's ofta häftiga utfall mot kristendomen, eller kyrkan, döljer sig längtan, misstänker jag, att "vända botten uppåt", ett uttryck Anders Frostensson, psalmskrivaren, lärde mig en gång när vi plockade hallon i Torrbo, i Dalarna.
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