Aldous Huxley

“ Viveash smiled her agonizing smile, nodded slowly and said, “Perhaps. And one doesn’t die, you know. One doesn’t die.”
Lypiatt was leaning back, staring fixedly up at her. The tears were dry on his face, his cheeks were flushed. “Do you know what it is,” he asked, “to love so much, that you begin to long for the anodyne of physical pain to quench the pain in the soul? You don’t know that.” And suddenly, with his clenched fist, he began to bang the wooden dais on which he was kneeling, blow after blow, with all his strength. ”

“ Mrs. Viveash leant forward and tried to arrest his hand. “You’re mad, Casimir,” she said. “You’re mad. Don’t do that.” She spoke with anger.
Lypiatt laughed till his face was all broken up with the grimace, and proffered for her inspection his bleeding knuckles. The skin hung in little white tags and tatters, and from below the blood was slowly oozing up to the surface. “Look,” he said, and laughed again. Then suddenly, with an extraordinary agility, he jumped to his feet, bounded from the dais and began once more to stride up and down the fairway between his easel and the door. ”

“ He picked up the unfinished portrait and adjusted it on the easel. “I’ve wasted a lot of time,” he said, “and there isn’t, after all, so much of it to waste.” He spoke gloomily, and his whole person had become, all of a sudden, curiously shrunken and deflated. “There isn’t so much of it,” he repeated, and sighed. “I still think of myself as a young man, young and promising, don’t you know. Casimir Lypiatt—it’s a young, promising sort of name, isn’t it? But I’m not young, I’ve passed the age of promise. Every now and then I realize it, and it’s painful, it’s depressing.” ”

“ And could I have painted that portrait if I hadn’t loved you, if you weren’t killing me?”
Ah, Bonomelli and illustrious Cinzano!
“Passionately I paint passion. I draw life out of life. And I wish them joy of their bottles and their Canadian apples and their muddy table napkins with the beastly folds in them that look like loops of tripe.” Once more Lypiatt disintegrated himself with laughter; then was silent.
Mrs. Viveash nodded, slowly and reflectively. “I think you’re right,” she said. Yes, he was surely right; there must be life, life was the important thing. ”

“ It blows me along in the teeth of opposing fate, it makes me work on, fight on.” He was like a man who walks along a sinister road at night and sings to keep up his own spirits, to emphasize and magnify his own existence. “And when I paint, when I write or improvise my music, it bends the things I have in my mind, it pushes them in one direction, so that everything I do has the look of a tree that streams north-east with all its branches and all its trunk from the root upwards, as though it were trying to run from before the Atlantic gale.” ”

“ Lypiatt continued to walk back and forth, waving his arms as he walked.
“But perhaps it’s good for one to suffer,” he went on, “perhaps it’s unavoidable and necessary. Perhaps I ought to thank you. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?” He halted in front of her, with arms extended in a questioning gesture. Mrs. Viveash slightly shrugged her shoulders. ”

“ You passed under an archway of bald and sooty brick—and at night, when the green gas-lamp underneath the arch threw livid lights and enormous architectural shadows, you could fancy yourself at the entrance of one of Piranesi’s prisons—and you found yourself in a long cul-de-sac, flanked on either side by low buildings, having stabling for horses below and, less commodiously, stabling for human beings in the attics above. ”

“ Lypiatt went on. He took down the canvas that was clamped to the easel and held it out for her inspection. It was one of Casimir’s abstract paintings: a procession of machine-like forms rushing up diagonally from right to left across the canvas, with as it were a spray of energy blowing back from the crest of the wave towards the top right-hand corner. “In this painting,” he said, “I symbolize the Artist’s conquering spirit—rushing on the universe, making it its own.” ”

“ Viveash could almost have laughed.
He began once more to kiss her hand.
“Beautiful and enchanting Myra—you were always that. But now you’re good and dear as well, now I know you’re kind.”
“Poor Casimir!” she said. Why was it that people always got involved in one’s life? If only one could manage things on the principle of the railways! Parallel tracks—that was the thing. For a few miles you’d be running at the same speed. There’d be delightful conversation out of the windows; you’d exchange the omelette in your restaurant car for the vol-au-vent in theirs. ”

“ No, decidedly, she never laughed. She wondered why she still went on seeing him. Simply because one must see some one? or why? “Are you going to go on with my portrait?” she asked.
Lypiatt sighed. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose I’d better be getting on with my work. Work—it’s the only thing. ‘Portrait of a Tigress.’” The cynical Titan spoke again. “Or shall I call it, ‘Portrait of a Woman who has never been in Love?’”
“That would be a very stupid title,” said Mrs. Viveash.
“Or, ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Heart Disease’? ”

“ I can give them back as good as they give me. It’s their power of silence and indifference, it’s their capacity for making themselves deaf. Here am I with something to say to them, something important and essential. ”