Those Barren Leaves
Copyright© 2025 by Aldous Huxley
Chapter 3
In the course of the last few days the entries in Miss Thriplow’s note-book had changed their character. From being amorous they had turned mystical. Savage and mindless passion was replaced by quiet contemplation. De Lespinasse had yielded to de Guyon.
“Do you remember, darling Jim,” she wrote, “how, when we were ten, we used to discuss what was the sin against the Holy Ghost? I remember we agreed that using the altar as a W.C. was probably the unforgivable sin. It’s a great pity that it isn’t, for then it would be so extremely easy to avoid committing it. No, I’m afraid it’s not quite so straightforward as that, the sin against the Holy Ghost. And it’s most perilously easy to fall into it. Stifling the voices inside you, filling the mind with so much earthy rubbish that God has no room to enter it, not giving the spirit its fair chance—that’s the sin against the Holy Ghost. And it’s unforgivable because it’s irremediable. Last-minute repentances are no good. The sin and the corresponding virtue are affairs of a lifetime. And almost everybody commits the sin; they die unforgiven, and at once they begin again another life. Only when they’ve lived in the virtue of the Holy Ghost are they forgiven, let off the pains of life and allowed to sink into unity with All. Isn’t that the meaning of the text? It’s terribly difficult not to commit the sin. Whenever I stop to think, I am appalled by the badness of my own life. Oh, Jim, Jim, how easily one forgets, how unthinkingly one allows oneself to be buried under a mountain of little earthy interests! The voices are muffled, the mind is blocked up, there’s no place for the spirit of God. When I’m working, I feel it’s all right; I’m living in the virtue of the Holy Ghost. For then I’m doing the best I can. But the rest of the time, that’s when I go wrong. One can’t be doing all the time, one can’t always give out. One must also be passive, must receive. That’s what I fail to do. I flutter about, I fill my mind with lumber, I make it impossible for myself to receive. One can’t go on like this; one can’t go on sinning against the Holy Ghost—not if one once realises it.”
There was a line. The next note began: “To think steadily and intensely of one thing is a wonderful mental exercise; it serves to open up the mysteries that lie below the commonplace surface of existence; and perhaps, if one went on thinking long enough and hard enough, one might get through the mystery to its explanation. When I think, for example, of my hand...” The note was a long one; it covered, in Miss Thriplow’s clear, cultured writing, more than two pages of the book.
“Recently,” she had written after that, “I have been saying my prayers again, as I used to when I was a child. Our Father which art in heaven—the words help to clear out one’s mind, to rid it of the lumber and leave it free for the coming of the spirit.”
The next three notes had got there by mistake. Their place was not in the secret, personal book, but in the other volume, wherein she recorded little snippets that might come in useful for her novels. Not, of course, that the entries in the secret book didn’t also come in useful for her fiction sometimes; but they were not recorded expressly for that purpose.
“A man in riding breeches,” the first note ran: “he makes a little creaking noise as he walks along, whipcord rubbing against whipcord, that is like the creaking noise that swans make, flying, when they move their big white wings.”
Then followed two lines of comic dialogue.
“Me. I find the Fall of the House of Usher a most blood-curdling story.
“Frenchman. Yes, yes, she bloods my curdle also.”
The third note recorded that “moss after a shower on a sultry day is like a sponge still damp from the hot bath.”
There followed a corollary to the note on prayer. “There is no doubt,” she had written, “that the actual technique of prayer—the kneeling, the hiding the face in the hands, the uttering of words in an audible voice, the words being addressed into empty space—helps by its mere dissimilarity from the ordinary actions of everyday life to put one into a devout frame of mind...”
To-night she sat for some time in front of the open book, pen in hand, without writing anything. She frowned pensively and bit the end of her pen. In the end she put it on record that “St. Augustine, St. Francis and St. Ignatius Loyola lived dissolute lives before their conversions.” Then, opening her other, her un-secret note-book, she wrote: “X and Y are old friends from childhood. X dashing, Y timid; Y admires X. Y marries, while X is at the war, a passionate creature who takes Y more out of pity (he is wounded) than from love. There is a child. X returns, falls in love with Y’s wife, A. Great passion amid growing anguish of mind—on her part because she is deceiving Y, whom she likes and respects, and daren’t undeceive him for fear of losing the child; on his part because he feels that he ought to give up all this sort of thing and devote himself to God, etc.; in fact, he feels the premonitions of conversion. One night they decide that the time has come to part; it can’t go on—she because of the deception, he because of mysticism, etc. It is a most touching scene, lasting all a last chaste night. Unfortunately Y finds out for some reason—baby ill, or something of the kind—that A is not staying at her mother’s as she said, but is elsewhere. Early in the morning Y comes to X’s flat to ask him to help in the search for A. Sees A’s coat and hat lying on the drawing-room sofa; understands all. In a fury flies at X, who, defending himself, kills him. The end. Question, however; doesn’t it end with too much of a click? too epigrammatically, so to speak? I wonder whether in this twentieth century one can permit oneself the luxury of such effective dramatic devices. Oughtn’t one to do it more flatly, somehow? More terre-à-terreishly, more real-lifeishly? I feel that a conclusion like that is almost an unfair advantage taken at the reader’s expense. One ought to arrange it differently. But the question is, how? Can one let them separate and show them living, she en bonne mère de famille, he as a coenobite? It would drag it out terribly, wouldn’t it? Must think of this carefully.”
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