Tragedy and the Whole Truth

Aldous Huxley There were six of them, the best and bravest of the heros companions. Turning back from his post in the bows, Odysseus was in time to see them lifted, struggling, into the air, to hear their screams, the desperate repetition of his own name. The survivors could only look on helplessly, while Scylla at the mouth of her cave devoured them, still screaming, still stretching out their hands to me in the frightful struggle. And Odysseus adds that it was the most dreadful and lamentable sight he ever saw in all his explorings of the passes of the sea. We can believe it; Homers brief description (the too poetical simile is a later interpolation) convinces us. Later, the danger passed, Odysseus and his men went ashore for the night and, on the Sicilian beach, prepared their supperprepared it, says Homer, expertly. The Twelfth Book of the Odyssey concludes with these words. When they had satisfied their thirst and hunger, they thought of their dear companion s and wept, and in the midst of their tears sleep came gently upon them. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth how rarely the older literatures ever told it! Bits of the truth, yes; every good book gives us bits of the truth, would not be a good book if it did not. But the whole truth, no. Of the great writers of the past incredibly few have given us that. Homer the Homer of the Odysseyis one of those few. Truth? you question. For example, 2+2=4? Or Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837? Or light travels at the rate of 187,000 miles a second? No, obviously, you wont find much of that sort of thing in literature. The truth of which I was speaking just now is in fact no more than an acceptable verisimilitude. When the experiences recorded in a piece of literature correspond fairly closely with our own actual experiences, or with what I may call our potential experiences experiences, that is to say, which we feel (as the result of a more or less explicit process of inference from known facts) that we might have hadwe say, inaccurately no doubt: This piece of writing is true. But this, of course, is not the whole story. The record of a case in a text-book of psychology is scientifically true, insofar as it is an accurate account of particular events, But it might also strike the reader as being true with regard to himselfthat is to say, acceptable, probable, having a correspondence with his own actual or potential experiences. But a text-book of psychology, is not a work of artor only secondarily and incidentally a work of art. Mere verisimilitude, mere correspondence of experience recorded by the writer with experience remembered or imaginable by the reader, is not enough to make a work of art seem true. Good art possesses a kind of super-truthis more probable, more acceptable, more convincing than fact itself. Naturally; for the artist is endowed with a sensibility and a power of communication, a capacity to put things across, which events and the majority of people to w hom events happen, do not possess. Experience teaches only the teachable, who are by no means as numerous as Mrs. Micawbers papas

favourite proverb would lead us to suppose. Artists are eminently teachable and also eminently teachers. They receive from events much more than most men receive and they can transmit what they have received with a peculiar penetrative force, which drives their communication deep into the readers mind. One of our most ordinary reactions to a good piece of literary art is expre ssed in the formula: This is what I have always felt and thought, but have never been able to put clearly into words, even for myself.

II
We are now in a position to explain what we mean when we say that Homer is a writer who tells the Whole Truth. We mean that the experiences he records correspond fairly closely with our own actual or potential experiencesand correspond with our experiences not on a single limited sector, but all along the line of our physical and spiritual being. And we also mean that Homer records these experiences with a penetrative artistic force that makes them seem peculiarly acceptable and convincing. So much, then, for truth in literature. Homers, I repeat, is the Whole Truth. Consider how almost any other of the great poets would have concluded the story of Scyllas attack on the passing ship. Six men, remember, have been taken and devoured before the eyes of their friends. In any other poem but the Odyssey, what would the survivors have done? They, would, of course, have wept, even as Homer made them weep. But would they previously have cooked their supper and cooked it, whats more, in a masterly fashion? Would they previously have drunk and eaten to satiety? And after weeping, or actually while weeping, would they have dropped quietly off to sleep? No, they most certainly would not have done any of these things. They would simply have wept, lamenting their own misfortune and the horrible fate of their companions, and the Canto would have ended tragically on their tears. Homer, however, preferred to tell the Whole Truth. He knew that even the most cruelly bereaved must eat; that hunger is stronger than sorrow and that its satisfaction takes precedence even of tears. He knew that experts continue to act expertly, and to find satisfaction in their accomplishment, even when friends have just been eaten, even when the accomplishment is only cooking the supper. He knew that when the belly is full (and only when the belly is full) men can afford to grieve and that sorrow after supper is almost a luxury. And finally he knew that, even as hunger takes precedence of grief, so fatigue, supervening, cuts short its career and drowns it in a sleep all the sweeter for bringing forgetfulness of bereavement. In a word, Homer refused to treat the theme tragically. He preferred to tell the Whole Truth. Another author who preferred to tell the Whole Truth was Fielding. Tom Jones is one of the very few Odyssean books written in Europe between the time of Aeschylus and the present age; Odyssean,

because never tragical; nevereven when painful and disastrous, even when pathetic and beautiful things are happening. For they do happen; Fielding, like Homer, admits all the facts, shirks nothing. Indeed, it is precisely because these authors shirk nothing that their books are not tragical. For among the things they dont shirk are the irrelevancies which, in actual life, always temper the situations and characters that writers of tragedy insist on keeping chemically, pure. Consider, for example, the case of Sophy Western, that most charming, most nearly perfect of young women. Fielding, it is obvious, adored her; (she is said to have been created in the image of his first, much-loved wife). But in spite of his adoration, he refused to turn her into one of those chemically pure and, as it were, focussed beings who do and suffer in the world of tragedy. That innkeeper who lifted the weary Sophia from her horsewhat need had he to fall? In no tragedy would he (nay, could he) have collapsed beneath her weight. For, to begin with, in the tragical context weight is an irrelevance; heroines should be above the law of gravitation. But that is not all; let the reader now remember what were the results of his fall. Tumbling flat on his back, he pulled Sophia down on top of himhis belly was a cushion, so that happily she came to no bodily harm pulled her down head first. But head first is necessarily legs last; there was a momentary display of the most ravishing charms; the bumpkins at the inn door grinned or guffawed; poor Sophia, when they picked her up, was blushing in an agony, of embarrassment and wounded modesty. There is nothing intrinsically improbable about this incident, which is stamped, indeed, with all the marks of literary truth. But however true, it is an incident which could never, never have happened to a heroine of tragedy. It would never have been allowed to happen. But Fielding refused to impose the tragedians veto; he shirked nothingneither the intrusion of irrelevant absurdities into the midst of romance or disaster, nor any of lifes no less irrelevantly painful interruptions of the course of happiness. He did not want to be a tragedian. And, sure enough, that brief and pearly gleam of Sophias charming posterior was sufficient to scare the Muse of Tragedy out of Tom Jones, just as, more than five and twenty centuries before, the sight of stricken men first eating, then remembering to weep, then forgetting their tears in slumber had scared her out of the Odyssey.

III
In his Principles of Literary Criticism Mr. I. A. Richards affirms that good tragedy is proof against irony and irrelevancethat it can absorb anything into itself and still remain tragedy. Indeed, he seems to make of this capacity to absorb the un-tragical and the anti-tragical a touchstone of tragic merit. Thus tried, practically all Greek, all French, and most Elizabethan tragedies are found wanting. Only the best of Shakespeare can stand the test. So, at least, says Mr. Richards. Is he right? I have often had my doubts. The tragedies of Shakespeare are veined, it is true, with irony and an often terrifying cynicism; but the

cynicism is always heroic idealism turned neatly inside out, the irony is a kind of photographic negative of heroic romance. Turn Troiluss white into black and all his blacks into white and you have Thersites. Reversed, Othello and Desdemona become Iago. White Ophelias negative is the irony of Hamlet, is the ingenuous bawdry of her own mad songs; just as the cynicism of mad King Lear is the black shadowreplica of Cordelia. Now, the shadow, the photographic negative of a thing is in no sense irrelevant to it. Shakespeares ironies and cynicisms serve to deepen his tragic world, but not to widen it. If they had widened it, as the Homeric irrelevancies widened out the universe of the Odysseywhy, then, the world of Shakespearean tragedy would automatically have ceased to exist. For example, a scene showing the bereaved Macduff eating his supper, growing melancholy, over the whisky, with thoughts of his murdered wife and children, and then, with lashes still wet, dropping off to sleep, would be true enough to life; but it would not be true to tragic art. The introduction of such a scene would change the whole quality of the play; treated in this Odyssean style, Macbeth would cease to be a tragedy. Or take the case of Desdemona. Iagos bestially cynical remarks about her character are in no sense, as we have seen, irrelevant to the tragedy. They present us with negative images of her real nature and of the feelings she has for Othello. These negative images are always hers, are always recognizably the property of the heroine-victim of a tragedy. Whereas, if, springing ashore at Cyprus, she had tumbled, as the no less exquisite Sophia was to tumble, and revealed the inadequacies of sixteenth-century underclothing, the play would no longer be the Othello we know. Iago might breed a family of little cynics and the existing dose of bitterness and savage negation be doubled and trebled; Othello would still remain fundamentally Othello. But a few Fieldingesque irrelevancies would destroy itdestroy it, that is to say, as a tragedy; for there would be nothing to prevent it from becoming a magnificent drama of some other kind. For the fact is that tragedy and what I have called the Whole Truth are not compatible; where one is, the other is not. There are certain things which even the best, even Shakespearean tragedy cannot absorb into itself. To make a tragedy, the artist must isolate a single element out of the totality of human experience and use that exclusively as his material. Tragedy is something that is separated out from the Whole Truth, distilled from it, so to speak, as an essence is distilled from the living flower. Tragedy is chemically pure. Hence its power to act quickly and intensely on our feelings. All chemically pure art has this power to act upon us quickly and intensely. Thus, chemically pure pornography (on the rare occasions when it happens to be written convincingly, by someone who has the gift of putting things across) is a quick-acting emotional drug of incomparably greater power than the Whole Truth about sensuality, or even (for many people) than the tangible and carnal reality itself. It is because of its chemical purity that tragedy so effectively performs its function of catharsis. It refines and corrects and gives a style to our emotional life,

and does so swiftly, with power. Brought into contact with tragedy, the elements of our being fall, for the moment at any rate, into an ordered and beautiful pattern, as the iron filings arrange themselves under the influence of the magnet. Through all its individual variations, this pattern is always fundamentally of the same kind. From the reading or the hearing of a tragedy we rise with the feeling that Our friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and mans unconquerable mind; with the heroic conviction that we too would be unconquerable if subjected to the agonies, that in the midst of the agonies we too should continue to love, might even learn to exult. It is because it does these things to us that tragedy is felt to be so valuable. What are the values of Wholly-Truthful art? What does it do to us that seems worth doing? Let us try to discover. Wholly-Truthful art overflows the limits of tragedy and shows us, if only by hints and implications, what happened before the tragic story began, what will happen after it is over, what is happening simultaneously elsewhere (and elsewhere includes all those parts of the minds and bodies of the protagonists not immediately engaged in the tragic struggle). Tragedy is an arbitrarily isolated eddy on the surface of a vast river that flows on majestically, irresistibly, around, beneath, and to either side of it. Wholly-Truthful art contrives to imply the existence of the entire river as well as of the eddy. It is quite different from tragedy, even though it may contain, among other constituents, all the elements from which tragedy is made. (The same thing placed in different contexts, loses its identity and beco mes, for the perceiving mind, a succession of different things.) In Wholly-Truthful art the agonies may be just as real, love and the unconquerable mind just as admirable, just as important, as in tragedy. Thus, Scyllas victims suffer as painfully as the monster-devoured Hippolytus in Phdre; the mental anguish of Tom Jones when he thinks he has lost his Sophia, and lost her by, his own fault, is hardly less than that of Othello after Desdemonas murder. (The fact that Fieldings power of putting things across is by no means equal to Shakespeares, is, of course, merely an accident.) But the agonies and indomitabilities are placed by the Wholly-Truthful writer in another, wider context, with the result that they cease to be the same as the intrinsically identical agonies and indomitabilities of tragedy. Consequently, Wholly-Truthful art produces in us an effect quite different from that produced by tragedy. Our mood, when we have read a Wholly-Truthful book is never one of heroic exultation; it is one of resignation, of acceptance. (Acceptance can also be heroic.) Being chemically impure, Wholly-Truthful literature cannot move us as quickly and intensely as tragedy or any other kind of chemically pure art. But I believe that its effects are more lasting. The exultations that follow the reading or hearing of a tragedy are in the nature of temporary inebriations. Our being cannot long hold the pattern imposed by tragedy. Remove the magnet and the filings tend to fall back into confusion. But the pattern of acceptance and resignation imposed

upon us by Wholly-Truthful literature, though perhaps less unexpectedly beautiful in design, is (for that very reason perhaps) more stable. The catharsis of tragedy is violent and apocalyptic; but the milder catharsis of Wholly-Truthful literature is lasting.

IV
In recent times literature has become more and more acutely conscious of the Whole Truth of the great oceans of irrelevant things, events, and thoughts stretching endlessly away in every direction from whatever island point (a character, a story) the author may, choose to contemplate. To impose the kind of arbitrary limitations which must be imposed by anyone who wants to write a tragedy has become more and more difficultis now indeed, for those who are at all sensitive to contemporaneity, almost impossible. This does not mean, of course, that the modern writer must confine himself to a merely naturalistic manner. One can imply the existence of the Whole Truth without laboriously cataloguing every object within sight. A book can be written in terms of pure phantasy and yet, by implication, tell the Whole Truth. Of all the important works of contemporary literature not one is a tragedy. There is no contemporary writer of significance who does not prefer to state or imply, the Whole Truth. However different one from another in style, in ethical, philosophical, and artistic intentions, in the scales of values accepted, contemporary writers have this in common, that they are interested in the Whole Truth. Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Andre Gide, Kafka, Hemingwayhere are five obviously significant and important contemporary writers. Five authors as remarkably unlike one another as they could well be. They, are as one only in this: that none of them has written a pure tragedy, that all are concerned with the Whole Truth. I have sometimes wondered whether tragedy, as a form of art, may not be doomed. But the fact that we are still profoundly moved by the tragic masterpieces of the past that we can be moved, against our better judgment, even by the bad tragedies of the contemporary stage and filmmakes me think that the day of chemically pure art is not over. Tragedy happens to be passing through a period of eclipse, because all the significant writers of our age are too busy exploring the newly discovered, or re-discovered, world of the Whole Truth to be able to pay any attention to it. But there is no good reason to believe that this state of things will last for ever. Tragedy is too valuable to be allowed to die. And there is no reason, after all, why the two kinds of literaturethe Chemically Impure and the Chemically Pure, the literature of the Whole Truth and the literature of Partial Truthshould not exist simultaneously, each in its separate sphere. The human spirit has need of both.
"...'A thing which poesy seldom mentions': in an essay called Tragedyand the Whole Truth, Aldous

Huxley argued that (pure) tragedy does not tell the whole truth, because in it people weep and grieve, whereas in real life 'even the most cruelly bereaved must eat,' for 'hunger is stronger than sorrow' and 'its satisfaction takes precedence even of tears'. As an example of a writer telling the whole truth, Huxley cites the aftermath of Scylla's attack on Odysseus' ship in Homer, when the survivors expertly prepare and eat their dinner, before they weep for their dead companions. " Huxley is saying that, no matter how intense or powerful a piece of drama or tragedy, it is, at best, an artful distillation of human experience, uncluttered, or strategically stripped, after the fact, by the mundane necessities of human existence. History records that Lincoln was shot by Booth, but makes no mention of whether Booth might have made a cleaner getaway, if his bladder hadn't been full, from drinking in the bar next door for an hour before shooting the President, thus necessitating a greater urgency to escape in Booth than he might otherwise have felt, had he not needed to relieve himself, too. Perhaps Booth wouldn't have leapt to the stage from the Presidential box, breaking his leg, had he not been feeling Nature's urgent call, on top his assassin's desperation. Perhaps if he'd have run back down the stairs instead, and then walked slowly and coolly out the front entrance of Ford's Theater, he'd have got away, and we wouldn't know his name today. But history doesn't record such, and tragedy can't discuss it, for such considerations are mundane, and pull the mind down, below tragedy's claim on higher sensibilities. Aldous Leonard Huxley /hksli/ (26 July 1894 22 November 1963) was an English writer and a prominent member of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism,[1][2] in particularVivekananda's NeoVedanta and Universalism.[3] He is also well known for his use ofpsychedelic drugs. By the end of his life Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.[4]
Contents
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1 Early life 2 Career

o o o

2.1 Bloomsbury set 2.2 United States 2.3 Post World War II

3 Association with Vedanta 4 Eyesight 5 Personal life 6 Death 7 Awards 8 Film adaptations of Huxley's work

9 Selected works

o o o o o o o o o o o

9.1 Novels 9.2 Short story collections 9.3 Poetry collections 9.4 Essay collections 9.5 Screenplays 9.6 Travel books 9.7 Children's fiction 9.8 Drama 9.9 Articles written for Vedanta and the West 9.10 Audio Recordings on CD 9.11 Other

10 See also 11 References 12 Sources 13 Further reading 14 External links

Early life[edit]
See also: Huxley family Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England, in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxleyand his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. Julia was the niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the sister ofMrs. Humphrey Ward. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog"). His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevelyan Huxley (18911914), who committed suicide after a period of clinical depression.[5] Huxley began his learning in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued in a school namedHillside[disambiguation needed]. His teacher was his mother, who supervised him for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908 when he was 14. In 1911, he suffered an illness (keratitis punctata) which "left [him] practically blind for two to three years".[6] Aldous volunteered to join the army at the outbreak of the First World War, but was rejected on health grounds: he was half-blind in one eye. Once his eyesight recovered sufficiently, he was able to study English literature at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1916 he edited Oxford Poetry and later graduated (B.A.) with first class honours. His brother Julian wrote, I believe his blindness was a blessing in disguise. For one thing, it put paid to his idea of taking up medicine as a career ... His uniqueness lay in his universalism. He was able to take all knowledge for his province.[7]

Following his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living. He taught French for a year atEton, where Eric Blair (later to become George Orwell) and Stephen Runciman were among his pupils, but was remembered as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldnt keep discipline. Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words.[8]For a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at the Air Ministry. Significantly, Huxley also worked for a time in the 1920s at the technologically advanced Brunner and Mond chemical plant inBillingham, Teesside, and the most recent introduction to his famous science fiction novel Brave New World (1932) states that this experience of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was one source for the novel.[9]

Huxley-Arnold Family Tree (partial)

Thomas Arnold 17951842 Matthew Arnold 18221888 Mary Augusta Ward 18511920 Trevelyan Huxley 18911914 Julian Huxley 18871975 Mary Penrose 17911873 Tom Arnold 18231900 Julia Arnold 18621908

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George Huxley Thomas Henry Huxley 18251895 Leonard Huxley 18601933 Rosalind Bruce 18901994 Laura Archera 1911 2007 Ann Heathorn 18251915 Jessie Huxley 18561927 David Bruce Huxley 19151992 Andrew Huxley 1917 2012 Richenda Pease 19252003

Maria Nys 18991955 Matthew Huxley 19202005

Aldous Huxley 18941963

Career[edit]
Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early 20s. His first published novels were social satires, beginning with Crome Yellow (1921).

Bloomsbury set[edit]

Left to right: Bloomsbury Group members Lady Ottoline Morrell, Maria Nys, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell.

During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. Here he met several Bloomsbury figures including Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell.

Later, in Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. Jobs were very scarce, but in 1919 Middleton Murray was reorganizing the Athenaeum and invited Huxley to join the staff. He accepted immediately, and quickly married the Belgian refugee Maria Nys, also at Garsington. [10] They lived with their young son in Italy part of the time in the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1933). Works of this period included important novels on the dehumanising aspects of scientific progress, most famously Brave New World, and on pacifist themes (for example, Eyeless in Gaza). In Brave New World Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander and included him as a character in Eyeless in Gaza. Starting from this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including Ends and Means, An Encyclopedia of Pacifism, and Pacifism and Philosophy, and was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union.[11]

United States[edit]
In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, with his wife Maria, son Matthew, and friend Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S., mainly in southern California, until his death, but also for a time in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote Ends and Means (published in 1937). In this work he examines the fact that although most people in modern civilisation agree that they want a world of "liberty, peace, justice, and brotherly love", they have not been able to agree on how to achieve it. Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta (Upanishad-centered philosophy), meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa. In 1938 Huxley befriended J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He also became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu SwamiPrabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world. Huxley's book affirmed a sensibility that insists there are realities beyond the generally accepted "five senses" and that there is genuine meaning for humans beyond both sensual satisfactions and sentimentalities. Huxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of Occidental College. He spent much time at the college, which is in theEagle Rock neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The college appears as "Tarzana College" in his satirical novel After Many a Summer(1939). The novel won Huxley that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.[12] Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel. During this period Huxley earned some Hollywood income as a writer. In March 1938, his friend Anita Loos, a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer who hired Huxley for Madame Curie which was originally to star Greta Garbo and be directed by George Cukor. (The film was eventually completed by MGM in 1943 with a different director and cast.) Huxley received screen credit for Pride and Prejudice (1940) and was paid for his work on a number of other films, including Jane Eyre (1944). However, his success in Hollywood was minimal. When he wrote a synopsis of Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that "he could only understand every third word".[13] Huxley's leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable for the movie moguls, who demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all else. For Dick Huemer, during the 1940s, Huxley went to the first of a five meetings' session to elaborate the script of Alice in Wonderland but never came again.[14] For author John Grant, although the movie's character the Caterpillar displays some characteristics familiar from Huxley's discussion of his experiments with hallucinogens, Huxley's contribution to the movie is nonexistent.[15]

Huxley wrote an introduction to the posthumous publication of J.D. Unwin's 1940 book Hopousia or The Sexual and economic Foundations of a New Society.[16] On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". In his letter to Orwell, he predicted: Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.[17] Huxley had deeply felt apprehensions about the future the developed world might make for itself. From these he put forward some warnings in his writings and talks. In a 1958 televised interview conducted by journalist Mike Wallace, Huxley outlined several major concerns: the difficulties and dangers of world overpopulation; the tendency toward distinctly hierarchical social organization; the crucial importance of evaluating the use of technology in mass societies susceptible to wily persuasion; the tendency to promote modern politicians, to a naive public, as well-marketed commodities.[18]

Post World War II[edit]

After the Second World War, Huxley applied for United States citizenship. His application was continuously deferred on the grounds that he would not say he would take up arms to defend the U.S. He claimed a philosophical, rather than a religious objection, and therefore was not exempt under the McCarran Act.[19] He withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the country; and in 1959 he turned down an offer of a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government. During the 1950s, Huxley's interest in the field ofpsychical research grew keener, and his later works are strongly influenced by both mysticism and his experiences with psychedelic drugs. In October 1930, the English occultist Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion.[citation needed] He was introduced to mescaline (the key active ingredient of peyote) by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953, taking it for the first time during the evening of May 5.[20] Through Dr. Osmond, Huxley met millionaire Alfred Matthew Hubbard who would deal with LSD on a wholesale basis.[21] On 24 December 1955, Huxley took his first dose of LSD. Indeed, Huxley was a pioneer of self-directed psychedelic drug use "in a search for enlightenment". According to a letter written by his wife Laura, Huxley requested and received two intramuscular injections of 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying.[22] His psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays The Doors of Perception (the title deriving from some lines in the book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake), and Heaven and Hell. Some of his writings on psychedelics became frequent reading among early hippies.[23] While living in Los Angeles, Huxley was a friend of Ray Bradbury. According to Sam Weller's biography of Bradbury, the latter was dissatisfied with Huxley, especially after Huxley encouraged Bradbury to take psychedelic drugs.

Association with Vedanta[edit]

Beginning in 1939 and continuing until his death in 1963, Huxley had an extensive association with the Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded and headed by Swami Prabhavananda. Together with Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, and other followers he was initiated by the Swami and was taught meditation and spiritual practices.[3]

In 1944 Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God",[24] translated by Swami Prabhavanada and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by The Vedanta Society of Southern California. From 1941 through 1960 Huxley contributed 48 articles to Vedanta and the West, published by the Society. He also served on the editorial board with Isherwood, Heard, and playwright John van Druten from 1951 through 1962. Huxley also occasionally lectured at the Hollywood and Santa Barbara Vedanta temples. Two of those lectures have been released on CD: Knowledge and Understanding and Who Are We from 1955. After the publication of The Doors of Perception, Huxley and the Swami disagreed about the meaning and importance of the LSD drug experience, which may have caused the relationship to cool, but Huxley continued to write articles for the Society's journal, lecture at the temple, and attend social functions.

Eyesight[edit]
With respect to details about the true quality of Huxley's eyesight at specific points in his life, there are differing accounts. Around 1939, Huxley encountered the Bates Method for better eyesight, and a teacher, Margaret Corbett, who was able to teach him in the method. In 1940, Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a 40-acre (160,000 m2) ranchito in the high desert hamlet of Llano, California, in northernmost Los Angeles County. Huxley then said that his sight improved dramatically with the Bates Method and the extreme and pure natural lighting of the southwestern American desert. He reported that for the first time in over 25 years, he was able to read without glasses and without strain. He even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch. He wrote a book about his successes with the Bates Method, The Art of Seeing, which was published in 1942 (US), 1943 (UK). It was from this period, with the publication of the generally disputed theories contained in the latter book, that a growing degree of popular controversy arose over the subject of Huxleys eyesight. It was, and to a noticeable extent still is, widely held that, for most of his life, since the illness in his teens which left Huxley nearly blind, that his eyesight was exceedingly poor (despite the partial recovery which had enabled him to study at Oxford). For instance, some ten years after publication of The Art of Seeing, in 1952, Bennett Cerf was present when Huxley spoke at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and apparently reading his paper from the lectern without difficulty: "Then suddenly he falteredand the disturbing truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his address at all. He had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought the paper closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch or so away he still couldn't read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonising moment."[25] On the other hand, Huxley's second wife, Laura Archera Huxley, would later emphasise in her biographical account, This Timeless Moment: "One of the great achievements of his life: that of having regained his sight." After revealing a letter she wrote to the Los Angeles Times disclaiming the label of Huxley as a "poor fellow who can hardly see" by Walter C. Alvarez, she tempers this: "Although I feel it was an injustice to treat Aldous as though he were blind, it is true there were many indications of his impaired vision. For instance, although Aldous did not wear glasses, he would quite often use a magnifying lens."[26] Laura Huxley proceeds to elaborate a few nuances of inconsistency peculiar to Huxley's vision. Her account, in this respect, is discernibly congruent with the following sample of Huxley's own words from The Art of Seeing. "The most characteristic fact about the functioning of the total organism, or any part of the organism, is that it is not constant, but highly variable." Nevertheless, the topic of Huxleys eyesight continues to endure similar, significant controversy, regardless of how trivial a subject matter it might initially appear.[27]

Personal life[edit]

He married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 12 February 1955), a Belgian he met at Garsington, in 1919. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 10 February 2005), who had a career as an author, anthropologist, and prominent epidemiologist.[28] In 1955, Maria died of breast cancer. In 1956 he married Laura Archera (19112007), also an author. She wrote This Timeless Moment, a biography of Huxley. Laura felt inspired to illuminate the story of their provocative marriage through Mary Ann Braubach's 2010 documentary, "Huxley on Huxley".[29] In 1960 Aldous Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, and in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel Island,[30] and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the Esalen Institute, which were fundamental to the forming of the Human Potential Movement. Despite his interest in spirituality and mysticism, Huxley called himself an agnostic. [31] The most substantial collection of Huxley's few remaining papers (following the destruction of most in a fire) is at the Library of theUniversity of California, Los Angeles.[32] Some are also at the Stanford University Library.[33]

Death[edit]
On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife Laura for "LSD, 100 g, intramuscular". According to her account of his death[34] in This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and a second one a few hours later; Huxley died aged 69, at 5:20 pm on 22 November 1963. Media coverage of Huxley's passing was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day, as was the death of the British author C. S. Lewis, who also died on 22 November. This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley . Huxley's ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, a village nearGuildford, Surrey, England.[35] On 26 July 2013 a commemorative bench was unveiled there, donated by the Aldous and Laura Huxley Literary Trust and the International Aldous Huxley Society. Huxley had been a long-time friend of famous Russian composer Igor Stravinsky who later dedicated his last orchestral composition to Huxley. Stravinsky began 'Variations' in Santa F, New Mexico in July 1963, and completed the composition in Hollywood, California on 28 October 1964. It was first performed in Chicago on 17 April 1965, by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Robert Craft (Spies 1965, 62; White 1979, 534). The score is dedicated to the memory of Stravinsky's close friend Aldous Huxley, who died on 22 November 1963, when composition of the Variations was in progress (White 1979, 53637). Although not composed for the purpose, Stravinsky's music was twice choreographed for the New York City Ballet by George Balanchine, a first version in 1966, and a second version in 1982, both times under the title "Variations" (Barnes 1966; Anderson 1982). Huxley's literary legacy continues to be represented by the literary agency headed by Georges Borchardt.

Awards[edit]

1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. 1959 Aldous Huxley American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for Brave New World. 1962 the Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.[36]

Film adaptations of Huxley's work[edit]

1968: Point Counter Point BBC mini-series by Simon Raven 1971: The Devils (Ken Russell) adapted Huxley's The Devils of Loudun 1980: US TV adaptation of Brave New World 1998: US TV adaptation of Brave New World

Selected works[edit]
Novels[edit]

Crome Yellow (1921) Antic Hay (1923) Those Barren Leaves (1925) Point Counter Point (1928) Brave New World (1932) Eyeless in Gaza (1936) After Many a Summer (1939) Time Must Have a Stop (1944) Ape and Essence (1948) The Genius and the Goddess (1955) Island (1962)

Short story collections[edit]

Limbo (1920) Mortal Coils (1922) Little Mexican (U.S. title: Young Archimedes) (1924) Two or Three Graces (1926) Brief Candles (1930) Jacob's Hands: A Fable (discovered 1997) co-written with Christopher Isherwood Collected Short Stories (1944)

Poetry collections[edit]

Oxford Poetry (magazine editor) (1916) The Burning Wheel (1916) Jonah (1917) The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (1918) Leda (1920) Selected Poems (1925) Arabia Infelix and Other Poems (1929) The Cicadas and Other Poems (1931) Collected Poems (1971, posthumous)

Essay collections[edit]

On the Margin (1923) Along the Road (1925)

Essays New and Old (1926) Proper Studies (1927) Do What You Will (1929) Vulgarity in Literature (1930) Music at Night (1931) Texts and Pretexts (1932) The Olive Tree and other essays (1936) Ends and Means (1937) Words and their Meanings (1940) The Art of Seeing (1942) The Perennial Philosophy (1945) Science, Liberty and Peace (1946) Themes and Variations (1950) The Doors of Perception (1954) Heaven and Hell (1956) Adonis and the Alphabet (U.S. title: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) (1956) Collected Essays (1958) Brave New World Revisited (1958) Literature and Science (1963) Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience 1931 63 (1977) The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959 (1977)

Screenplays[edit]

Brave New World Ape and Essence Pride and Prejudice (Collaboration. 1940) Madame Curie (Collaboration. 1943) Jane Eyre (Collaboration with John Houseman. 1944) A Woman's Vengeance 1947 Original screenplay for Disney's animated Alice in Wonderland 1951 (rejected)[37] Eyeless in Gaza BBC Mini-series (Collaboration with Robin Chapman. Aired 1971)[38]

Travel books[edit]

Along The Road: Notes and essays of a tourist (1925) Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey (1926) Beyond the Mexique Bay: A Traveller's Journey (1934)

Children's fiction[edit]

The Crows of Pearblossom (1967) The Travails and Tribulations of Geoffrey Peacock (1967)

Drama[edit]

The Discovery (adapted from Francis Sheridan, 1924)

The World of Light (1931) Mortal Coils A Play. (Stage version of The Gioconda Smile, 1948) The Genius and the Goddess (stage version, co-written with Betty Wendel, 1958) The Ambassador of Captripedia (1967) Now More Than Ever (Huxley's lost play discovered in 2000 in the University of Mnster, Germany's Department of English Literature)

Articles written for Vedanta and the West[edit]

Distractions (1941) Distractions II (1941) Action and Contemplation (1941) An Appreciation (1941) The Yellow Mustard (1941) Lines (1941) Some Reflections of the Lord's Prayer (1941) Reflections of the Lord's Prayer (1942) Reflections of the Lord's Prayer II (1942) Words and Reality (1942) Readings in Mysticism (1942) Man and Reality (1942) The Magical and the Spiritual (1942) Religion and Time (1943) Idolatry (1943) Religion and Temperament (1943) A Note on the Bhagavatam (1943) Seven Meditations (1943) On a Sentence From Shakespeare (1944) The Minimum Working Hypothesis (1944) From a Notebook (1944) The Philosophy of the Saints (1944) That Art Thou (1945) That Art Thou II (1945) The Nature of the Ground (1945) The Nature of the Ground II (1945) God In the World (1945) Origins and Consequences of Some Contemporary Thought-Patterns (1946) The Sixth Patriarch (1946) Some Reflections on Time (1946) Reflections on Progress (1947) Further Reflections on Progress (1947) William Law (1947) Notes on Zen (1947) Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread (1948)

A Note on Gandhi (1948) Art and Religion (1949) Foreword to an Essay on the Indian Philosophy of Peace (1950) A Note on Enlightenment (1952) Substitutes for Liberation (1952) The Desert (1954) A Note on Patanjali (1954) Who Are We? (1955) Foreword to the Supreme Doctrine (1956) Knowledge and Understanding (1956) The "Inanimate" is Alive (1957) Symbol and Immediate Experience (1960)

Audio Recordings on CD[edit]

Knowledge and Understanding (1955) [39]<[40] Who Are We? (1955) [40][41]

Other[edit]

Pacifism and Philosophy (1936) An Encyclopedia of Pacifism (editor, 1937) Grey Eminence (1941) The Devils of Loudun (1953) The Politics of Ecology (1962) Selected Letters (2007)

Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH (1 January 1879 7 June 1970) was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect ... ". His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India (1924) brought him his greatest success.
Contents
[hide]

1 Early years 2 After A Passage to India 3 Novels 4 Critical reception 5 Key themes 6 Notable works by Forster

6.1 Short stories

o o o o o o o o

6.2 Plays and pageants 6.3 Film scripts 6.4 Libretto 6.5 Collections of essays and broadcasts 6.6 Literary criticism 6.7 Biography 6.8 Travel writing 6.9 Miscellaneous writings

7 Notable films based upon novels by Forster 8 Secondary works on Forster 9 References 10 External links

Early years[edit]
Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, in a building that no longer exists. He was the only child of Alice Clara "Lily" (ne Whichelo) and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, an architect. His name was officially registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but at his baptism he was accidentally named Edward Morgan Forster.[1] To distinguish him from his father, he was always called Morgan. His father died oftuberculosis on 30 October 1880, before Morgan's second birthday.[2] Among Forster's ancestors were members of the Clapham Sect, a social reform group within the Church of England. He inherited 8,000 (753,240 as of 2014)[3] from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died on 5 November 1887.[4] The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended the notable public school, Tonbridge School in Kent, as a day boy. The theatre at the school has been named in his honour.[5] At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901,[6] he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles(formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society). Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as theBloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey. After leaving university, he travelled in continental Europe with his mother. In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by which time he had written all but one of his novels.[7] In the First World War, as aconscientious objector, Forster volunteered for the International Red Cross, and served in Alexandria, Egypt. Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this period. After returning to London from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India(1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. He also edited Eliza Fay's (17561816) letters from India, in an edition first published in 1925.[8]

After A Passage to India[edit]

Arlington Park Mansions, Chiswick

In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the Union of Ethical Societies. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937. Forster was a homosexual (openly to his close friends, but not to the public) and a lifelong bachelor. [9] He developed a long-term, loving relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman.[10] Forster included Buckingham and his wife May in his circle, which included J. R. Ackerley, a writer and literary editor of The Listener, the psychologist W. J. H. Sprottand, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid. From 1925 until his mother's death at age 90 on 11 March 1945, Forster lived with her at West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving on or around 23 September 1946.[11] His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.[12][13] Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge, in January 1946,[12] and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953.[12] In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died of a stroke[14] on 7 June 1970 at the age of 91, at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry.[12]

Novels[edit]

The monument to Forster in Stevenage,Hertfordshire, near Rooks Nest where Forster grew up. He based the setting for his novel Howards End on this area, now informally known as Forster Country.

Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. He never finished a seventh novel,Arctic Summer. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). Philip Herriton's mission to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. Forster discussed that work ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted as a 1991 film directed by Charles Sturridge. Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappealing Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire, which introduce Rickie's wild halfbrother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started as early as 1901, before any of his others; its earliest versions are entitled "Lucy". The book explores the young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was adapted as a film in 1985 by theMerchantIvory team. Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share many themes with his short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). Critics have observed that numerous characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey. Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in his Preface to its Everyman's Library Edition. Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities[15] influenced his writing.

Critical reception[edit]
This section requires expansion. (August 2012)

In the United States, interest in, and appreciation for, Forster was spurred by Lionel Trilling's E. M. Forster: A Study, which began: E. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something (Trilling 1943).

Key themes[edit]
Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. His humanist attitude is expressed in the non-fictional essayWhat I Believe. When Forster's cousin, Philip Whichelo, donated a portrait of Forster to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association(GLHA), Jim Herrick, the founder, quoted Forster's words: "The humanist has four leading characteristics - curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race." Forster's two best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make human connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship. Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works. Some critics have argued that a general shift from heterosexual to homosexual love can be observed through the course of his writing career. The foreword

to Maurice describes his struggle with his homosexuality, while he explored similar issues in several volumes of short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death. Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for his attachment to mysticism. One example of his symbolism is the wych elm tree in Howards End. The characters of Mrs. Wilcox in that novel and Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past, and a striking ability to connect with people from beyond their own circles.

Notable works by Forster[edit]

===Novels===

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) The Longest Journey (1907) A Room with a View (1908) Howards End (1910) A Passage to India (1924) Maurice (written in 191314, published posthumously in 1971) Arctic Summer (an incomplete fragment, written in 191213, published posthumously in 2003) Book of Love

Short stories

The Celestial Omnibus (and other stories) (1911) The Eternal Moment and other stories (1928) Collected Short Stories (1947) a combination of the above two titles, containing:

"The Story of a Panic" "The Other Side Of The Hedge" "The Celestial Omnibus" "Other Kingdom" "The Curate's Friend" "The Road from Colonus" "The Machine Stops" "The Point of It" "Mr Andrews" "Co-ordination" "The Story of the Siren" "The Eternal Moment"

The Life to Come and other stories (1972) (posthumous) containing the following stories written between approximately 1903 and 1960:

"Ansell" "Albergo Empedocle" "The Purple Envelope" "The Helping Hand" "The Rock" "The Life to Come" "Dr Woolacott" "Arthur Snatchfold" "The Obelisk" "What Does It Matter? A Morality" "The Classical Annex" "The Torque" "The Other Boat" "Three Courses and a Dessert: Being a New and Gastronomic Version of the Old Game of Consequences"