A pack of snapshots in the hands of a lunatic

From Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (pg 17)

A chalk pit, a picture gallery, a brown figure in the sun, a skin, here, redolent of salt and smoke, and here (like Mary’s, he remembered) savagely musky.  Somewhere in the mind a lunatic shuffled a pack of snapshots and dealt them out at random, shuffled once more and dealt them out in different order, again and again, indefinitely.  There was no chronology.  The idiot remembered no distinction between before and after.  The pit was as real and vivid as the gallery.  That ten years separated flints from Gauguins was a fact, not given, but discoverable only on second thoughts by the calculating intellect.  The thirty-five years of his conscious life made themselves immediately known to him as a chaos – a pack of snapshots in the hands of a lunatic.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s