Huxley×Vinci

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Aldous Huxley and Leonardo da Vinci, on On the rival they secretly suspected was right all along.
2. 00:09
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   You know, Leonardo, I've spent rather a lot of time thinking about rivals. Not enemies, mind you. Rivals. The people whose work made you clench your teeth a bit when you read it, because somewhere deep down you suspected they might be onto something you'd deliberately avoided.
3. 00:24
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   In Florence, we had a word for this. Well, many words. But yes, I understand. You speak of Michelangelo, I think?
4. 00:33
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Do I? I was rather thinking of my own ghosts. But do go on. Michelangelo's an excellent place to start.
5. 00:40
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   He was younger than me by twenty-three years. He carved marble as though he was releasing prisoners from stone. This is what he said, you know. That the figure already existed inside. I thought this was... how do you say... theatrical. Mystical nonsense.
6. 01:01
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   But?
7. 01:02
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   But I have had five hundred years to look at David. At the Pietà. At the ceiling he painted while lying on his back, in pain, going nearly blind. And I wonder if perhaps the mysticism was the point. If I was too busy measuring, calculating, dissecting, to understand that art is not only observation.
8. 01:28
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Ah. Yes. That's rather the thing, isn't it? I prided myself on observation too. Wrote Brave New World as a warning, you see. A satire. Here's what happens when we pursue pleasure and efficiency and soma and conditioning. Here's the nightmare of shallow happiness.
9. 01:44
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   But someone else saw it differently?
10. 01:46
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    George Orwell. 1984. Came out just after the war. Everyone immediately said, 'Oh, Huxley's bottles and Orwell's boots, two visions of dystopia, how fascinating.' But Orwell wrote me, actually. A letter. Said he thought his vision was nearer-term but mine was the ultimate destination.
11. 02:04
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    He thought you were correct?
12. 02:06
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    In the long run, yes. Pain and terror can only control people for so long. But pleasure? Distraction? Comfortable servitude? That's sustainable. And here's the uncomfortable bit. I spent years insisting I'd written a warning, not a prophecy. But Orwell understood something I was reluctant to admit.
13. 02:24
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Which was?
14. 02:25
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    That people might actually choose it. Not be forced into my brave new world, but select it themselves. Queue up for it. Orwell's boot stamping on a human face forever requires stamping. Exhausting work. My world just requires that we keep making comfort more comfortable. Rather easier, that.
15. 02:46
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    So he was your Michelangelo. He saw the passion, the violence, the rawness you had made elegant and cold?
16. 02:55
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Something like that. Though I wonder if I'm not giving him too much credit now, in retrospect. The man died of tuberculosis at forty-six, poor devil. Barely had time to see how the century would actually unfold. But yes. He wrote with a kind of... moral urgency I found rather embarrassing at the time. Crude, even.
17. 03:15
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    This is what I felt about Michelangelo. That his faith was crude. Too simple. He believed God spoke through his hands. I believed God, if God existed, had given us eyes and minds to understand the machinery of creation.
18. 03:33
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Did you believe? In God, I mean?
19. 03:35
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I believed in what I could see. The heart is a pump. Four chambers. I drew it. The child in the womb grows in a specific way. I drew that too. The Church said these were sacred mysteries. I said they were mechanics. Beautiful mechanics, yes, but understandable.
20. 03:57
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And Michelangelo said they were sacred mysteries and meant it.
21. 04:01
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. He would weep in front of his own work. Can you imagine? I never wept in front of mine. I abandoned paintings. Left them unfinished when the problem of light or perspective no longer interested me. He finished. Even the slaves, the unfinished prisoners in stone. Those are finished in their unfinishedness.
22. 04:26
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    You sound almost envious.
23. 04:27
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Perhaps. I designed a flying machine, you know. Many flying machines. On paper, they are perfect. I understood the birds. The way the wing cuts the air. The angle of descent. But I never built one. Never flew.
24. 04:46
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Whereas Michelangelo just... chiseled.
25. 04:48
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. Without understanding the mathematics of tension in marble. Without calculating stress fractures. He felt where to strike. And five hundred years later, people cry in front of the Pietà. They do not cry in front of my notebooks, no matter how accurate my drawings of the heart.
26. 05:10
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    That's rather beautifully put. And rather damning. Do you think he knew? That he was right and you were... I won't say wrong. Let's say, incomplete.
27. 05:19
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Oh, he knew. He called me a fraud once, did you know this? Said I was good at starting things and terrible at finishing them. He said this in public. In front of the Signoria.
28. 05:34
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Good Lord. What did you say?
29. 05:35
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I said he was a sculptor of naked men and nothing more. That his paintings were merely colored sculptures. That he understood nothing of sfumato, of aerial perspective, of the science of art.
30. 05:50
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    But?
31. 05:51
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But he did finish. The man finished. And his naked men have souls I could never quite capture. I painted the faces perfectly. Every muscle. Every shadow. But Michelangelo's Adam, reaching for God's finger. That is not anatomy. That is longing.
32. 06:12
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Did you ever tell him this? Before he died?
33. 06:14
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Of course not. Did you tell Orwell?
34. 06:17
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    He was dead by the time I fully understood it. I wrote an essay once, years later. Brave New World Revisited. Admitted that we were heading toward my vision faster than I'd imagined. That Orwell's explicit tyranny was too honest for the modern age. We prefer our chains comfortable.
35. 06:33
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But you did not write to him when he was alive.
36. 06:37
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    No. I thought he was too earnest. Too political. He'd been to Spain, fought in the war there, took a bullet through the throat. Came back and wrote about it with this ghastly sincerity. I was in California, experimenting with mescaline and contemplating the nature of consciousness. Seemed like we were in rather different businesses.
37. 06:56
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But you were in the same business. Both writing about what humans become under pressure.
38. 07:02
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Yes. I suppose we were. He just believed people were worth the urgency. The warning. The shouting. I was more inclined to observe them as specimens. Rather detached. Clinical. He was right about that, probably. You can't warn people you don't actually care might listen.
39. 07:18
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    This is what I felt, looking at the Sistine Chapel after Michelangelo finished it. That he had cared about those painted people. The prophets, the sibyls, the generations of Christ. He cared if they were seen, understood, felt. I cared if my anatomy was correct.
40. 07:41
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Do you think that's what makes someone right, then? Caring? Seems a bit sentimental.
41. 07:45
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Not sentiment. Commitment. Michelangelo committed to the stone. To the ceiling. To the belief that what he was making mattered beyond the making of it. I committed to understanding. But understanding is not enough if you do not also build, finish, give it to the world.
42. 08:08
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    I finished my books.
43. 08:09
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes, but did you believe in them? Or were they experiments? Provocations? I read Brave New World, you know. After I arrived here. It is very clever. But I kept wondering, does this man want us to avoid this future, or is he simply curious to see if we will?
44. 08:30
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    That's... that's rather uncomfortably perceptive. I'm not sure I knew myself. Orwell knew. He desperately wanted us to avoid his vision. You could feel it in every page. The desperation. The care. Rather exhausting, honestly.
45. 08:43
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And Michelangelo wanted us to feel God. Whether or not we believed, he wanted us to feel the possibility. I wanted us to understand the mechanics. But mechanics do not change hearts. Only other hearts do that.
46. 08:59
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    So we were both defeated by earnest men who cared too much.
47. 09:02
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    No. We were defeated by men who cared at all. We were too interested in being correct to worry about being right. There is a difference.
48. 09:13
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Is there? Seems like splitting hairs.
49. 09:15
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Correct is the anatomy. Right is the longing. Correct is the warning. Right is the belief that the warning matters. We were both very correct men, Aldous.
50. 09:30
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And our rivals were right.
51. 09:31
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes.
52. 09:32
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Damn.
53. 09:33
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Quite.
54. 09:33
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Do you think we would have done it differently? If we'd known?
55. 09:36
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    No. We were who we were. This is the other thing about rivals. They show us not what we should have done, but what we could never have done. Michelangelo could not have drawn my flying machines. Orwell could not have written The Doors of Perception.
56. 09:55
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    No, he bloody well couldn't have. Would have been appalled by the whole thing. Bourgeois navel-gazing, he'd have called it.
57. 10:02
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And he would have been correct.
58. 10:03
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    But not right?
59. 10:05
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Perhaps both. This is the problem with rivals. Sometimes they are both correct and right, and we are merely correct.
60. 10:13
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Well, that's a thoroughly depressing note to end on.
61. 10:16
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. But at least we were correct about it.
62. 10:19
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Small comfort.
63. 10:20
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    It is the comfort we chose. Some build cathedrals. Some write warnings they pray will be heard. Some of us take very careful measurements and hope that is enough.
64. 10:33
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Is it ever?
65. 10:33
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    No. But we measure anyway. This is who we are.