Young Archimedes: And Other Stories, Volume 10"Every day he made the discovery of something which seemed to him exquisitely beautiful..." -Aldous Huxley, Young Archimedes and Other Stories (1924) Young Archimedes and Other Stories (1924) by Aldous Huxley is a collection of six stories considered to be semi-autobiographical and originally published under the title of Little Mexican and Other Stories. The collection includes the aforementioned titles as well as Uncle Spencer, Hubert and Minnie, Fard, and The Portrait and diverge from his well-known dystopian writing. All are set in Europe and offer thoughtful discourse on childhood, love, life, death, and society. This anthology is a must-read for lovers of short stories, early twentieth century literature, and Huxley's writing. |
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Common terms and phrases
Alphonse Antonieke ARCHIMEDES asked astonished bank clerk beautiful began Bigger blue Brabançonne Brussels Carlo charming cheeks cheerful child choly Coriolan overture countess dark delighted devil dancers door Dravidian Emmy Wendle Eros and Psyche eyes Fabio face father felt Figaro fingers Flemish frescoes Giangolini Glamber grey Guido hair hand head Hôtel de Ville Hubert hypotenuse interest Italian Italy joke journalist kermesse knew laughed listened little Mexican lived Longres looked Lord Hurtmore Louiseke Madame Manor melan mind Minnie Mlle Leeauw ness never old Count old gentleman once Padua Pagliacci painted passion perhaps play poor prawns prison Robin round seemed side Signora Bondi silence sitting smiled Sophie Spenny square suddenly talk thing thought tion told took turned Uncle Spen Uncle Spencer Venice voice wait walked window woman young Count
Popular passages
Page 164 - Casanova used to come and spend the summer; seducing the chambermaids, taking advantage of terrified marchionesses in caleches during thunder-storms, bamboozling soft-witted old senators of Venice with his fortune-telling and black magic. Gorgeous and happy scoundrel! In spite of my professed detachment, I envied him. And, indeed, what was that famous detachment but a disguised expression of the envy which the successes and audacities of a Casanova must necessarily arouse in every timid and diffident...
Page 292 - Pythagoras himself. He had drawn a square and dissected it, by a pair of crossed perpendiculars, into two squares and two equal rectangles. The equal rectangles he divided up by their diagonals into four equal right-angled triangles. The two squares are then seen to be the squares on the two sides of any one of these triangles other than the hypotenuse. So much for the first diagram. In the next he took the four right-angled triangles into which the rectangles had been divided and rearranged them...
Page 290 - Pythagoras' theorem states that the square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides.
Page 296 - But what of those born out of time? Blake, for example. What of those? This child, I thought, has had the fortune to be born at a time when he will be able to make good use of his capacities. He will find the most elaborate analytical methods lying ready to his hand; he will have a prodigious experience behind him. Suppose him born while Stonehenge was building; he might have spent a lifetime discovering the rudiments, guessing darkly where now he might have had a chance of proving. Born at the time...
Page 78 - Strong in the materialistic philosophy, the careless and unreflecting scepticism which were, in those days, the orthodoxy of every young man who thought himself intelligent, I found my Uncle Spencer's mystical and religious preoccupations marvellously ludicrous. I should think them less ridiculous now, when it is the easy creed of my boyhood that has come to look rather queer. Now it is possible — it is, indeed, almost necessary — for a man of science to be also a mystic.
Page 299 - ... and blossom in his mind with an unfailing luxuriance. Every day he made the discovery of something which seemed to him exquisitely beautiful; the new toy was inexhaustible in its potentialities. In the intervals of applying algebra to the second book of Euclid, we experimented with circles; we stuck bamboos into the parched earth, measured their shadows at different hours of the day, and drew exciting conclusions from our observations. Sometimes, for fun, we cut and folded sheets of paper so...
Page 303 - ... the waist, and the arms: a sphere to the elbow, a polished cylinder below — smiled mournfully out of their marble frames; the smiling frames; the smiling faces, the white hands, were the only recognizably human things that emerged from the solid geometry of their clothes. Men with black mustaches, men with white beards, young cleanshaven men, stared or averted their gaze to show a Roman profile. Children in their stiff best opened wide their eyes, smiled hopefully in anticipation of...
Page 295 - ... shape of their skulls. Would it not be more sensible to divide them up into intellectual species? There would be even wider gulfs between the extreme mental types than between a Bushman and a Scandinavian. This child, I thought, when he grows up, will be to me, intellectually, what a man is to his dog. And there are other men and women who are, perhaps, almost as dogs to me. Perhaps the men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of the race there have been only a few thousand real...
Page 256 - ... Solitary on the hilltop, one is not alone in a wilderness. Man's traces are across the country, and already — one feels it with satisfaction as one looks out across it — for centuries, for thousands of years, it has been his, submissive, tamed, and humanized. The wide, blank moorlands, the sands, the forests of innumerable trees — these are places for occasional visitation, healthful to the spirit which submits itself to them for not too long. But fiendish influences as well as divine haunt...
Page 193 - There are mountains on the horizon, spiky and blue like mountains in a picture book; and in the foreground, extending to the very foot of the extremely improbable crag on which the castle and the beer garden are perched, stretches a flat green plain — miles upon miles of juicy meadows dotted with minusculous cows, with here and there a neat toy farm or, more rarely, a cluster of doll's houses with a spire going up glittering from the midst of them.