The burning wheel from The Burning Wheel by Aldous Huxley read for librivox.org by Larry Wilson. We read of its own turning distressed with its own busy restlessness, yearning to draw the circumference pain. The rim that is dizzy with speed to the motionless center, there to rest. The wheel must strain through agony on agony contracting, returning into the core of Steel, and at last the wheel has rest, is still. Shrunk to an adamant core fulfilling its will in fixity. But the yearning atoms as they grind closer and closer, more and more fiercely together, we get a flaming, a fire upward leaping, billowing out in a burning passionate fierce desire to find the infinite calm of the mother's breast. And there the flame is a Christ child sleeping bright, tenderly radiant, all bitterness lost in the infinite peace of the mother's bosom. But death comes creeping in a tide of slow oblivion, till the flame in fear wakes from the sleep of its quiet brightness, and burns with a darkening passion.

Pain lists all forgetting and quiet it perish and as it burns and anguishes, it quickens. Begetting once again the wheel that yearns, sick with speed, for the terrible stillness of the adamant core, and is still hard attained. So once more shall the will revolve till its anguish cease in the iron anguish of fixity. Till once again flame billows out to infinity, sing key to a sleep of brightness in that vast oblivious peace. Many are the doors of the spirit that lead into the innermost shrine, and I count the gates of the temple divine, since the god of the place is guarded. These are the gates that God decreed should lead to his house, kisses and wine, cool depths of thought, youth without rest, and calm old age. Prayer and desire, the lovers and mother's breasts, the fire of sense and the poet's fire. But he that worships the gates alone, forgetting the shrine beyond, shall see the great valves open suddenly, revealing not God's radiant throne, but the fires of wrath.

agony. Up from the darkness on the laughing stage, a sudden trapdoor shot you unawares, incarnate tragedy with your strange airs of courteous sadness. Nothing could dissuade the secular grief that was your heritage, passed down the long line to the last that bears the name, a gift of yearnings and despairs too greatly noble for this Iron Age. Time mood for you not in quotidian beats, but in the long so rhythm the ages keep in their immortal symphony. He taught that not in the harsh turmoil of the streets does life consist. You bed the soul, drink deep of infinite things, saying the rest is naught. My clothes waltz soul has never known that innermost darkness, dazzling sight like the blind point whence the visions spring in the core of the gazers chrysolite. The mystic darkness that lapses God's throne and the splendor beyond imagining, so passing bright, but the many twisted dark masses that range the city to and fro in English suddenly pass, impart and ebon gluttonous leaf low.

darkness of lust and avarice of the crippled body in the crooked heart. These darkness, as I know, tunneled in solid blackness, creeps the old mole soul and wakes or sleep. He knows not which but tunnels on through ages of oblivion until at last a long constraint of each hand wall is a lost and faint comes daylight creeping from afar and mold worth grows crepuscular tunnel midair and bursts ball sees men hugely walking or are they trees and Far Horizons smoking blue and chasing clouds forever new. Green hills like lighted lamps a glow or quenching neath the clouds shadow quenching and blazing turn-by-turn. Springs great green signals fitfully burn mold travels on but finds the steering a harder task of pioneering. That when he threaded through the Strait blind catacombs that ancient fate had carved for him. Stupid and dumb and blind and touchless he had come away without a turn. But here under the sky the passenger chooses his own best way and a mole distracted.

Wanders it, his whole regrets not much wherein he crept. But runs a joyous ninfa lipped this way and that, by all made Mad River nymph and Oread oceans daughters and Lorelei. Combing the silken mystery, the Glaucus gold of her River II tresses. Each hordes the traveler, each possesses the drunken wavering soul awhile. Then with the Phantom's cock-crow smile, mocks craving with sheer vanish meant mole eyes grow hawks. Knowledge is lent in grudging driblets that pay high unconscionable usury do unrelenting live. More learns to travel, more secure the turns of his long way less puzzling seem. And all those magic forms the gleam in airy invitation sheet less often than they did. The earth slopes upward fold by fold, and quiet hills that meet the gold serenity of Western skies over the world's edge with clear eyes, our mole Transcendent sees his way tunneled in light. He must obey necessity again, and thread closed catacombs as erst he did. Faith's tunneling.

himself must brought through the sunsets in most core the guiding rules to each hand shine luminous and crystalline and mole shall tunnel on and on till night let fall oblivion. Summer on himself intent past without for nothing carrying save his own high fists of all. My windows blind and wingless staring wondered what the pageant meant nor ever understood at all and oh? the pains of sentiment the loneliness beyond all bearing mucus and spleen and gall. But now that grey November peers in at my fire bright windowpane and all its misty spires and trees loom in upon me through the rain and question of the light that cheers the room within. Now my soul sees life. Where of old were sepulchre x' and in these newfound sympathies sinks petty hopes and loves and fears and knows that life is not in vain. A Wagon past with scarlet wheels and a yellow body shining new. Splendid said I how fine it feels to be alive when Beauty peels the grimy husk from life.

And you said splendid, and I thought you'd seen that wagon blazing down the streets. But I looked and saw that your gaze had been on a child that was kicking at obscene Brown or door with his feet. Our souls are elephants thought I Remote behind a prison in grille, with trunks thrust out to peer and pry upon reality, and each at his own sweet will. Seizes the bun that he likes best and passes over all the rest. There is a sadness in a street, and suddenly the folk I meet droop their heads as they walk along without a smile, without a song. A Mystic called and muffling gray falls fold by fold on another day that dies and wept. But suddenly under a tunnel dark, I see on flank and haunched the chestnut gleam of horses in the lamp-lit steam, and the dead world moves for me once more with Beauty for its living horror. I had been sitting alone with books filled out with a black disease, when I heard the cheerful shout of rooks in the bare prophetic trees.

bare trees prophetic of new birth. You lift her bridge is clean and free to be a beacon to the earth, a flame of Wrath for all to see. The rooks and the branches laugh and shout to those that can hear and understand. Walk through the gloomy ways of doubt with the torch of vision in your head. Slow-moving moonlight once did pass across the Dreaming looking-glass, where sunk in viola bleed deep old secrets unforgotten sleep of beauties unforgettable. But dusty cobwebs are woven now across that mirror, which of old soul fingers drawing back the gold from an untroubled brow, and the depths are blinded to the moon and their secrets forgotten forever untold. Youth as it opens out discloses the sinister meta psychosis of Lily's dead and turned to Rose's red as an angry dawn. But lilies remember our graveside flowers while slow bright rose leaves sail the drift on the music of happiest hours. And those lilies cold and pale hide fiery roses beneath the lawn of the young Brides parting veil.

God needs no christening. Pentheus mutters, Love opens shutters on heaven's glistening. Flesh keyhole listening. Here's what God uh ters? Yes, but God stutters one. Was I that lean-to emirate with what is the Brys of tangled time till lost in the wood ways? He quite forget how plaintive in cities at midnight sounds the chime of bills slow down from discord to the hush whence they rose and met. And in the forest we shall live free, free from the bondage the time has made to hedge our soul from its Liberty. We shall not fear. What is mighty and unafraid shall look wide-eyed at beauty, nor shrink from its majesty. But Emirate answered me again, We are lost in the forest, you and I, lost, lost not free there. No bonds restrained, for no spire rises for comfort, no landmark in the sky, and the longer laid as they occur from sight, a dark with a nameless pain, and time creates what he devours. Music that sweetly dreams itself away.

Frail swung leaves of autumn, and the scent of flowers, and the beauty of that poised a moment. When the day hangs 'twixt the quiet of darkness and the mirth of the sunlit hours. To mottled and gray and brown they pass, the wood moths wheeling, fluttering, and we chase, and they vanish, and in the grass, a starry flowers, and the birds sing faint broken songs of the dying spring, and on the beach, bowl smooth and gray. Some lover of an older day has carved in time blur, littering word only, alas, Three Lutes I forbid you. You must never play when shimmering Li glimpse, Bo glimpse scene through the leaves, the silken figures sway and measured dance. Never a chat of day when time perversely loitering limps through endless Twilight's should your strings whisper of light remembered things that happened long ago and far away. Lutes I forbid you, he must never play. And you, pale marble statues, far describe where vistas opened suddenly. I bid you show yourselves no more, but hide your loveliness.

Lest to be much glorified by Western radiance. Slantingly shot down the glade, you turn from stone to living gods, immortal grown and ageless. Mock my beauty's fleeting pride, you pale relentless statues, far describe old ghosts the death forgot to ferry across the leaf of the years. These are my friends, and at their tears, I weep, and with their mirth and marry on a high tower whose battlements give me all heaven at a glance. I lie long summer nights in trance, drowsed by the murmurs in the sense that rise from Earth, while the sky above me merges its peace with my soul's peace. Deep meeting deep. No stir can move me, not break the quiet of my release. In vain the windy sunlight raves at the hush and gloom of polar caves. One head of my soul, Xanthus Veena, turns to the day times dust and sweat, but evenings come when I would forget the sword strife of the arena. And then my other self will creep along all these scented twilight lanes to where a little house contains a hoard of books, a gift of sleep.

in windows throw a fiery light between the narrowing shutter slats, and Golden as the eyes of cats shine me a welcome through the night. I Seek the quietude of stones. Or a great oxen dewlap deep in meadows of lush grass where sleep Drifts tufted on the air or drones on flowery traffic. Sleep atones for sin, comforting eyes that weep, or me lethean darkness creep unfelt as tides through dead men's bones in That metallic sea of hair. Fragrance I come to drown despair of wings and dark forgetfulness. No love, love is self-known, aspires to heights unearthly. I ask less sleep born of satisfied desires. There shall be dark trees round me. I insist on cypresses. I'm terribly romantic and Glimpsed between shall move the whole Atlantic. Now led and dull, now subtle with gray mist, now many jeweled when the waves are kissed by reveling sunlight and the koib antics southwestern wind so troubled passion frantic. The poet's mind boils golden amethyst.

There shall be seen the infinite endeavor of a sad fountain white against the sky, and poised as it strains up. But doomed to break in weeping music, ever fair, in ever young. And the bright-eyed wood gods, as they slake their thirst in it, are silent reverently. No dip and dart of swallows wakes the black slumber of the canal, a mirror dead for lack of loveliness remembered from ancient ashes and green trees. For lack of some white beauty given and flung back secret to her that gave. No Sun has bled to waken echo, hear of answering read. The surface stirs to no Leafs windblown track between unseeing walls. The waters rest lifeless and hushed till suddenly a swan glides from some broader River blue as day, and with the mirrored magic of his breasts creates within that barren waterway new life, new loveliness, and passes on. I'm sick of clownery and hourglass tricks. Damn the whole crowd of you. I hate you all the same night after night from power installed.

sweating gallery your faces fixed in flux and idiot mean. The app tracks you worship is no victory, and you call on all Stupidity. God made to crawl for tempting with world wisdoms narcotics. I'll break a window through my prison, see the sunset bleeds among the roofs, comes night. Dark blue and calm as music dying out. Is it escape? No. The laughs turned on me. I kicked a cardboard gift at red limelight, you laughed and cheered my latest knock about. Red wine that slowly leaned and brimmed the shell of pearl where lips had touched, as Light and Swift as naked petals of the rose adrift upon the lazy looted ritornello of summer be song. Laughing as they fell, gold memories dream in sense childhoods gift. Blue as the smoke that Far Horizons lifts, tenuous as the wings of Ariel, these treasured things are laid upon the pyre, and the flame kindled, and I found it high and Strong in hope, could watch the crumbling past. Eager, I knelt before the waning fire.

Phoenix to greet thine immortality, but there was naught but ashes at the last. Well, I to die you'd break your heart, you say. Well, if it do, but Bend, I'm satisfied. Bend and rebound four hearts, a temper tried, mild steel not hardened with a spring, and play of excellent tough swords. It's not that way that you'll be perishing. But when I've died, when snap my light goes out. What Robert hired you if the heart breaks, give you leave to stay? What will be left, I wonder, if you lose all that you gave me. All. A year or so out of a life, you say, but world's say aye. Over kisses timeless, even in ecstasy that gave me real new I die. You go with me. What's left? Limbs, furs, a pair of shoes. The West has plucked its flowers and thrown them fading on the night. Out of the skies black depths, their smiles are greeting from those eyes where all the real, all that I have ever known of the divine, is held.

Not alone do I stand here now, a presence seems to rise. Your voice sounds near across my memories, and answering fingers brush against my own. Yes, it is you, for evening holds those strands of fire and darkness twined in one to make your loveliness a web of magic mesh, whose cross swift harmony of soul and flesh. Shadows and thought all glows when smiles awake like sunlight passionate on southern lands. Comrade, now that you're merry and therefore true, say where would you like to die and have your friend to bury? What once was you on the top of the hill with a peaceful view of country where all is still? Greater God, not I, I'd lie in the street where two streams meet, and there's noise enough to fill the outer ear while within the brain can beat matters death and life glory and joy in fear peace of the sort that moves and clash of strife and routes of armies fleeing. There would I shake myself clear out of the deep-set grooves of my sluggish being. The church spire lake in Italy stands white on a hill against the sky.

a path of immemorial cobbles leads up and up. Where the pilgrim hobbles passed a score or so of neat repose arees? Where you stop and breathe and tell your rosaries to the shrine to terra cotta mannequins that expound with the Lively's quirks and grins known texts through scripture. But no long stay should the pilgrim make upon his way but as means to the end these shrines stand here to guide to something holier the church on the hilltop your heavens so with a path leading up to it pastor rotary friar who leads a Teach who pours and tell your beads along the quintuple strings of sins. Then on to face heavens eminence new stimulated new inspired. If that a sparkle of true star shine be that led my way if some divine a thing that common thought Urged me to fashioning clothes web. And links of burnished poetry then all the heaven that one time dwelt in me has fled leaving the body.

triumphing. Dead flesh, it seems, with not a dream to bring visions that better warm immediacy. Why have my visions left me? What would kill that feeble spark, which yet had life and heat? Fulfillment showed a present rich and fair. I strive to mount, they catch the nearest still. Souls have been drowned between hearts beat and beat, and trapped and tangled in a woman's hair. One Mother dove, all my future memories, mistress of mine, you lie. Which but today began when I beheld deep in your eyes. My own love mirrored and the warm surprise of the first kiss swept both our souls away. Your love has freed me, for I was oppressed by my own devil, whose unwholesome breath tarnished my youth, leaving to me at best age lacking comfort of a soul at rest and weariness beyond the hope of death - ah, those were days of silent happiness. I never spoke and had no need to speak. While on the windy downland, cheek by cheek, the slow driven Sun beheld us, each caress had oratory for its own defense.

When I kissed or felt her fingers press, I envied not Demosthenes his Greek, nor Tully for his Latin eloquence. When life burns, lo, is the fire in the grate, and all the evening's books are read. I sit alone, save for the dead and the lovers I have grown to hate. But all at once, the narrow gloom of hatred and despair expands in tenderness. Thought stretches hands - welcome to the midnight room, another presence, a memory of how last year in the sunlit field, laughing, you suddenly revealed beauty in immortality. For so it is, a gesture strips life bare of all its make-believe. All unprepared, we may receive our casual apocalypse. Sheer beauty, then you seemed to stir embodied soul. Soul sleeps tonight, and love comes, did mean spirit sight when body plays interpreter. I have tried to remember the familiar places, the pillared gloom of the beech woods, the town's by the sea. I have tried to people the past with dear known faces. But you were haunting me, like a remorse insistent, pitiless.

You have filled my spirit. You were ever at hand. You have mocked my gods with your new loveliness, broken the old shrines stand. In this wood, how the Hazels have grown. I left the treasure all my own of childish kisses and laughter and pain, left till I might come back again to take from the familiar earth my hoarded secret and count its worth, and all the spiderwork of the years, all the time-spun gossamer dew with each succeeding spring, and the piled-up leaves the autumns fling to the sweet corruption of death on death, at the sudden stirred of my spirit's breath all scattered new and fair and bright as ever it was before my sight. The treasure lay and nothing missed. So, having handled all and kissed, I put them back, adding one new and precious memory of you. Where German scholars, poring over life as over a Greek manuscript that's torn and stained beyond repair, our eyes of horn read one or two poor letters and what strife? What books on books but gotten for their sake, but we enjoy it.

Meanwhile, neglect the line. It's left us perfect from the wrecked rich Argosy clear beyond doubts to make conjectures of. So in my universe of scribbled half hid meanings, you appear solo perfect symbol of the highest sphere and Life's great matrix crystal, whose depths nurse souls infinite reflections, blows in you with now on Radiance One through the suburbs. Provincial Sunday broods above the town, the streets asleep. Through a dim window drifts a small romance that hiccups up and down, and air all trills and runs and sudden lifts to yearning sevenths poised, not a Chopin quite, but all romantic, a tinsel world made bright with rose and honeysuckles paper blooms, and where the moon's blue limelight and the glooms of last act scenes of passion are discreet. And when the tinkling stops and leaves the street blank in the sunlight of the afternoon, you feel a curtain dropped for little tune. Perhaps our grandmother's dole girlhood days were fired by you with radiances, a pink.

Heavenly writer far than she could think anything might be. Till a greater blaze tinged life's horizon when he kissed her first, our grand papa. But a thin ghost still plays in music down the street, echoing the plaintiff our romance with its own sadder song of every day. And as they walk along, the young man and the woman deep immersed in all the suburb comedy around, and they seem to catch coherence in the sound of that ghost music, and the words come faint. Oh, the months and the days, asleep sand dinners, all the planning of ways and quotidian means, endless vistas of mutton and grieves, or weekly membranes of prayers and praise. Oh, evenings with all the winners, Monday sends the clothes to the wash, and Saturday brings them home again. Will do la vie parle wash, and destiny is us all cobbles. But I'll give you heaven in a dominant seven, and you shall not have lived vain. In vain, the girl repeats, in vain. Your suburb's whole philosophy leads there, the oxd all for our happiness, for pain.

Poignant as wheat, the dole narcotic. Ache of wretchedness and in resigned despair, a grim contentment. Ashen fruits to slake an aimless, quenchless thirst. The tinkling rain of that small, sentimental music wets your partying suburb. It makes prompt who knows in Something red and silken like a rose in sheaves of almost genuine violets faint chords, your sadness secular immense. Brims to the bursting of this poor actual heart, for searching through the floodgates that sense of sudden. Lightly open sweeps the whole into the narrow compass of its party inedited sensation of the soul. You'd have us bless the hire-purchase system. Which now allows the poorest vampers to feel as they abuse at pianos dampers that? Angels have stooped down and kissed them with our memorias from the infinite, but poor old Infinite's dead, long live is air. Lord here and now. For all the rest is windy nothingness, or at the best, home-made shimira body, mr.. Spare.

Headed with formless foolish hope, no. No, we're live in verse for all things rhyme with something out of space and time. But in the suburb here, life needs must flow in journalistic prose. But we have set our faces towards the further hills. We're yet, the winds untainted and unbound may blow to from the crest, soul through the squalor till the sky unfolds tonight and left its fringes pinned at no more, a Thin Canal to explore an ugly shore of Hubble's poured contiguous from the molds of gothic horror. Town is left at last, save for the tentacles that probe a squat done house or to allotments plot on plot of cabbage jae-joon ripe or past. Checkering with sick yellow are verdigris, the metropolitan ground and neat paid ways that edge the road, the town's last nerves and cease as if in sudden shame, where hedges raise their dusty greenery on either hand. Their paths mount slowly up the hill and as they walk to right and left expand the plain and the golden uplands and the blue faint smoke of

Distances that fade from view, and at their feet remote and still, the city spreads itself. That Glabrus dome that lifts itself so grand. They're in the marish is the omphalos, the navel humble middle central boss of the unique soul, true cloud cuckoo-land. Drowsy with Sunday bills and Sunday beer, a firm in silver rump, Khun's there it Basques thinking of Labor's past and future tasks, and pondering on the end forever near it ever distant as the rainbow spring. For still in cuckoo land. They're laboring with hopes undamped and under storaged hearts a little musty. But superb they said piecing a god together bit by bit out of the chaos of his sundered parts. Unmoved, nay pitying, they view the grins and lewd grimaces of the folk that year, the vulgar herd gross monster at the best. Obscene or more ballet the uttermost sphere are less too much the mirror of the rest. Though they turned sun gates to its widdershins.

and in some half million years perhaps, God may at last be made a new troop, an Isis temple in the soul of man, and Aphrodite with her thousand to peps, a streaming eternal wisdom? Yes, and man's vessel, all pavilion out with silk and flags in the wind, a stream shall make the port at last with a great shout ringing from all her decks, and rocking there shall dream forever and dream true. Calm in those roads as a lover of souls and evening when they swim between the despairing sunset and the dim blue. Memories of mountains lost to sight but like her fancied half-remembered episodes of childhood, guests that through the veils of night and the worn sailors at the mast who heard the first fire bells and knew the sound for home. Who marked the land weeds and ass and stained foam and through the storm blast? Saw a wielded bird seek refuge at the masthead. These at last shall earn you praise when all the hubs past and cuckoo lenders. Not a few shall prove

You have fast close to the temple gates. You have fast close to the temple gates. You stand without in the noontide glow, but the innermost darkness. Where God waits you do not know, you cannot know. In the poem, this recording is in the public domain. End of the burning wheel by Aldous Huxley.

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