Huxley, Aldous Leonard

Huxley, Aldous Leonard, 1894-1963, English author; grandson of T.H. HUXLEY. After writing critical essays and symbolist poetry, he turned to the novel. Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), and Point Counter Point (1928) all depict social decadence. Brave New World (1932) describes a nightmarish 25th-cent. Utopia. Other works include Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and Ape and Essence (1948). In later years he was strongly interested in mysticism and Eastern philosophy. Huxley also published many short stories and essays.

"Religion is for people who have not yet had a spiritual experience."

Drugs

Which is better: to have Fun with Fungi or to have Idiocy with Ideology, to have Wars because of Words, to have Tomorrow's Misdeeds out of Yesterday's Miscreeds?
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. "Culture and the Individual," in Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1931-1963) (ed. by Horowitz and Palmer, 1977).

Horowitz and Palmer are the parents of Winona Ryder.

Fame

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Miss Thriplow, in Those Barren Leaves, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1925).

Death and Dying

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Bruno Rontini, in Time Must Have a Stop, ch. 26 (1944). But in his 1936 novel Eyeless in Gaza, ch. 31, Huxley wrote, "Death . . . the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing."

Clubs

To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Beyond the Mexique Bay, "Chichicastenango" (1934).

Books

A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Point Counter Point, ch. 13 (1928).

Banquets

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Do What You Will, "Holy Face" (1929).

Experience

Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a

doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Texts and Pretexts, Introduction (1932).

Naïveté

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. "Vulgarity in Literature" (1930; repr. in Music at Night and Other Essays, 1949).

Los Angeles

Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British novelist. Jesting Pilate, pt. 4 (1926).

Cities and City Life

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Beyond the Mexique Bay, "Oaxaca" (1934).

Intellect and Intellectuals

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the "higher life."
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Ends and Means, ch. 14 (1937).

Experts

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Ends and Means, ch. 14, "Beliefs" (1937).

Jim Morrison found the name "The Doors" for his rock band in the title of Aldous Huxley's book _The Doors of Perception_ (which in turn was taken from poem _The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell_  by William Blake), which extolls the use of hallucinogenic drugs.  The Doors were originally called the Psychedelic Rangers.

• TAZ: Jul 29, 00 ; _The Doors of Perception_ (open air); Germany
• 604 track _Phosphoressence (Doors Of Perception Mix)_ by The Infinity Project off of _Deck Wizards: Goa Gil - Kosmokrator_ on Psychic Deli (1996)
• track _Mantra (Doors Of Perception Mix)_ MP3 by Material off of _Mantra_ CDs on Axiom #001 (1993)
• ambient track _Doors Of Perception_ MP3 (192k) by Deep Space Network off of _Big Rooms_ CD on Source (1993)
• 604 track _Dorset Perception_ MP3 (192k)  by Shpongle off of _Tales Of The Inexpressable_ CD on Twisted(2001)
sample:
• Desafina(do)

Canto mi amor
Tu es fixe, es muito bom.
• Dor·set1 (dôrst)  n.  An early Native American culture flourishing in small coastal settlements in northern Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic south to Newfoundland from about 800 B.C. to A.D. 1000.
 

Aldous Huxley was born in Surrey, England in 1894. He received an upper class education, and most of his writings reflect his education. He suffered an illness in his teens that left him completely blind for two years. He eventually regained some of his vision, but it remained seriously impaired for most of his life. He experimented with

hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and mescaline in the late forties. He continued to write about the possible uses of psychedelic drugs for transcendent, mystical experiences in the 1960s; these writings had a profound influence on sixties counterculture.   Huxley began his writing career as a satirist of the British upper class.  As he grew older, he became more interested in writing about questions of philosophical and ethical significance. Many of his writings deal with the conflict between the interests of the individual and society. He often dealt with the question of profound self- realization within the context of social responsibility. _Brave New World_ addresses this conflict in a fictional future in which free will and individuality have been sacrificed to achieve complete social stability.     Huxley's _Brave New World_ is painfully clumsy at moments and brilliantly funny at others. It also raises some difficult questions about the nature of moral choices. The novel concentrates on the various abuses of  power made possible by science. Huxley does not present his dystopian novel as an impetuous rant against science, but as a sobering warning. The brave new world isn't an evil world because of science, but because power hungry individuals have misused it maliciously.

• May 1953 - Aldous Huxley's first mescaline experience
• November 22, 1963 - Aldous Huxley dies shortly after JFK assassination
• Anomalog: Brave New World Banned In School By Parents
• The Beatles - _Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band_ (1967) cover art depicts Aldous Huxley, second row, third from left.
• 604 release _Huxley's Medicine/Iteration_ 12" by Moksha on POF (1998)

  

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