Back to the Classics 2021 #14

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

Classic by a Favorite Author: In the early 1920s, Aldous Huxley became a best-selling writer with satirical novels such as Antic Hay and Time Must Have a Stop. Though Elizabeth Bowen said in 1936 in Spectator magazine (as foul then as it is now) he’s “a stupid person’s idea of a clever person,” I like reading Huxley because he’s funny and provocative.  I’ve read not only Brave New World (the one everybody reads), but also a travel book  Jesting Pilate, a late career novelette  The Genius and the Goddess, the science fiction-like After Many a Summer, and a history The Devils of Loudon. Because I’m a reading snob, that’s why.

 The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley

Huxley mentions William James’ The Variety of Religious Experience in Brave New World. James observes that seekers have used various intoxicants to induce mystical states.

Leuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection reminds one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds called mescal by the Mexicans:

“When I went in the morning into the fields to work, the glory of God appeared in all his visible creation. I well remember we reaped oats, and how every straw and head of the oats seemed, as it were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may so express it, in the glory of God.”

Perhaps recalling this passage, in 1952 Huxley consented to volunteer for research on the psychological effects of mescaline, called by Meso-Americans peyote. He describes the above-mentioned feeling of “is-ness” as he gazes at a trio of flowers and furniture. He also gazes deeply into the folds and creases of his pants, drawing cool analogies to paintings of harlequins by Watteau.

Huxley speculates that the brain is a filter. For the sake of survival and passing on our genes, natural selection has taught our brains to pay attention to the African savanna to avoid predators and fit into the band to get enough to eat and drink. We can’t pay attention to the mystical realization that the universe is really full of stuff happening at the same time. Focusing on such huge truths, we can’t work to make mortgage payments and maintain our reputations.

Nobody I know would advocate a life dedicated to contemplating huge truths about alternative forms of consciousness. But it’s hard to disagree with Huxley when he says

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

On that infamous day November 22, 1963, a dying Huxley, unable to speak owing to stage 4 laryngeal cancer, wrote a note to his wife Laura: "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular." She gave him the shot at 11:20 a.m. and another an hour later. Huxley passed away at 5:20 p.m. at the age of 69.