Will.

In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.

Aldous Huxley, from The Doors of Perception

... but it will.

Outside.

Wouldn't it be nice, for a change, if there were another way out of our difficulties! A short cut. A method requiring no greater personal effort than recording a vote or ordering some "enemy of society" to be shot. A salvation from outside, like a dose of calomel.

Aldous Huxley, from Eyeless in Gaza

Happy Birthday, Huxley

SONG of POPLARS

Shepherd, to yon tall poplars tune your flute:

Let them pierce, keenly, subtly shrill,

The slow blue rumour of the hill;

Let the grass cry with an anguish of evening gold,

And the great sky be mute.

Then hearken how the poplar trees unfold

Their buds, yet close and gummed and blind,

In airy leafage of the mind,

Rustling in silvery whispers the twin-hued scales

That fade not nor grow old.

"Poplars and fountains and you cypress spires

Springing in dark and rusty flame,

Seek you aught that hath a name?

Or say, say: Are you all an upward agony

Of undefined desires?

"Say, are you happy in the golden march

Of sunlight all across the day?

Or do you watch the uncertain way

That leads the withering moon on cloudy stairs

Over the heaven's wide arch?

"Is it towards sorrow or towards joy you lift

The sharpness of your trembling spears?

Or do you seek, through the grey tears

That blur the sky, in the heart of the triumphing blue,

A deeper, calmer rift?"

So; I have tuned my music to the trees,

And there were voices, dim below

Their shrillness, voices swelling slow

In the blue murmur of hills, and a golden cry

And then vast silences.

Aldous Huxley, born on this day in 1894

Friends.

Koninck, Philosopher with an Open Book, after Rembrandt's Philosopher in Meditation,1645

BOOKS and THOUGHTS

Old ghosts that death forgot to ferry

Across the Lethe of the years -

These are my friends, and at their tears

I weep and with their mirth am merry.

On a high tower, whose battlements

Give me all heaven at a glance,

I lie long summer nights in trance,

Drowsed by the murmurs and the scents

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,

Nought break the quiet of my release:

In vain the windy sunlight raves

At the hush and gloom of polar caves.

Aldous Huxley

Acting.

The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.

Aldous Huxley, from Brave New World

Behalf.

Most of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing virtue on behalf of religious or political idols.

Aldous Huxley

Compelled.

It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free – to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private interest within the nation, wants him to think, feel and act.

The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.

Aldous Huxley

Solitude.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

Aldous Huxley

Prepared.

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

Thomas Huxley

Shaken.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. 

Aldous Huxley

Limitations.

When we see a rose, we immediately say, rose. We do not say, I see a roundish mass of delicately shaded reds and pinks. We immediately pass from the actual experience to the concept.

We cannot help living to a very large extent in terms of concepts. We have to do so, because immediate experience is so chaotic and so immensely rich that in mere self-preservation we have to use the machinery of language to sort out what is of utility for us, what in any given context is of importance, and at the same time to try to understand — because it is only in terms of language that we can understand what is happening. We make generalizations and we go into higher and higher degrees of abstraction, which permit us to comprehend what we are up to, which we certainly would not if we did not have language. And in this way language is an immense boon, which we could not possibly do without.

But language has its limitations and its traps.

Aldous Huxley

Sense.

Adjustment.

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.

Aldous Huxley

Inestimable.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by the mind at large -- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone.

Aldous Huxley

Optimistic.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Aldus Huxley

Want.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness.

Aldus Huxley