HOMMAGE A HUXLEY
"An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie."
--Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
GRATUITOUS, MISCELLANEOUS OUTTAKES - PSYCHEDELIC RENEGADES - PSYCHEDELIC REPUBLICANS - PHARMACOPOEIA - GRAVITY OF LIGHT - DOORS OF PERCEPTION - SOMA
THE BIOGRAPHY - Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley (London: Little Brown, 2002) - "For all his prescience, Huxley's star has dimmed since his death in 1963, on the same day that John F Kennedy was shot. The president's assassination overshadowed everything else on that grimmest of November days. A random psychotic act had endangered the world and refuted Huxley's vision of a sane and calculating tyranny. A single deranged man with a mail-order rifle was a more sinister threat than Big Brother, whether in jackboots or a white lab coat." -- Review, Prophet of Our Present (The Guardian Unlimited, 04/23/02) - Published in the US by St. Martin's (03/2003), Cloth, 480 pages, ISBN 0-312-30237-1THE LEGACY - "The possibilities of life -- both good and evil -- were what Huxley explored in much of his writing. In Island, his Utopia has 'no established church and our religion stresses immediate experience and deplores belief in unverifiable dogmas and the emotions which inspire that belief. So we're preserved from the plagues of popery, on the one hand, and fundamentalist revivalism on the other.' He was also interested in the mind-expanding properties of drugs and how they might be used but also aware of the risks; when Will Farnaby takes the 'moksha' medicine in Island he is warned that 'It can take you to heaven but it can also take you to hell.'" -- Island of Dreams (The Guardian Unlimited, 04/27/02)
