Word: huxley
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Admirers of those cleverly nasty satires that Aldous Huxley wrote in the '20s and '30s were certain that one day the master's first name would pass into common usage as an adjective: if someone woke up feeling aldous, he would be liverish, cold to the touch and awfully, awfully acute. So it might have happened, except that a time came when Aldous did not feel aldous any more; he felt thomas-henry. And old T. H. Huxley, the novelist's grandfather, was a solemn teacher, not a satirist. The result was that after the aldous...
...Huxley's utopia is the island of Pala, whose happy inhabitants of mixed Indian, European and native descent have evolved a new form of Mahayanist Buddhism...
...pills made from yellow mushrooms. Those who think the only fun in fungi is in a mushroom omelet may be skeptical when they read that things are just short of perfect in Pala-"a small island completely surrounded by twenty-nine hundred million mental cases." And why did not Huxley heed the warning of one of his own characters that "Eastern philosophers are often rather bad talkers"? Weight of Dandruff. Huxley's hero is William Farnaby, a successful journalist who blunders into Pala by inadvertence and a fortuitous shipwreck. In Huxley's eyes, Farnaby represents a sickness...
Nowhere & Serutan. The best parts of Pala-and reading about Pala-constitute an intellectual teaser in the best Huvley tradition. It is when Huxley is undertaking to describe the spiritual Himalayas of his fictional Utopias that his prose, always as smooth as yak butter, begins to smell like the same spread. To cut some of the butter, Huxley even provides a snake in his paradise, a local fascist princeling who advocates things like fast cars, Progress, Values, Oil and True Spirituality. In the end, he manages to organize a revolution against Pala's benevolent philosopher rulers, and "the work...
...even Huxley seems to realize, not so much that human perfection is unobtainable, but that it is not interesting. For Utopias are about nowhere and novels are about somewhere; therefore, a Utopian novel is a contradiction in terms...