Word: huxleyans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gioconda Smile" used a murder incident merely as vehicle to carry the usual Huxleyan theme that lives not lived on both the sensual and rational level fall short of fulfillment. As a result the characters were not rounded, but rather each represented a perversion from Huxley's "golden mean." To develop the movie out of such a story it became necessary to make al the characters just a bit more human than they had been originally. Thus the film lost some of the story's meaning as the murder plot became an end in itself...
When 17-year-old Sebastian Barnack, adolescent poet-hero of Aldous Huxley's new novel, arrived in Florence, Italy, he found life in the British colony revolving in oldtime Huxleyan fashion...
...mixture of deplorable characters and homiletic essays is deliberately artificial, packed with wit, rarely dull. Its basic theme is the Huxleyan conviction that world reform must begin in the individual soul, and that men may enter "the Divine Ground" of eternity only by a regime of selflessness and contemplation. Nor should man imagine that death will save him the trouble of choosing between flesh and spirit. Author Huxley's alarming notion is that the same choice will confront all men in the hereafter...
Truth was, Eustace was having a difficult time on the other side. Floating about in the Huxleyan semivoid of the next world ("an all-pervading silence that shone and was alive. Beautiful with more than the beauty of even Mozart's music. . . ."), he was embarrassed to find his digestive processes continuing with a "purring" noise. If he tried hard, he managed to recapture physical sensations and sensual memories of Mimi. But to his horror he found himself faced by the same spiritual problems as had dogged him on earth. A "divine white light" kept trying to make a decent...