Word: pala
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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...
...tathata (or "such-ness") through prayer, liturgy and ceremonies involving ritual lovemaking and liberal doses of happy 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...
...Farnaby becomes the willing catechumen of Pala's nubile adams and eves, who live in a state of highly sophisticated innocence. In fact, the substance of the book is Farnaby's slow indoctrination into Pala's delights and mysteries, expounded in interminable conversational counterpoint to the corruption of his own world...
...Life on Pala has some remarkable features. A 30-night supply of contraceptives is delivered free with the mails once a month. Also there is insemination without intercourse; the best sperm goes into deep freeze so that top citizens may perform patriarchal prodigies of propagation. The normal nuttiness common to man in the demented Outside has been abolished by a program of adoption in which children rotate at will among a committee of 20 sets of parents...
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...