Aldous Huxley
Novelist and essayist: wary of comfortable systems, curious about consciousness, and funny about both.
Ideas
- Control by comfort
- Brave New World imagines a society kept docile by pleasure and distraction rather than fear. Brave New World Revisited argues the real world was drifting that way.
- The doors of perception
- After taking mescaline he described the brain as a filter that narrows experience to what is useful for survival, and asked what gets screened out.
- The perennial philosophy
- He collected the mystical traditions that, in his reading, point at the same underlying reality.
In their words
“To be a fool at the right time is also an art.”
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
Start with
- Point Counter Point (1928)
- Brave New World (1932)
- The Doors of Perception (1954)
- Island (1962)
