New Essays by Huxley

...His ear is such that he is capable of carrying out the most far-reaching modulations without disturbing us in the least...

...In the meantime we must be content with such real but limited goods as Hyperion [the plant near Los Angeles for disposing of "un-activated sludge" which had been his principal topic in the essay], and such essentially precarious and mutable sources of good as are provided by the more realistic of our religious symbols...

...As for this serenity, I am not sure that I am a good enough Huxley scholar to understand it very clearly...

...Huxley is like the best of all teachers...

...He has become a widely-read popular writer without forfeiting the esteem of the intelligentsia...

...Tat tvam asi—thou art That...

...He spreads knowledge and ideas almost by contagion, and (to vary the figure somewhat) he makes it all go down in the most entertaining way...

...I am tempted, in fact, by my own intellectual pride to suggest that this lack of understanding is something I have in common with Huxley himself...

...In this consists the essentially tragic nature of the human situation...

...This merely means that the reviewer had missed the center of which I speak...

...I find this one of his pleasant idiosyncrasies, and the lines of Hopkins he alludes to are certainly deserving of the compliment he pays them...

...Nor is he tainted by any of the self-righteous snobbery which is the portion of many of those who enjoy none of his advantages, social or intellectual...

...He may not be able to define it satisfactorily, but the reader is certain that he has found a center which unifies the most heterogeneous topics of his interest...

...We have already heard of a so-called "grandfather theory of history" in which the pendulum of change brings each man back eventually to the position occupied by the generation before the last one...

...Huxley generally wears his learning lightly and he does not expect us to recognize his more esoteric references and spells them out for us patiently, but we soon learn to expect the allusion (without identification) to one poem or another of Gerard Manley Hopkins, as if he expected them to be as familiar to us as lines of Pope or Shakespeare...

...In the space of about 25 pages, Huxley recreates for us the fascinating life of a virtually unknown composer, gives us a vivid impression of the period in which he lived, and communicates the pleasure he has found in his work, together with the reasons for it, so effectively that we should wish at the earliest opportunity to make the acquaintance of Gesualdo's music for ourselves...

...Without knowing that the speaker is Huxley, we might wonder where this had sprung from...

...Huxley calls it "an extraordinary little masterpiece" and does as much as it is possible to do in mere words to convey its quality to us...

...This is certainly not due to any lack of effort...

...It is curious that the descendant of one of the great defenders of the theory of evolution and progress should be not only a believer in the essential changelessness of the human experience but an exemplifier of it...

...Nor is he a show-off, either, it should be added...

...Having that implied and mostly unspoken center clearly in mind, we will not be surprised when the stream of his thought in an essay devoted mainly to the problems of sanitation in our cities meanders pleasantly along to the following unforeseen conclusion: "Symbols are necessary—for we could not think without them...

...There is only one requirement—that he shall be continuously interesting, and Huxley never fails to be so...

...I only wish I had the space to quote every passage that is worth quoting...

...But if his philosophy appears to me sometimes to be a potpourri of Eastern wisdom (mostly Indian) and Western mysticism, there is no mistaking the satisfaction which Huxley himself derives from it...

...He has made the best of several worlds...

...When this is perceived, the rest will be added...

...I was reading Rhys Davids's History and Literature of Buddhism when I came upon a reference to the elder Huxley: "I would remind you of the veteran leader of scientific thought in England, T. H. Huxley, who, comparing Gotama's idealism with that of Berkeley, says, 'It is a remarkable indication of the subtlety of Indian speculation that Gotama should have seen deeper than the greatest of modern idealists.' And throughout his whole essay he insists very strongly on the value, even to actual belief in the West, of a critical study of the Buddhist system...

...And I have read The Perennial Philosophy and now this book and I am still in the dark with regard to the writer's basic commitments of belief...

...He has found serenity, the rarest gift of all—without forfeiting any of the liveliness and sparkle of his expression...

...I notice that one of his reviewers recently complained of the lack of either unity or coherence in his essays...

...And yet this is no criticism of the writer, for the very essence of the essay-form which he is practicing is an unlimited freedom in the progression of thoughts...

...He rambles all over the lot, it is true, but he is never a bore...

...One of the works of this composer which he discusses in great detail—a madrigal entitled Ardita Zan-zarelta—was performed at Los Angeles in the autumn of 1955 for the first time in more than 300 years...

...It certainly does not grow out of what has gone before...

...There is one essay, for example, mysteriously entitled Gesualdo, which turns out to be on the neglected subject of Renaissance music, about which even so learned an authority on the Renaissance as Burck-hardt tells us next to nothing for the very good reason that in the 19th century it was not possible to know very much about it...

...Without the feeling which this center gives to his work, Huxley's mind would resemble the behavior of Stephen Leacock's horseman, who went galloping rapidly off in all directions...

...He was famous before he was 30, and in the years that have passed since (he is now 62) his work has never failed to command broad and respectful public attention...

...Reviewed by Milton Hindus Professor of Literature, Bramdeis University By and large, Fortune has certainly given Aldous Huxley "a fair shake...

...There is nothing new under the sun, and especially when it comes to the same people or the same family...

...But they are also fatal—for the thinking they make possible is often just as unrealistic as it is to the point...

...Thomas Henry Huxley, the associate of Darwin, had shown the greatest abilities as both educator and popularizer, but I had not realized until recently how much else he had in common with his grandson, Al-dous...

...Even the interest in Buddhism and Eastern philosophy generally, which from one point of view may be looked upon as a reaction against the scientific views represented by his ancestors, is something which is already present in the remarkable grandfather...

...He is an impro-viser of infallible intuition...

...There is no way out, except for those who have learned how to go beyond all symbols to a direct experience of the basic fact of the divine immanence...

...and the world both of our own time and of other times would be poorer than it is without them...

...He has settled down in the neighborhood of Hollywood without succumbing to its spirit or compromising his standards...

...Born to a great name in the intellectual world, educated at the best schools in England and precociously talented, his work has been cut out for him from the beginning...

...The level of performance in this book is uniformly high—there are eighteen separate essays in it and there was not one which I read without relish...

...Though troubled throughout his life, and especially in his later years, by poor eyesight—a misfortune which he shared with James Joyce and for which nothing else can serve as any real compensation—his career on the whole seems to have been a happy and successful one...

...A truly wonderful race are the Huxleys...

...It gives him real peace...

...I have read his introduction to Christopher Isherwood's translation of the Bhagavad-Gita several times with the utmost attention of which I am capable...