The Essential Mature Huxley

...The product of what Huxley called his "encyclopedic ignorance," it haphazardly ventures into almost every area of human experience...

...As a "pontifex minor," Huxley feels that "three worlds—the world of abstractions and concepts, the world of immediate experience and objective observation, and the world of spiritual insight" must be brought together, in education and in other areas of life...

...Huxley's tentative bridge-building is always rewarding, often witty, amazingly well-informed, and provocative...

...He is as at home in Vedan-tic and Buddhist thought as he is in the works of Marx, Freud and Jung...

...He viewed himself as a "practical idealist," although the practicality of his ideas remains to be proved...

...there is, as there was in his conversation, a kind of open-ended-ness about it...

...art as therapy is something which probably everybody ought to practice for his own good...

...the injunction to turn the other cheek, which is very rarely practiced by men, is consistently and instinctively practiced by wolves...

...if all our psychological troubles are due to traumatic experiences in childhood, why aren't we all crazy...

...speaking as he was, assumedly inter pares, he did not have to wrap it up: He was exploring...

...art as communication is a job for specially gifted people...

...These examples, chosen almost at random, do not give more than an impression of Huxley's extraordinary scope here...

...into which we have by our folly and also by our good intentions, alas, succeeded in putting ourselves...

...For anyone who does not share my liking of the novels after T/uise Barren Leaves (1925), this is perhaps the book to read to get the essential mature Huxley, the writer who searched throughout his life for a satisfactory solution to our species' place in nature and the social and spiritual universe surrounding it...

...In his final lecture he quotes Oliver Cromwell...

...For instance: "the golden rule holds...

...and collected under the title The Human Situation...

...environment" to the "technicization of every aspect of human life" to the matter of "human potentialities...

...There is no denying, though, the truth of his comments at the end of his lecture on "War and Nationalism," and its applicability to every category of human affairs: "I...

...heredity...

...think that if we attack the problems on all fronts at once—the moral front, the political front, the persuasion front, the technological front—there is some considerable hope that we may get ourselves out of this dreadful situation...

...Sometimes it even seems to descend into the eccentric, as in Huxley's championing of Sheldon's classification of people as ecto-morphs, endomorphs and meso-morphs, and his advocacy of Bates' system for cultivating the art of vision...

...Throughout, he continually stresses the importance of the interplay of mind, body and spirit in the solution, if in fact there is one, to these "problems...

...Still, the author is never strident...

...death control is extremely easy under modern circumstances, birth control is extremely difficult...

...As Sybille Bedford has noted in her admirable biography of Huxley: "The great point about Aldous' spoken word [is] that it is looser, lighter, less didactic and a good deal more concise than some of the essays and expository passages in the novels...

...Whether speaking of "The World's Future" or "Art," he includes the historical, the ethical, the political, and the esthetic approach that may help us understand our predicament...

...The exploration does not make for easy reading, however...

...Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster Author, "After the Trauma" In 1959, before an overflow crowd at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Aldous Huxley delivered a series of lectures extemporaneously, his only contact with the printed word being an occasional close-to-face peering at quotations...

...I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken"—echoing a remark in the first lecture: "By the time we are at the end we shall have covered a great deal of ground, and we will also be extremely bored with what I have to say, but fortunately, I shall then quietly disappear...

...Succeeding lectures move from "Man and His Planet" to the "strictly biological problem of the human individual...

...The Human Situation begins with a consideration of our educational system's flaws...

...These lectures (versions of which were also given at MIT and the Menninger Institute) have now been transcribed and well-edited by Piero lerrucci...

...On the other hand, Huxley was able to give up glasses, and his warnings to psychiatrists who disregard body structure are sensible...

...not only for man's dealings with other men, but also for his dealings with lower animals and even with the inanimate world...