FIFTY YEARS ON: ALDOUS HUXLEY’S ISLAND (1962) RECONSIDERED

DAVID GARRETT IZZO

Huxley’s last novel is a summation of his vast study in the ways that humanity might use science rather than abuse science and forsake a rabid capitalism for more of a spiritually motivated, semi-socialistic society. Island is Huxley’s device aimed at giving readers a look at a positive utopia, quite a change from the dystopia of Brave New World. The innovation in this novel is in the ideas, rather than in the telling. In its way, Island is a refutation of Brave New World. One must have an overview of Huxley’s idea of mysticism as an island in the mind to fully appreciate the underlying guiding principle of Island, which begins with an intuition that there is an integrated sense of a spiritual unicity and then one seeks the ways to heighten the perception of this intuitive awareness as a basis for expanding human potential.

To be capable of love – this is, of course, about two thirds of the battle; the other third is becoming capable of the intelligence that endows the love with effectiveness in an obscure and complicated and largely loveless world. It is not enough merely to know, and it is not enough merely to love; there must be knowledge- love and charity-understanding or pajna-karuna, in the language of Buddhism – wisdom-compassion.1

An island can be a sanctuary, a safe haven, an escape from the larger and fractious world, a place for hopes and dreams to be born. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is set on such an island, one that is a metaphor for the inner life of the mind, and it remains the first modern effort to define an island as an aesthetic frame for ideas. Perhaps Shakespeare’s play somewhat echoes a precursor, the Arthurian Avalon, where Excalibur is found, forever after assuring the isle’s

1 Aldous Huxley, Letters of Aldous Huxley, London: Chatto and Windus, 1969, 866.

110 David Garrett Izzo mystical aura. Later, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick metaphorized the island as sanctuary in his chapter titled, “An Insular Tahiti”. Alongside the many fictional islands one could refer to, representing places to which one escapes for solace, solitude or clarity, Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962) stands out as the aesthetic frame for an exploration of love as a basic and indispensable element of life. Huxley, one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of the twentieth century, spent a lifetime in quest of an inner island of mystical serenity. He learned early that love would be the predetermining condition in his search for serenity. On 29 November 1908, his mother, who was forty-seven, died from cancer. Aldous adored her and was devastated by her death. In a final letter to her son written on her deathbed, she told him: “Don’t be too critical of people and love much.” Huxley later added in 1915:

I have come to see more and more how wise that advice was. It’s her warning against a rather conceited and selfish fault of my own and it’s a whole philosophy of life.2

If his cynicism prevailed in his novels in the 1920s, in the 1930s, he began to formulate the idea to “love much” as a “philosophy of life”. The change begins to appear in his 1928 novel, Point Counter Point, in which Huxley intimates that such a place as an island in the mind can be achieved through a surrender to contemplative music:

There are grand things in the world …. Johan Sebastian [Bach] puts the case. The Rondeau begins, exquisitely and simply melodious, almost a folk-song …. His is a slow and lovely meditation on the beauty (in spite of all the evil), the oneness (in spite of such bewildering diversity) of the world. It is a beauty, a goodness, a unity that no intellectual research can discover, that analysis dispels, but of whose reality the spirit from time to time is suddenly and overwhelmingly convinced …. The music was infinitely sad; and yet it consoled …. It was able to confirm – deliberately, quietly … that everything was in some way right, acceptable. It included the sadness within some vaster, more comprehensive happiness.3

2 Ibid., 83. 3 Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, London: Chatto and Windus, 1928, 31-32.