Overview

"Long before ""turn on, tune in, drop out"" became the credo of contemporary counterculture, Aldous Huxley was using mescaline and LSD in controlled, carefully documented experiments. Accounts of those psychedelic experiences, along with his interest in Eastern mystic religions, accompany the moving story of his later years with his wife, Laura, whom he met in 1948 and married in 1956. Huxley's fascination with the spiritual world remained with him throughout his life and never wavered through his final illness in 1963. This memoir allows the reader to understand the man behind the writings, his emotional and intellectual freedom, his humour, and ultimately his tenderness and compassion."

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9780890879689

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Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. - Aldous Huxley

The second wife of Aldous Huxley, whom he married in 1956, remembers the last years and last hours of his life. Laura Huxley herself, a self-help cultist and enthusiastic investigator of non-material planes of existence in California, published her own book, You Are Not the Target, in 1963. Rather a rum go. However, the lowering, egocentric righteousness of the seeress has been softened, clarified by love and loss, and this is a moving book. The gentle, searching, indefatigable mind of Aldous Huxley (reflecting the genuinely humanistic concerns of all the Huxleys) as he moved beyond the nihilistic mysticism of Time Must Have A Stop, is given full and devoted focus. The human mind wrote Huxley in a note, has the function of bringing some kind of conceptual order upon the huge brute fact of one damned thing after another. And, We must not attempt to live outside the world. . . but transform it and transfigure it. Huxley's attempt to prepare for the other consciousness of death, earlier through his creative vigil at the bedside of Maria, his dying wife; his own strenuous work in the last days as he lay ravaged with cancer, gasping into a tape recorder; as he and Laura experimented with LSD; are remarkable, glimpses of a man convinced of the world's All-Rightness. A section of Huxley's unfinished novel, many notes and letters, and taped dialogues are included. Sure to fascinate admirers of the late novelist and a general public bemused by the busy Mrs. Huxley. An intimate retrospective with many timeless moments which will endure. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

LAURA HUXLEY is a psychotherapist and the author of several books, including You Are Not the Target, Between Heaven and Earth, and The Child of Your Dreams. She lives in Los Angeles.

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