Island - Aldous Huxley [155]
“Karuna. Karuna.” And a semitone lower, “Attention.”
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About the author
Aldous Huxley
A Life of the Mind
POET, PLAYWRIGHT, NOVELIST, short story writer, travel writer, essayist, critic, philosopher, mystic, and social prophet, Aldous Huxley was one of the most accomplished and influential English literary figures of the mid-twentieth century. In the course of an extraordinarily prolific writing career, which began in the early 1920s and continued until his death in 1963, Huxley underwent a remarkable process of self-transformation from a derisive satirist of England’s chattering classes to a deeply religious writer preoccupied with the human capacity for spiritual transcendence. Yet in everything Huxley wrote, from the most frivolous to the most profound, there runs the common thread of his search to explain the meaning and possibilities of human life and perception.
Aldous Huxley was born in Surrey, England, in 1894, the son of Leonard Huxley, editor of the prestigious Cornhill magazine; and of Julia Arnold, niece of the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, and sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. He was the grandson of T. H. Huxley, the scientist. Thus by “birth and disposition,” as one biographer put it, Huxley belonged to England’s intellectual aristocracy.
As Sybille Bedford writes in her fascinating biography, Aldous Huxley (Alfred A. Knopf / Harper & Row, 1974): “What we know about him as a young child is the usual residue of anecdote and snapshot. During his first years his head was proportionately enormous, so that he could not walk till he was two because he was apt to topple over. ‘We put father’s hat on him and it fitted.’ In another country, at a great distance in time and place, when he lay ill and near his end in southern California, a friend, wanting to distract him, said, ‘Aldous, didn’t you ever have a nickname when you were small?’ and Aldous, who hardly ever talked about his childhood or indeed about himself (possibly because one did not ask) said promptly, ‘They called me Ogie. Short for Ogre.’
“The Ogre was a pretty little boy, the photographs…show the high forehead, the (then) clear gaze, the tremulous mouth and a sweetness of expression, an alertness beyond that of other angelic little boys looking into a camera. Aldous, his brother, Julian, tells us, sat quietly a good deal of the time ‘contemplating the strangeness of things.’
“‘I used to watch him with a pencil,’ said his cousin and contemporary Gervas Huxley, ‘you see, he was always drawing…. My earliest memory of him is sitting—absorbed—to me it was magic, a little boy of my own age drawing so beautifully.’
“He was delicate; he had mischievous moods; he could play. He carried his rag doll about him for company until he was eight. He was fond of grumbling. They gave him a milk mug which bore the inscription: Oh, isn’t the world extremely flat / With nothing whatever to grumble at.
“…And Aldous aged six being taken with all the Huxleys to the unveiling of the statue of his grandfather at the Natural History Museum by the Prince of Wales, and his mother trying, in urgent whispers, to persuade Julian, then a young Etonian, to give up his top hat—a very young Etonian and a very new top hat—to Aldous, queasy, overcome, to be sick in.”
When Huxley was a sixteen-year-old student at Eton, he contracted a disease that left him almost totally blind for two years and seriously impaired his vision for years to come. The loss of sight was an “event,” Huxley later wrote, “which prevented me from becoming a complete public school English-gentleman.” It also ended his early dreams of becoming