For the next several weeks, we will be discussing Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.

As Will Farnaby rests up, he begins to read Notes on What’s What, and on What It Might be Reasonable to Do about What’s What, a short book written by the Old Raja of Pala, laying out some of the ideas behind the design of Pala’s culture.

As he turns the pages, a poem written by the healer Susila, who has recently lost her husband in a mountain climbing accident, falls out. It’s a lovely piece of writing about accepting one’s life, loves and losses included, as it is, then, having accepted it, seeing it all as part of a larger, impersonal process. Here is a part of it:

Somewhere between seeing and speaking, somewhere
Between our soiled and greasy currency of words
And the first star, the great moths fluttering
About the ghosts of flowers,
Lies the clear place where I, no longer I,
Nevertheless remember
Love’s nightlong wisdom of the other shore;
And, listening to the wind, remember too
That other night, that first of widowhood,
Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark.
Mine, mine, all mine inescapably!
But I, no longer I,
In this clear place between my thought and silence
See all that I had and lost, anguish and joys,
Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass
Blue, unpossessed and open.

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For the next several weeks, we will be discussing Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.

The other night I got together with a few friends to watch the first presidential debate, and I couldn’t get the Ken Wilber video posted last Friday out of my mind. In that video, Wilber says that the fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals comes down to what they think causes human suffering.

Conservatives think suffering comes from within: a lack of willpower, the wrong values, or weakness. Liberals on the other hand think that suffering is caused by the way society shapes us: lack of opportunity, lack of support, or oppression.

Watching John McCain and Barack Obama debate, I saw this difference playing out before me clear as day. And I wondered, why does neither candidate seem to see that both points of view are valid?

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For the next several weeks, we will be discussing Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.

As Will Farnaby gets to know more and more about his Palanese hosts and the culture that shaped them, so do we. One of the children who finds him injured in the jungle after his shipwreck, Mary Sarojini, asks him what happened to him. He is too horrified to tell her, so she sensibly tells him to think back to when he was a child. “What did your mother do when you hurt yourself?”

His response—she said, “My poor baby, my poor little baby”—horrifies Mary in turn. “But that’s awful!” she replies, shocked. “That’s the way to rub it in! It must have gone on hurting for hours. And you’d never forget it.” She then insists that he tell the story over and over again until he sees that it’s in the past and can no longer hurt him in the present.

Having been recently injured myself—I broke my ankle on the last day of my vacation 2 weeks ago—I can vouch that the “poor baby” treatment doesn’t help at all. “Poor baby” inevitably leads to “why me?” and that is a question with no satisfactory answer. Why not me? Why not any of us? Suffering comes into every life and it seems far more sensible to learn how to handle it rather than wallow in it.

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For the next several weeks, we will be discussing Aldous Huxley’s utopian final novel, Island (click here for all posts on the book). As our discussion of the book unfolds, I will be referencing and, in many cases, agreeing with Huxley’s critique of modern culture.

I want to be clear that I do not mean to dismiss the progress we have made over the years. Certainly, we have come a long way. At the same time, we have a long way still to go. Part of the reason for looking into this book in detail is that it shows pathways we might travel to get to a future in which humans live more fully, happily, and harmoniously.

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In preparation for our discussion of Island starting next week, I went looking on Youtube for interviews with Aldous Huxley. In this snippet, you can hear him talk about problems that we are still facing today, 50 years later, as well as his ideas on how we can solve these problems using “all our goodwill, all our intelligence, and all our knowledge.”

What I find most interesting is that he considers problems of politics unsolvable, and problems of ecology possibly solvable, and so advocates shifting our attention from one to the other: “It’s high time we started thinking not merely in terms of politics and ideology but in terms of biology and the relationship of man to his environment.”

You can watch the full interview (around 20 minutes long) after the jump. Huxley’s ideas reverberate today as much as or even moreso than in his own time.

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“In framing an ideal, we may assume what we wish, but should avoid impossibilities.”
—Aristotle

Aldous Huxley begins his utopian final novel, Island, with the above quote, which intrigues me. Is he saying that the culture he describes fails Aristotle’s test or passes it? Could the practical, spiritual, thriving island of Pala really exist?

These are questions we will address starting September 15th, when we begin The Sunny Way’s first book club with Island.

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