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

On Susila’s second visit to Will Farnaby, they talk about their families and the ways in which they did and did not function. Farnaby’s mother was weak and his father domineering and cruel, while Susila had a quiet father and an exuberant mother. To Susila’s more reserved constitution, her mother “was like a permanent invasion of one’s privacy.”

The difference between the fractured, resentful result of Farnaby’s upbringing and the integrated, forward-looking result of Susila’s is the Palanese family structure.

The first difference is a conception of family relationship which is not fixed or based on duty. Susila explains that although her mother raised her, as adults there is no pressure for them to maintain a deep relationship. “‘Mother’ is strictly the name of a function,” she says. “When the function has been duly fulfilled, the title lapses; the ex-child and the woman who used to be called ‘Mother’ establish a new kind of relationship. If they get on well together, they continue to see a lot of each other. If they don’t, they drift apart. Nobody expects them to cling, and clinging isn’t equated with loving—isn’t regarded as anything particularly creditable.”

The second difference is the Mutual Adoption Club, or MAC. In addition to their family of birth, Palanese people are voluntarily connected to 15 or 20 others via their MACs. When a child is having a hard time at home or wants a change of pace, she goes to one of her other families for a little while.

This structure ensures that no one family gets into an isolated position. If something needs to be dealt with, then that family has support from the rest of the MAC. If your parents don’t have a happy marriage, then you have dozens of other examples of other parents who may. Each child experiences what it’s like to live with newborns, the elderly, boys and girls of all ages, and a variety of ways of relating. This provides children with direct experience in the options available for living their own lives.

Of course, something like this structure used to be the norm in human civilization—extended families lived together for a long time, supporting each other through illnesses and new babies, building strong connections across multiple generations. But the MAC is a different beast in that it is both voluntary and malleable. No one is subjected to someone else’s tyranny or drama simply because of a fact of birth, and no one is duty-bound to stay in the same situation forever.

Contrasted with the nuclear family in which most of us are raised, where one person’s problems can poison a whole family and twist the children’s psyches forever, the MAC idea seems particularly sane—a way of diversifying the portfolio of relationships, decreasing risks, and expanding possibilities. Even if one’s own parents are crazy, children can see up close that others are not. I can vouch for the fact that, growing up in a somewhat insane environment, seeing examples of other ways to live influenced me deeply and helped me chart the course to the kind of life I wanted, which was very different from what my family had.

“Here the children grow up in a world that’s a working model of society at large, a small-scale but accurate version of the environment in which they’re going to have to live when they’re grown up,” says Susila.

This chapter contains one of my favorite passages in the book, where Susila says, “No Alcatrazes here. No Billy Grahams or Mao Tse-Tungs or Madonnas of Fatima. No hells on earth and no Christian pie in the sky, no Communist pie in the twenty-second century. Just men and women and their children trying to make the best of here and now, instead of living somewhere else, as you people mostly do, in some other time, some other home-made imaginary universe.”

“And it really isn’t your fault,” she continues. “You’re almost compelled to live that way because the present is so frustrating. And it’s frustrating because you’ve never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year’s resolutions and your actual behavior.”

Susila and Farnaby talk more about family and religion, eventually ending up on the topic of his adultery and his wife’s death. He tells Susila about how he fell in love with his wife—being with her was the only thing that quieted his persistent delusion of the world being full of maggots. But their marriage wasn’t happy, he cheated, she died in a car accident right after he broke the news that he was leaving, and Farnaby is wracked with guilt.

At the end of Farnaby’s story, the mynah bird in the distance shouts “Here and now, boys! Here and now!” Farnaby yells at him to shut up, but realizes that “he’s absolutely right… Then and there are absolutely irrelevant. Or aren’t they? What about your husband’s death, for example?” he asks Susila. “Is that irrelevant?”

She answers, “In the context of what I have to do now—yes, completely irrelevant. That’s something I had to learn ... What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living. It isn’t easy.”

“It isn’t easy,” repeats Farnaby. Then, suddenly: “Will you help me?”

“It’s a bargain,” she agrees.

As Susila and the other residents of Pala teach Farnaby how to live with lightness and purpose, Huxley continues to teach us, dangling the carrot of what it looks like when well-adjusted people live together in a well-adjusted society.

The beauty of what exists on Pala—the loving, productive, humane way of life they share—is meant, I think, to inspire each of us to bring more openness, intelligence, and awareness of the present moment into our own lives. At least, it works that way on me.

What are your thoughts as we proceed through the book?