“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. 

I first read this book 10 years or so ago. Jean Houston, an author and teacher I’ve long admired, mentioned the book at a class I took with her, and I was intrigued that the man who wrote perhaps the most chilling dystopian novel of all time also contributed a vision of utopia.

Island was published 30 years after Brave New World, after Huxley discovered meditation and experimented with psychedelics (documented in his short book The Doors of Perception). An open-minded and curious man who believed that no dogma or totalitarian regime could ever substitute for a person’s own direct experience, Huxley no doubt changed greatly in the three decades between the two books.

In some ways, they can hardly be seen as the work of the same person. But they are united by the same vision of modern Western society as basically insane—incomplete, unjust, and largely malfunctioning. Brave New World depicts this madness taken to unimaginable extremes; Island represents the same madness faced head-on and transformed by common sense and intention into a structure that works for the human beings who comprise it rather than the other way round.

In the book, Will Farnaby is a wounded, embittered journalist from “the outside” who serves the reader’s stand-in as we learn about how things are done on Pala. In this passage, one of the island’s elders describes how social reforms first came to Pala via the Old Raja and his friend and doctor, Dr. Andrew MacPhail:

People ... are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom. Might it not be possible, on this forbidden island, to avoid the cankers, minimize the nippings, and make the individual blooms more beautiful? That was the question to which, implicitly at first, then with a growing awareness of what they were really up to, Dr. Andrew and the Raja were trying to find an answer.

And that is the question we will be exploring as we read and discuss this beautiful and important book together, starting three weeks from today—September 15th.

I can’t imagine that anyone who reads this site could read Island without being touched and illuminated by its vision for what humans can make possible in our interactions with each other and the Earth. Please get hold of the book and join us as we look into the questions Huxley raises and the answers he proposes.