Aldous Leonard Huxley

Aldous Leonard


Author Quotes


From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death ? all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence.

In a different mode, or another plane of being, music is the equivalent of some of man?s most significant and most inexpressible experiences. By mysterious analogy it evokes in the mind of the listener, sometimes the phantom of these experiences, sometimes even the experiences themselves in their full force of life ? it is a question of intensity; the phantom is dim, the reality, near and burning. Music may call up either; it is chance or providence which decides. The intermittences of the heart are subject to no known law.

Listening to expressive music, we have, not of course the artist?s original experience (which is quite beyond us, for grapes do not grow on thistles), but the best experience in its kind of which our nature is capable ? a better and completer experience than in fact we ever had before listening to the music.


Music ?says? things about the world, but in specifically musical terms. Any attempt to reproduce these musical statements ?in our own words? is necessarily doomed to failure. We cannot isolate the truth contained in a piece of music; for it is a beauty-truth and inseparable from its partner. The best we can do is to indicate in the most general terms the nature of the musical beauty-truth under consideration and to refer curious truth-seekers to the original. Thus, the introduction to theBenedictus in the Missa Solemnis is a statement about the blessedness that is at the heart of things. But this is about as far as ?our words? will take us. If we were to start describing in our ?own words? exactly what Beethoven felt about this blessedness, how he conceived it, what he thought its nature to be, we should very soon find ourselves writing lyrical nonsense? Only music, and only Beethoven?s music, and only this particular music of Beethoven, can tell us with any precision what Beethoven?s conception of the blessedness at the heart of things actually was. If we want to know, we must listen ? on a still June night, by preference, with the breathing of the invisible sea for background to the music and the scent of lime trees drifting through the darkness, like some exquisite soft harmony apprehended by another sense.

Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven?s or Mozart?s, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner?s music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It ?says? less because it is always speaking.




What are we in relation to our own minds and bodies ? or, seeing that there is not a single word, let us use it in a hyphenated form ? our own mind-bodies? What are we in relation to this total organism in which we live? ? The moment we begin thinking about it in any detail, we find ourselves confronted by all kinds of extremely difficult, unanswered, and maybe unanswerable questions.


I wish to raise my hand. Well, I raise it. But who raises it? Who is the ?I? who raises my hand? Certainly it is not exclusively the ?I? who is standing here talking, the ?I? who signs the checks and has a history behind him, because I do not have the faintest idea how my hand was raised. All I know is that I expressed a wish for my hand to be raised, whereupon something within myself set to work, pulled the switches of a most elaborate nervous system, and made thirty or forty muscles ? some of which contract and some of which relax at the same instant ? function in perfect harmony so as to produce this extremely simple gesture. And of course, when we ask ourselves, how does my heart beat? how do we breathe? how do I digest my food? ? we do not have the faintest idea.

Idolatry is ... the worship of a part ? especially the self or projection of the self ? as though it were the absolute totality. And as soon as this happens, general disaster occurs.





The liberal arts ... are little better than they were in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages the liberal arts were entirely verbal. The only two which were not verbal were astronomy and music... Although for hundreds of years we have been talking about mens sana in corpore sano, we really have not paid any serious attention to the problem of training the mind-body, the instrument which has to do with the learning, which has to do with the living. We give children compulsory games, a little drill, and so on, but this really does not amount in any sense to a training of the mind-body. We pour this verbal stuff into them without in any way preparing the organism for life or for understanding its position in the world ? who it is, where it stands, how it is related to the universe. This is one of the oddest things. Moreover, we do not even prepare the child to have any proper relation with its own mind-body.

The superficial self ? the self which we call ourselves, which answers to our names and which goes about its business ? has a terrible habit of imagining itself to be absolute in some sense... We know in an obscure and profound way that in the depths of our being ... we are identical with the divine Ground. And we wish to realize this identity. But unfortunately, owing to the ignorance in which we live ? partly a cultural product, partly a biological and voluntary product ? we tend to look at ourselves, at this wretched little self, as being absolute. We either worship ourselves as such, or we project some magnified image of the self in an ideal or goal which falls short of the highest ideal or goal, and proceed to worship that.



We as personalities ? as what we like to think of ourselves as being ? are in fact only a very small part of an immense manifestation of activity, physical and mental, of which we are simply not aware. We have some control over this inasmuch as some actions being voluntary we can say, I want this to happen, and somebody else does the work for us. But meanwhile, many actions go on without our having the slightest consciousness of them, and ... these vegetative actions can be grossly interfered with by our undesirable thoughts, our fears, our greeds, our angers, and so on? The question then arises, How are we related to this? Why is it that we think of ourselves as only this minute part of a totality far larger than we are ? a totality which according to many philosophers may actually be coextensive with the total activity of the universe?

We have to learn, so to speak, to get out of our own light, because with our personal self ? this idolatrously worshiped self ? we are continually standing in the light of this wider self ? this not-self, if you like ? which is associated with us and which this standing in the light prevents. We eclipse the illumination from within. And in all the activities of life, from the simplest physical activities to the highest intellectual and spiritual activities, our whole effort must be to get out of our own light.

What we perceive and understand depends upon what we are.

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Aldous Leonard
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