Letters

Brief Candles is an early  book of short stories by Aldous Huxley. Then, in the nineteen-teens and twenties (the  Anno Domini y ear was always six more than Huxley's own age) Huxley was savaging British society. An obscure  book, my copy came by luck in the '80s at "Ageless Book Shop" in Panama City, Florida run by Ann Humphreys who kept track of orders with small slivers of scrap paper held together by a rubber band. Brief Candles hasn't been republished for decades. It is, however, on Audible. As a satirist, Huxley has the virtue of being motivated by humor and curiosity rather than anger. "The Claxtons" still shocks me in its insight. The story was a lampoon on the political correctness of that day. But that day is long gone and time has been hard on the book' appeal tothe reader. The overriding themes of class, rejection of conventional religion, the liberating upsurge of new values (including Freud whom Huxley disliked) all are distant ghosts...

American Icarus ,  an essay by Henry Murray, is difficult to find.  I read it forty three years ago and even at that time it was considered a classic. But there is no place it is available for free. My searching, at least, proved inadequate. It was not available in Amazon, in Google Books,  in various online booksellers. Nonetheless, this is a perceptive essay about the narcissism (or "narcism") that develops during adolescence, the prevalence of drowning and fire imagery in the fantasies of certain teens (a topic Laing later took up) and coined ideas such as "ascensionsim". Henry Murray was the author of the TAT. The article is copied here from an antique (almost) text of mine, somewhat sloppily for the time being before it can be done professionally. At some point a text can be made. This is not an essay that should slip away. It is  useful in the understanding of many psychological and psychosocial events.   Murray describes imagery seen in many works of fi...