Letters

In this recorded lecture Alan Watts describes the accomplishment of Aldous Huxley iin the book  "Island". Huxley had been a social critic his entire life and it was a hard task reversing himself, and becoming a critic. Given that utopias were out of style, he allowed himself to be a sitting duck, by writing this utopia. The regnent idea was that the world was getting worse, so this utopian novel was out of step with literary fashion. Since Huxley was a novelist, he chose to put his ideas into novel form;. Possibly it would have worked better as an essay. But that was his identity--as a novelist, and that is the category people put him into. So rather than writing essays, which would have conveyed the same content, he had the ideas come out of characters mouths. Also, Watts describes how Huxley changed in the nineteen thirties, under the influence of Gerald Heard, developing a Maniachin view of the world. The physical world was a degradation from the spiritual state. That idea