Letters

The novel  Eyeless in Gaza Damon LaBarbera Eyeless in Gaza  was written by the English writer Aldous Huxley in 1936 and describes, in achronological episodes, the interacting lives of several individuals over  the decades.  Eyeless in Gaza  is not one of Huxley's best-known books, and may not be obscure, but is a favorite book of mine, Some opine,  and I am inclined to agree, that this book equal or superior to his more famous books, including  Brave New World or Doors of Perception.   Eyeless in Gaza is   written in that particular style of which Huxley is so adept. The prose allows us to enter the inner monologue, sometimes humorously depicted, of his protagonists (assuming a book can have more than one protagonist).  His use of language is finely developed and virtuosic.  The characters are finely tuned, struggling with ethical issues and living the extraordinarily free and thoughtful lives of well to do intellectuals of that day. T his book differs from Huxley's earlier oeu

  A physician in Panama City, Florida recently died, I was very sorry to hear. Attrition of old friends and mentors and acquaintances proceeds at an accelerated pace at a certain age, and the normalcy of the subjective experience, over time, if that is what it is, rather than a sort of numbing, is one of the most interesting adaptive qualities of older age. The world--its structures and rules and mores, stay roughly the same, but it is peopled with a new set of actors. In any case, I was very sorry to hear of Dr. Zumarraga's death. He was a very kind, also very competent individual, from the Phillipines, and one aspect of our friendship was that my Dad had served in Manilla during the forties, during the conflagration of that city, while Dr. Zumaragga was a youngster there. I first met Dr. Zumarraga at Life Management Center about 1986. He attended weekly meetings to provide psychiatric coverage.  W ell-liked, he was easygoing, and pleasant, with none of the officiousness you might