17 notes” - Decerto. A felicidade real parece bem sórdida em comparação às compensações que se encontram na miséria. E sem dúvida a estabilidade não é tão bom espetáculo quanto a instabilidade. E estar contente nada tem do encanto de uma boa luta contra a desgraça, nada do pitoresco de uma batalha contra a tentação, nem de uma derrota fatal pela paixão ou pela dúvida. A felicidade nunca é grandiosa.”
O Admirável Mundo Novo - Aldous Huxley <pag. 274>
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"Wrightwood. Cal.
21 October, 1949
Dear Mr. Orwell,
It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.
Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.
Thank you once again for the book.
Yours sincerely,
Aldous Huxley
"Several months after George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 was published in 1949, Aldous Huxley sent a letter to his former French pupil. (via hisnamewasbeanni)
(Source: lettersofnote.com, via hisnamewasbeanni)
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"Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything."Aldous Huxley
(Source: solace-isle, via teachingliteracy)
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“All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in subsituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly,those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.”
Aldous Huxley
2 notes“Meanwhile the music played on-Bach’s Suite in B minor, for flute and strings. Young Tolley conducted with his usual inimitable grace, bending in swan-like undulations from the loins and tracing luscious arabesques on the air with his waving arms, as though he were dancing to the music. A dozen anonymous fiddlers and cellists scraped at his bidding. And the great Pongileoni glueily kissed his flute. He blew across the mouth hole and a cylindrical air column vibrated; Bach’s meditations filled the Roman quadrangle. In the opening largo John Sebastian had, with the help of Pongileoni’s snout and the air column, made a statement: There are grand things in the world, noble things; there are men born kingly;there are real conquerors, intrinsic lords of the earth. But of an earth that is, oh! complex and multitudinous, he had gone on to reflect in the fugal allegro. You seem to have found the truth; clear, definite, unmistakable, it is announced by the violins;you have it, you triumphantly hold it. But it slips out of your grasp to present itself in a new aspect among the cellos and yet again in terms of Pongileoni’s vibrating air column. The parts live their separate lives; they touch, their paths cross, they combine for a moment to create a seemingly final and perfected harmony, only to break apart again. Each is always alone and separate and individual. “I am I,” asserts the violin; “the world revolves around me.” “Round me.” calls the cello. “Round me,” the flute insists. And all are equally right and equally wrong; and none of them will listen to the others.”
— Aldous Huxley “Point Counter Point”
“Individual sanity is not immune to mass insanity.”
— Aldous Huxley
(via mdcccxcv-deactivated20110828)
6 notesPhoto
Ken Russell interview: The last fires of film’s old devil
… Russell’s film was adapted from Aldous Huxley’s 1952 non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudon, as well as John Whiting’s follow-up 1960 play The Devils. They were all inspired by the notorious case of supposed demonic possession in 17th-century France, in which a charismatic Catholic priest, Urbain Grandier, was accused of bewitching nuns. The accusation was trumped up by Richelieu as an excuse to destroy a Protestant stronghold.
Russell takes even more liberties with this material than Huxley. Why portray the king as a cross-dressing homosexual who shoots Protestants dressed as birds in his royal park for fun? “Because that’s exactly as I saw him,” says Russell.
…Russell mentions he was inspired by one particular line in Huxley’s book. “The exorcism of sister Jeanne,” wrote Huxley, “was equivalent to rape in a public lavatory.” Hence the film’s vision of Loudon as a pristine, white-stone city and the convent as clad in white tiles (Derek Jarman designed the sets). Russell recalls the film’s final shot: “The girl goes up the hill of broken bricks.” The girl (Grandier’s recently widowed wife) walks over Loudun’s ruins into a landscape in which the only objects are posts topped by carriage wheels, on which Protestant corpses turn in the wind. “Polanski is said to have been inspired by that shot for the last scene of The Pianist,” Tribble says.
Russell then suggests The Devils is a religious film that takes inspiration from his own Catholic faith. “It’s about the degradation of religious principles,” he says. “And about a sinner who becomes a saint.”
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"«Ser arrancado de la percepción ordinaria, poder contemplar durante unas pocas pero eternas horas el mundo exterior y el interior, no tal como lo percibe un animal obsesionado por las palabras y los conceptos, sino tal como los percibe, directa e incondicionalmente, la Mente Libre… esa es una experiencia de incalculable valor para todo ser humano.»"Aldous Huxley, Las Puertas de la Percepción (via nessayavi)
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"In Egypt biology is a good deal closer to the politely human surface than it is in the United States. We cannot understand what happens in that country, and we cannot hope to deal effectively with those happenings, unless we take into account the brute biological facts which, in Egypt, are so painfully obtrusive. In the long run, politics, economics, and sociology are not enough for the management of any nation’s affairs. In Egypt, they are manifestly not enough even in the short run. Unless events on the biological level are recognized and effectively dealt with, the problem of the Near East can only become progressively more insoluble, more pregnant with danger for the rest of the world, more productive of human misery on an ever grander scale…
Meanwhile, as though the facts of biology were non-existent, the world’s politicians and soldiers, its bankers and traders, its clergymen and ideologists, continue to play their respective games in the style to which they are accustomed. Rome burns to the accompaniment of a whole orchestra of fiddlers.
"Aldous Huxley, “Politics and Biology,” Esquire, April 1957 (via fuckyeahjean-lucgodard)
