“These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things
without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.”
“Two great appetites of the soul - the urge to independence and
self-determination and the urge to self-transcendence - were fused with, and
interpreted in the light of, a third - the urge to worship”
“I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in
my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three
flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every
petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured
carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic
blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all
the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been
struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the
point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing
what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by
moment, of naked existence.”
“Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has
ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere
in the universe.”
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always
and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into
the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to
fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By
its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in
solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancy - all these are private and,
except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool
information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From
family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven
and Hell
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