Showing results by author "Aldous Huxley" in All Categories

The critically acclaimed novelist and social critic Aldous Huxley, describes his personal experimentation with the drug mescaline and explores the nature of visionary experience. The title of this classic comes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity. Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

It's 2116, and Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson are token rebels in an irretrievably corrupted society where promiscuity is the norm, eugenics a respectable science, and morality turned upside down. There is no poverty, crime or sickness - but no creativity, art or culture either. Human beings are merely docile citizens: divided into castes, brainwashed and controlled by the state and dependent on the drug soma for superficial gratification.

In 1958, 27 years after Aldous Huxley wrote "Brave New World", he took another look at his remarkable fable and résumé the development since. His understandings are most alarming in his time already. They are even more alarming almost another half century later and shockingly up-to-date, considering recent developments. His prophetic view proofs once more, how terribly precise and visionary it was.

Unlike the dystopian vision described in Brave New World, or the psychedelic vision described in his The Doors of Perception, in The Art of Seeing, Aldous Huxley focuses on the actual vision of the human eye. Documenting his own profound near-blindness and subsequent attempts to improve his own sight, Huxley offers a thorough instruction manual on the controversial alternative vision therapy exercises developed by W. H. Bates.

The renowned author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, made his literary debut with the 1921 classic Crome Yellow. Set in post-WWI England, this perennial favorite satirizes the fads and fashions of the time with the tale of a hapless couple who join a colorful mix of British aristocrats attending a party at a rural country estate.

Într-o dimineață din primăvara anului 1953, Aldous Huxley ia patru zecimi de gram de mescalină și așteaptă răbdător să vadă ce se întâmplă. După un timp, constată că totul, de la florile din vază până la cutele pantalonilor, e complet schimbat: culorile sunt mai intense și mai luminoase, iar timpul și spațiul par să nu aibă nici o importanță. Huxley notează cu lux de amănunte senzațiile trăite în Porțile percepției, conchizând că halucinogenele stimulează creativitatea și brodând pe marginea efectelor pe care asemenea experiențe le-ar putea avea asupra artei și religiei.

One of the greatest prose writers and social commentators of the 20th century, Aldous Huxley here introduces us to a delightfully cynical, comic, and severe group of artists and intellectuals engaged in the most free-thinking and modern kind of talk imaginable. Poetry, occultism, ancestral history, and Italian primitive painting are just a few of the subjects competing for discussion among the amiable cast of eccentrics drawn together at Crome, an intensely English country manor.

Philosopher, pacifist, psychonaut and prophet Aldous Huxley was one of the 20th century’s pre-eminent intellectuals and writers. The author of over 50 books, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize nine times, and elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962, a year before his death. Known for his mordant satire and visionary ideas, Huxley spanned the period from post-First World War disillusionment to mid-century mysticism, and the works in this collection reflect his literary evolution.

Full-cast dramatisations of six masterpieces from the founding fathers of dystopian fiction. Dark and disturbing, provocative and prescient, dystopian literature has long captured our imagination with its nightmarish visions of forbidding future worlds. Included here are six classic novels of time-travel, totalitarianism and terror, written by some of the masters of speculative fiction and adapted for radio with all-star casts.

The plot centers on Anthony Beavis, a dilettante social theorist, a man inclined to recoil from life. The pleasures of the physical world disgust him and the universe of ideas is but a poor refuge. Having long lost the art of intimacy, he betrays friendships and toys with the affections of women. But as Beavis approaches middle age, his world of perfect detachment begins to lose its appeal. Finally realizing that his withdrawal from life has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Beavis, devastated and at crisis point, meets the remarkable and redoubtable Dr Miller.

The CBS Radio Workshop was an experimental series of productions, subtitled "radio's distinguished series to man's imagination" that ran between 27 January 1956 and 22 September 1957. The premiere production was Brave New World, narrated by Huxley himself, with a complicated sound-effects score that evidently took a long time to construct, and comprised a ticking metronome, tom-tom beats, bubbling water, an air hose, a cow's moo, an oscillator, and three kinds of wine glasses clicking together.

In music, counterpoint is the art of writing melodies that play in conjunction with one another, according to a strict set of rules, in order to emphasize the melody by contrast. In debate, point/counterpoint is a means of persuasion in which the speaker begins by conceding to their opponent’s argument before refuting it wholeheartedly. Aldous Huxley follows these traditions in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. The polarity between passion and reason in the intellectual life of the 1920s is demonstrated both in form and in theme in Huxley’s ambitious satire.

Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published a year later. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society that is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist.

Deviant. Depraved. Dangerous. Denounced for their transgressive themes and inflammatory ideas, these 20th-century classics have all been considered so seditious that they had to be suppressed. Find out what made these iconic works so threatening to governments worldwide in these superlative dramatisations, featuring stellar casts and specially composed music.

i>Mortal Coils is a collection of 5 pieces, which were written by Aldous Huxley in the 1920s. The first one, The Giaconda Smile, is a short murder story. Permutations Among the Nightingales is a play concerning amorous problems had by patrons of a certain establishment. The Tillotson Banquet tells of an old artist who was thought to be dead. Green Tunnels is about the boredom of a young girl on holiday with her family. Nuns at Luncheon is a story being told of a nun falling in love.

Young Oxford tutor Theodore Gumbril has become thoroughly dismayed by the formality of college life and the staid British institutions of learning. An impetuous need for celebration, even rebellion, possesses him. He and his bohemian companions embark on wild and daring "bacchanalian" adventures that steer them resolutely away from stifling conventions of behavior. Antic Hay, first published in 1923, is one of Aldous Huxley's earlier novels, and like them is primarily a 'novel of ideas' involving conversations which disclose viewpoints rather than establish characters; its polemical theme unfolds against the backdrop of London's post-war nihilistic Bohemia. This is Huxley at his biting, brilliant best -- a novel, loud with derisive laughter, which satirically scoffs at all conventional morality and at stuffy people everywhere -- a novel that's always charged with excitement.

Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published a year later. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society that is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist.

Denis Stone, a self-conscious young poet, is invited to the English town home of Crome, renowned for its gatherings of intellectuals. Hosted by Henry and Priscilla Wimbush, the house party has much to offer the naive Denis. The guests include the self-contained Anne, whom Denis adores; the handsome artist Gombauld, his rival for Anne's affections; and the cynical Mr. Scogan. All have their stories and ideas to unfold but, as Denis comes to realize, ideas cannot compensate for reality.

For its premiere episodes, The CBS Radio Workshop aired a two-part adaptation of Brave New World, featuring its author, Aldous Huxley, as narrator. The musical score was created by Academy Award-winner Bernard Hermann, whose film credits included Psycho and Citizen Kane.