Attention!
Island is Aldous Huxley’s utopian counterpart to his most famous work, the
distopian Brave New World. Published in 1962, Island offers stunning insights
into conditions and trends that shape our lives today.
Derived from a lifetime of research and experience, Huxley came to believe
that “life is to be lived out in awareness of itself and of the light beyond it.”
Here are just a few pearls of wisdom he found on his journeys. Ironically it is
Brave New World that is standard reading in schools across the country,
while Island, with its recipes for life and how to live it, is the truly transformative
work that deserves our attention.
“Attention is the whole point.
Attention to the experience of something given, something you haven’t
invented. Not the memory of a form of words addressed to somebody
in your imagination.”