Island

After a five-day vacation near a lapping shore,  islands are on my mind this last day of July.

One long ago summer in June of 1961 – merely a month after his house burned to the ground in a canyon brush fire – Huxley finally completed the manuscript of his utopian novel Island. The manuscript was one of very few items he had managed to save in those last desperate minutes as flames surged up the canyon and he and Laura fled from their home

Huxley had long planned to write a utopian novel, as he told Dr. Humphry Osmond in a letter penned many years earlier. Huxley understood that utopias were fragile constructs. He had written about the failed utopian community of Llano del Rio, and he and first wife Maria had lived in the Mojave desert adjacent to the former colony. In his time, the ruins were still standing and some original walls survive even today.

Huxley knew that a perfect society cannot be sustained in perpetuity when those who comprise any group suffer from human flaws, guaranteeing eventual degradation from within or without. An island with its insularity (not unlike a remote desert locale) might encourage the bud of an ideal to flourish for a while, but not forever.

So after deciding on the fictional setting of an imaginary island and naming it Pala, Huxley set about portraying an advanced culture with an enlightened approach to education, a guilt-free attitude toward sexuality, and a cradle-to-grave practice of spiritual development that included the use of, and respect for, the mind-expanding properties of a psychedelic mushroom Huxley dubbed moksha medicine.

Pala’s highly evolved culture required separation from the taint of its neighbors, but leaders of a neighboring country cast a predatory eye on Pala’s as-yet unexploited mineral resources. Simultaneously, protective resolve was collapsing from within. Pala’s founders and a successive generation prevailed until they spawned a third generation, thrill-seeking heir who was drawn to the glittery temptations of another shore.

I write this on a midsummer’s day, when two themes in Huxley’s Island bring to mind current and recurrent news headlines. The 17th century poet John Donne wrote “no man is an island.” In this sense, no nation is an island. Change arrives, for better or for worse, from without or within.