Everyday Ecstasy

by Marghanita Laski

At one time or another, most if not all of us have what might be called a mystical experience, or a moment of ecstasy. This can be triggered off by the sudden apprehension of a beautiful landscape, by love of a person or an object, by the frightening or sublime aspects of a natural phenomenon, or indeed by a multitude of events or states of consciousness which seem to empty the mind of its usual preoccupations or thoughts and fill it instead with short-lived sensations of awe, fulfillment or joy. Most people shrug off such experiences once they have passed; others cling to them and try to repeat and to live by them. This dichotomy in people’s reactions to ecstasy leads to curious and controversial modes of social behavior, and can also be used as a mechanism for manipulating or directing people’s minds. Marghanita Laski published in 1961 a book called Ecstasy which was enthusiastically received and widely discussed. In it she assembled data gathered from a number of individuals on the ecstatic experience, its nature and its triggers. In the present work, she enlarges the scope of her investigation to examine the actual and potential results of a reliance on ecstasy or mystical experience as contrasted with conduct based on reason and analysis. This is very much a book of today, a book for today. It addresses itself wittily and gracefully to problems often subsumed under that cant term, ‘the generation gap’; it weighs the values of ‘the simple life’, the return to nature, as compared to the more sophisticated life of intellectual quest and attainment.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2002

About the author

English journalist, radio panelist, and novelist: she also wrote literary biography, plays, and short stories.

Laski was born to a prominent family of Jewish intellectuals: Neville Laski was her father, Moses Gaster her grandfather, and socialist thinker Harold Laski her uncle. She was educated at Lady Barn House School and St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith. After a stint in fashion, she read English at Oxford, then married publisher John Howard, and worked in journalism. She began writing once her son and daughter were born.

A well-known critic as well as a novelist, she wrote books on Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ecstasy (1962) explored intense experiences, and Everyday Ecstasy (1974) their social effects. Her distinctive voice was often heard on the radio on The Brains Trust and The Critics; and she submitted a large number of illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary.

An avowed atheist, she was also a keen supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Her play, The Offshore Island, is about nuclear warfare.