Aldous Huxley, Island, and paying attention to the present
Harry J. SteadFollowingDec 9, 2019 · Medium.com
Aldous Huxley’s inspiration for writing his last novel, ‘Island’, was to promote an ideal world, a utopia, in which the best of Western and Eastern culture would collaborate and learn from each other. The island of Pala was founded by a Scottish secular humanist medical doctor and an Old Raja, who came together to negotiate a place where a balance was made between their differing worldviews; thus, the island of Pala adopts English law, language and literature, and Western science and medicine, but they practice the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and religion, and Eastern living, art and customs.
On the island, the attainment of self-realisation is made compatible with the interest of the greater good, and there is a careful and open consideration of religion, science, medicine, technology, government, sex, and health; a balance which avoids the dangers of runaway science, superstition, mass-mechanisation, and tyranny. It seems then Pala is a middle way between East and West, whereby the virtues of one cancels out, or at least disarms, the vices of the other.
Huxley remarks on Island that: “It’s a kind of fantasy, a kind of reverse Brave New World, about a society in which real efforts are made to realize human potentialities. I want to show how humanity can make the best of both Eastern and Western worlds. So the setting is an imaginary island between Ceylon and Sumatra, at a meeting place of Indian and Chinese influence.”
– Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews (second series; New York, 1963), page 198.
On the first page of ‘Island’, the call of “Attention!” by a talking mynah bird is the first sound Will Farnaby hears as he regains consciousness after deliberately wrecking his boat on the island paradise of Pala. Why the birds have been taught to say this curious word is one of the first things which Farnaby asks of the Palanese girl who found him helpless on the rocky cliff:
“Is that your bird?” Will asked.
She shook her head.
Mynahs are like the electric light”, she said. “They don’t belong to anybody.”
Why does he say those things?
“Because somebody taught him”, she answered patiently…
But why did they teach him those things? Why ‘Attention’? Why ‘Here and now?’
“Well …” She searched for the right words in which to explain the self-evident to this strange imbecile. “That’s what you always forget, isn’t it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not being here and now.”
“And the mynahs fly about reminding you — is that it?”
She nodded. That, of course, was it. There was a silence.
(Aldous Huxley, Island, page 15)
Later in the novel, Farnaby is invited to dinner by Shanta, and before the family begins to eat she explains to Farnaby that the Palanese people do not say grace with words, rather they chew with grace; the taste of food is “something given, something you haven’t in vented”, and it is to be experienced and attended to with the proper patience and presence of mind that it deserves:
“Grace is the first mouthful of each course — -chewed and chewed until there’s nothing left of it. And all the time you’re chewing you pay attention to the flavor of the food, to its consistency and temperature, to the pressures on your teeth and the feel of the muscles in your jaw.”
“And meanwhile, I suppose, you give thanks to the Enlightened One, or Shiva, or whoever it may be?”
Shanta shook her head emphatically, “That would distract your attention, and 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.”
(Aldous Huxley, Island, Page 243)
This mindful exercise keeps one’s attention to the here and now, and leads to the awareness of the fact that, like breathing, we have no control over our taste, it happens naturally — that is the point of the practice: to become more and more aware of what our unconscious — the you that is not-you, the you that cannot be grasped — is doing.
The theme of paying attention is a constant throughout the novel; we are made aware of it when Farnaby learns to observe his feelings at the beginning, when Lakshmi accepts that she is dying, and when Farnaby connects with nature and Susila in the final chapter.
This emphasis on the present moment is just one of customs which Huxley uses to distinguish Pala from the neighbouring country of Rendang, and also from our own world, the Western world; in this way, the island of Pala is a commentary and a critique on the state of mind in the modern West, which has, as Huxley argues in his essay ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’, condemned us to live in a rationalised, mechanical abstraction which has little relation to or harmony with nature, and in which we spend our days calculating and predicting the future — indeed, this is the principle virtue of our time: the ability to estimate the future.
In this modern age we are impatient for the future; the future is the supreme virtue. So nowadays we hurry everything we do, so that we might reach the future faster and enjoy our happiness in some distant land. But increasingly we find ourselves caught in a terrible circle: for the quicker we move the more that is expected of us, and the more that is expected of us, the faster our pace — in short, it is the circle of stress. We fly from point to the other, chasing happiness at greater and greater speeds, and all the while, ruining our work and wellbeing, and eventually our society, by violence, confusion, and haste, for the purposes of deadlines, money, the boss, hopes for the future.
As result, everything we do is not worth doing; our hurried actions become punishments — modern food, architecture, journalism, art, fashion are all punishments, because they have corrupted our sense of taste, and made us addicted to the artificial, the counterfeit, and ignorant of the real thing, the homegrown, of nature, truth.
We are all bound by heavy chains: economics, fractions, progress, allowances, spreadsheets — but the heaviest is that of time. So little time that we take our food so fast that it has none of the quality of food, and take our holidays wishing we were somewhere else and oftentimes wishing we were back at work. And yet everyone is agreed that it is absurd to be a man who hurries about his food and leisure. But how can it be helped? How can one in this age not indulge in the haste and stress when the primary aim of the society is productivity and progress?
This is, as Huxley sees it, the principle vice of the West: that we are only happy when we have the assurance of a happy future; even when we have given up on our own future then we are anxious about the future of someone else. We demand an assured future. However no such assurance is possible, only vague calculations and probabilities. So we are forever on edge, never quite settled with what we have in this moment. The antidote to this vice, Huxley argues, is in the philosophical traditions and customs of China and India; just as Western scepticism and science is the antidote to the Eastern vice of superstition.
On the last page, when the invading army from neighbouring country of Rendang, a military dictatorship whose sole interest in Pala is oil and natural resources, is for the time being out of sight, the frogs and the insects and the mynah birds are once again audible, and the same reminder is heard — first, “Karuna, Karuna,” which means compassion, and then, “a semitone lower, ‘Attention’.”
“The roaring of the engines diminished, the squeaking rhetoric lapsed into an inarticulate murmur, and as the intruding noises died away, out came the frogs again, out came the uninterruptable insects, out came the mynah birds.”
(Aldous Huxley, Island, page 354)
In the end, Huxley is not offering us a romantic, far-off island to which we could go and escape and be happy, but rather a country which is suffering with very real challenges and has difficult practical choices to make; a country which is not unlike our own world. His purpose is not to invent some fool’s paradise; escapism is always an indication of a deeper insecurity. But rather he challenges the reader to pay attention, to be here and now in sickness and health, to choose the good in whatever terms the present moment offers, and to stop looking to the future for happiness, for a place in which all is finished, where there is nothing to struggle against.
There is no such thing as an assured future, and any desire for security is a contradiction in a world which is constantly changing. We as readers are asked to take reality as it is, to slow down and give our whole attention to whatever our present circumstances are now, in this moment, even under the threat of bombs and the machine guns.
“We don’t despair,” he said, “because we know that things don’t necessarily have to be as bad as in fact they’ve always been.” “We know that they can be a great deal better,” Susila added. “Know it because they already are a great deal better, here and now, on this absurd little island.”
(Aldous Huxley, Island, 130)
Thank you, Harry J. Stead
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