A Place for Utopia by Smriti Srinivas

Author:Smriti Srinivas [Srinivas, Smriti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, India & South Asia, Architecture, Urban & Land Use Planning
ISBN: 9780295806129
Google: gr_XCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2016-01-27T02:58:57+00:00

TRAVELING FAR

Huxley’s last authored essay in Vedanta and the West was probably in 1960, called “Symbol and Immediate Experience.”35 However, in mid-1963, a brief essay appeared that was starkly titled “Death.” The essay stated that birth, sickness, decrepitude, and death are called fetters because they seem to impose “involuntary captivity.”36 However, if one can practice or view each of these tests or turning points in life in a voluntary, spontaneous, or liberating way, then the experience of these states is not merely one of suffering. The essay concluded, “Then inevitably comes the crowning gift—the capacity to achieve delivery, the voluntarily liberating death which is the master-birth for those who have lived, purposively and earnestly, their bodily life as a preparation for that which alone can crown it.” Only such a view of man’s purpose, it affirmed, can “give the individual true fullness of life and keep his society from despair, frustration, and self-destruction.”37

The author of this essay is not named. The journal states only that it was penned by “a friend” of the Southern California Vedanta Society who wanted it published solely with the title, since “the subject is one which invites anonymity.”38 From the grace of the prose as well as the timing, one might surmise that it is Huxley’s. Soon after the publication of his last novel Island in 1962, Huxley’s cancer returned, having been first diagnosed in 1960. Although he made an initial recovery, he relapsed in mid-1963. Isherwood (2001 [1980]: 259) describes visiting him in the hospital on November 4: “I came away with the picture of a great noble vessel sinking quietly into the deep; many of its delicate marvelous mechanisms still in perfect order, all its lights still shining.” Huxley died on November 22, 1963.

Huxley’s Island (2002 [1962]) not only offers a counterpoint to his better-known 1932 dystopia Brave New World but also portrays the elements of utopian reconstruction and a faith and practice for living and dying that emerge out of the same terrain as Californian Vedanta, although the nuances are very different.39 It seems appropriate in the context of building “a utopianism that is explicitly spatiotemporal” (Harvey 2000: 182) to refer to Island’s roots in a history of utopian experiments, the space of new religions, and designs for biculturalism or ecumenicalism.40

Island emerged from the soil of Huxley’s American immersion: in 1937, he moved to the United States with his family and lived mostly in Southern California until his death (Bedford 1973; Sawyer 2002). In California, his horizons broadened to include script writing for American films, psychedelic substances, alternative lifestyles, and the study of several religious traditions. From 1942 to 1945, he lived on a humble ranch in Antelope Valley about forty miles north of Los Angeles near a utopian farming collective, the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony, founded in 1914 by Job Harriman. In Llano, Huxley experimented with a simple life and practiced eye exercises advocated by W. H. Bates. Huxley also befriended J. Krishnamurti (residing nearby in Ojai Valley), with whom he maintained a long-standing friendship and mutual interest in pedagogy.

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