Tuesday, 9 January 2018

Fiftieth anniversary of the deaths of Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis (Nov. 22, 1963)

22 November 2013 at 6:49 am
Fiftieth anniversary of the death of Aldous Huxley
Los Angeles, California, 22 November 1963
On the morning of November 22nd, a Friday, it became clear the gap between living and dying was closing. Realizing that Aldous [Huxley] might not survive the day, Laura [Huxley’s wife] sent a telegram to his son, Matthew, urging him to come at once. At ten in the morning, an almost inaudible Aldous asked for paper and scribbled “If I go” and then some directions about his will. It was his first admission that he might die …
Around noon he asked for a pad of paper and scribbled
LSD-try it
intermuscular
100mm
In a letter circulated to Aldous’s friends, Laura Huxley described what followed: ‘You know very well the uneasiness in the medical mind about this drug. But no ‘authority’, not even an army of authorities, could have stopped me then. I went into Aldous’s room with the vial of LSD and prepared a syringe. The doctor asked me if I wanted him to give the shot- maybe because he saw that my hands were trembling. His asking me that made me conscious of my hands, and I said, ‘No, I must do this.’
An hour later she gave Huxley a second 100mm. Then she began to talk, bending close to his ear, whispering, ‘light and free you let go, darling; forward and up. You are going forward and up; you are going toward the light. Willingly and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing this beautifully — you are going toward the light — you are going toward a greater love … You are going toward Maria’s [Huxley’s first wife, who had died many years earlier] love with my love. You are going toward a greater love than you have ever known. You are going toward the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it so beautifully.’
All struggle ceased. The breathing became slower and slower and slower until, ‘like a piece of music just finishing so gently in sempre piu piano, dolcamente,’ at twenty past five in the afternoon, Aldous Huxley died.
  • vto1.1
    22 November 2013 at 7:53 am
    some deaths are intensely beautiful..
    like the wilt of a rose..
        • Chooky1.2
          22 November 2013 at 8:20 am
          …wow what a fantastic way to go into the next realm
        • greywarbler1.3
          22 November 2013 at 12:30 pm
          Thanks Morrissey that was very touching and hopeful for the rest of us.
        • Dumrse1.4
          23 November 2013 at 4:25 pm
          I’m guessing the death of JFK 50 years ago simply slipped your mind ?
          • Morrissey1.4.1
            23 November 2013 at 4:37 pm
            I’m guessing the death of JFK 50 years ago simply slipped your mind?
            A guy who had connived in the assassination of the South Vietnam prime minister (an American vassal) just twenty days earlier, and was actively conspiring to assassinate the Cuban president (who refused to be a vassal) was himself the victim of an assassin’s bullet.
            The biter bit, pure and simple. You can throw all that Camelot hogwash where it belongs—in the same bin as the fulsome tributes for Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet, Mao and Pol Pot.
            I prefer to focus on people who actually enhanced human life—like great writers, who really could write. Unlike some Pulitzer Prize winners….
            http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2478/did-john-f-kennedy-really-write-profiles-in-courage
            • Dumrse1.4.1.1
              24 November 2013 at 9:45 am
              Ok, that’s cool. At least I now know there is more to you than just a cut and paste blogger and, I also suspect you research and write for the Herald and TV 3.
            • 22 November 2013 at 7:11 am
              C.S. Lewis died fifty years ago today: Friday 22 November 1963
              CS Lewis’s literary legacy: ‘dodgy and unpleasant’ or ‘exceptionally good’?
              by SAM LEITH, The Guardian, 19 November 2013
              “Aslan is on the move.” That phrase, three decades after I first read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, still has the power to tickle the hairs on my neck. It testifies to the enduring power of CS Lewis’s recasting of the Christian myth that I’m far from alone. If this were all there were to him, it would still be pretty remarkable that, 50 years after his death, this tweedy old Oxford don should occupy such an exalted place in our cultural life.
              All this week on Radio 4, Simon Russell Beale has been reading The Screwtape Letters – Lewis’s perceptive inquiry into temptation cast as a series of witty letters between a demon and his apprentice. This Friday, his reputation will be crowned with a plaque in his honour, between John Betjeman and William Blake, in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
              The tribute might have pleased him, but it’s an odd one: as a poet, Lewis is usually regarded as pretty useless. “He hated all poets because he was a failed poet,” says his biographer AN Wilson. “He hated TS Eliot. He hated Louis MacNeice. There’s a very bad ‘poem’ by Lewis about reading The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, and it just shows how stupid he was about modern poetry.”
              Lewis has much more than poetry to offer, though. Almost too much: his posthumous reputation is disconcertingly various. As well as a children’s writer, he was novelist, memoirist, essayist, critic, broadcaster and apologist. But the two Lewises that command the biggest followings….
              • tracey2.1
                22 November 2013 at 8:17 am
                does this mean copyright lapses today?
                • Draco T Bastard2.1.1
                  22 November 2013 at 2:22 pm
                  Nope. Copyright is, depending upon where in the world you are, death +50/70 years. Apparently the governments of the world are concerned that anyone the author leaves behind won’t be able to live on their own work.
                  The really big problem with it is that corporations don’t die and yet corporations now own a lot, if not most, of the copyrights.
              • Chooky2.2
                22 November 2013 at 8:19 am
                Morrissey….Thankyou for that review of CS Lewis and his writings…i always enjoyed his children’s books and I was a great fan of his popular Christian theology in my teens…….which after doing Comparative Religion at Univeristy i havent read since….however, interesting and understandable that he is still as popular as ever
                …for me now , looking back he remains a very important twentieth century existentialist Christian thinker ….who was wrestling with deep personal, moral and religious issues from the perspective of his time and place….and trying to frame them for the ordinary person …he deserves respect for this. Like Graham Greene, also a man of his time, he was an agonised modernist but a deeply moral and religious man
                …in some ways they are a yardstick from which to view the values inhering in our present society….materialist, social persona and media driven, technologically determined… and more often than not frivolous and amoral.

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