Aldous Huxley. The Gates of Perception/Heaven and Hell

Original language: English.

Original title: The Doors of Perception. Heaven and Hell
Translation: Miguel de Hernani.
Year of publication: 1977.
Valuation: almost necessary

Aside from the fact that from time to time the well-known public debate on the legalization of drugs is revived (especially when some government progressive incorporates norms that address the subject with some laxity), books like this seem essential to me not in their strict literary value, but because of what they imply from a point of view of cultural enrichment. A mythical writer speaking in the first person about experiences with hallucinogenic drugs, writing (or conceiving the text) under their influence and revealing it, without the first judgment – I suppose it would be different in his day – being an accusation of proselytism or prudery.

By the way, for lovers of memorabiliathis text takes its title from a fragment of a poem by William Blake, and in turn the North American band The Doors It took its name from that same reference. So the link woven between beatnik culture and cultural movements influenced by psychedelia would have an obvious link in texts like this. Not always for the better, that’s why. The powerful intellectual load that can be derived from the experience of a first-rate literary creator like Huxley is somewhat diluted in some passages in which mystical, mythological, and spiritual aspects are alluded to, and in this sense the narrative lacks a deep descriptive aspect in the sensory sense. Obviously these are essays and they want to avoid the most subjective issues and seek to focus on their in-depth interpretation, so we find ourselves in a strange, almost unreal terrain, where we go from describing the pure chemical effect, the action on the neural system of substances such as peyote or mescaline, in a matter of pages, indulge us in a difficult to digest exercise in a somewhat disordered enumeration of sensations.

Here, I insist, Huxley’s intellectual power intervenes like a sieve and the text is destructured and combines sensations in the face of impacts such as the vision of a painting with lucubrations that place us in oriental culture, so in vogue at the time, but prevents us from ( something very consistent with the very conception of the project) to put ourselves exactly in the shoes of the first-person experience, an issue that I don’t know if this book intended or not. Because decades later, in a society that has, apart from the absurd legal and tolerated drugs, not only access to these substances without the greatest difficulty, but even a detailed experience of their uses and utilities, perhaps, volunteers will not be lacking, It would be a good idea to have someone with talent (and some courage) to update the catalog.

Works by Huxley reviewed in ULAD: here