This was a political treatise barely disguised as a novel.

I found some merit in this book, but I would not recommend it, as it is a very odd book. Either the most boring interesting book, or the most interesting boring book I've ever read. Not really a novel. More a philosophical treatise.

dnf

Może kiedyś przyjdzie czas na jej dokończenie. Zdecydowanie to nie jest odpowiednia lektura na pierwsze spotkanie z autorem. Przede wszystkim dlatego, że popularny Huxley jest innym pisarzem, niż autor „Wyspy”. „Wyspę” trudno uznać za powieść, bo znacznie bliżej jej do prywatnego traktatu filozoficznego Huxleya, którego liczne drogi podejmowane w literaturze (a głównie w życiu) doprowadziły właśnie tu. Myślę, że książka może być niezwykłym zwieńczeniem dorobku autora, dla jego fanów, ale dla początkujących jest przegadana, żmudna i na dłuższą metę męcząca. Ponad połowę stanowią rozmowy objaśniające specyfikę utopii Pali, dialogi, dialogi i jeszcze raz dialogi.

Another novel I picked up becuase it was noted as an influence on the Lost Tv show (dont hate me, please)

It was just ok for me. I am not sure what i was expecting, but this novel just didnt even come close. Basically, I feel like I read an essay by Huxley on what he felt the perfect society was. The only reason it is a 'novel' is becuase he created characters to explain it all to us.

There was no meat in this storyline, no real action or emotions to really build on, or to get you involved with the characters. It was hard to pick up once it was put down.

I will say I am glad Ive read it.
And I thought the ending was interesting.

And thats really all i can say. Not for the light reader!

Huxley's last book. Clearly a final almost-desperate attempt to offer an alternative vision for our troubled society. A parting literary gift.

Where 'Brave New World' offered a glimpse of horror, 'Island' offers a glimpse of hope. An immensely eye-opening read and one that constantly inspired thought on What Could Be.

I think good utopian literature (that inspires imagination) is honestly so important in a world where the status quo is constantly protected and reinforced. We must learn to constantly question any familiarity, and analyse, rethink, and explore alternatives. Rigidity is not advantegous when we exist in universe of constant change.

I found 'Island' simlar to one of my favourite books - 'Utopia' by Thomas More - in that there are so many social structures, formats, traditions, and behaviours that we either take for granted or don't even think about (as they appear as commonplace and non-negotiable as the oxygen we breathe), this book scathingly dismantles many of them and offers alternative possibilities.

Many of Huxley's solutions come from outside traditional Western thought - meditation, yoga, emrbacing the mind-body connection, and psychodelics. I assume The Beatles song “Dr. Robert" is about the Dr. Robert in this book, being that he encourages the use of mind-expanding drugs and Aldous Huxley himself was on the frontcover of the Sgt. Pepper’s album.

Another key component of Huxley's 'Island' though is the embracement of science and skepticism.

The book is written in a not too disimlar fashion from the Platonic dialogues, philosophical conversations between the protagonist 'Will', and the various people he meets on the Island. So be warned, there aren't any hollwood plot twists or big character developments to keep you gripped. It's the breadth of topics discussed and the thoughts they inspire that make this book appealing.

If I'm honest it certainly wasn't the most enjoyable reading experience, but it felt like one of the most important.

We're so hindered by crises in this day and age, yet we're constantly told that "there is no alternative". These two states of being cannot coexist. Given the state of the world, the second cannot be true. So imagination and alternative ideas are more important than ever, and anything that kickstarts creativity is a generous gift.
Thank you Aldous.

In framing an ideal we may assume what we wish, but should avoid impossibilities
-ARISTOTLE

Welcome to the idealist paradise of Pala. Listen and hear the birds calling, "ATTENTION!"

I prefer ISLAND to Huxley's more popular Brave New World. Island is a real gem, a much overlooked volume. I read ISLAND because of it's connection to my new employment, Mokshachocolate.com - Moksha Medicine plays a key role in the story and Nestle Chocolate is mentioned.

After reading Aldous Huxley's nonfiction works: The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, it's clear to see how personally involved the author became with the transcendent subject matter at hand.

Favorite Passages:

"I fell, I fell. I fell . . . "
Gradually the sobbing died down. The words came more easily and the memories they aroused were less painful.
"I fell," he repeated for the hundredth time.
"But you didn't fall very far," Mary Sarojini now said.
"No, I didn't fall very far," he agreed.
"So what's all the fuss about?" the child inquired.
_______

Will Farnaby laughed aloud.
The little girl clapped her hands and laughed too. A moment later the bird on her shoulder joined in with peal upon peal of loud demonic laughter that filled the glade and echoed among the trees, so that the whole universe seemed to be fairly splitting its sides over the enormous joke of existence.
_______

"Attention to attention?"
"Of course."
"Attention," the mynah chanted in ironic confirmation.
"Do you have many of these talking birds?"
"There must be at least a thousand of them flying about the island. It was Old Raja's idea. He thought it would do people good. Maybe it does, though it seems rather unfair to the poor mynahs. Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks."
________

Nature here was no longer merely natural; the landscape had been composed, had been reduced to its geometrical essences, and rendered, by what in a painter would have been a miracle of virtuosity, in terms of these sinuous lines, these streaks of pure bright color.
________

Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny.
________

"Floating," she said aloud, "on the surface between the real and the imagined, between what comes to us from the outside and what comes to us from within . . ."
________

"Along the sleeping river, irresistibly, into the wholeness of reconciliation."
________

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.
________

"I'm not denying their kindness," said the Rani. "But after all kindness isn't the only virtue."
"Of course not," Will agreed, and he listed all the qualities that the Rani seemed most conspicuously to lack. "There's also sincerity. Not to mention truthfulness, humility, selflessness . . ."
"You're forgetting Purity," said the Rani severely. "Purity is fundamental . . . "
________

"I find it more satisfactory," he said, "to smack her bottom. Unfortunately, she rarely needs it."
________

"We've had good sanitation for the best part of a century - and still we're not overcrowded, we're not miserable, we're not under a dictatorship. And the reason is very simple: we chose to behave in a sensible and realistic way."
"How on earth were you able to choose?" Will asked.
"The right people were intelligent at the right moment," said Ranga. "But it must be admitted - they were also very lucky. In fact Pala as a whole has been extraordinarily lucky."
_______

For a good Buddhist, birth control makes metaphysical sense. And for a village community or rice growers, it makes social and economic sense.
_______

Somewhere between seeing and speaking, somewhere
Between our soiled and greasy currency of words
And the first star, the great moths fluttering
About the ghosts of flowers,
Lies the clear place where I , no longer I,
Nevertheless remember
Love's nightlong wisdom of the other shore;
And, listening to the wind, remember too
That other night, that first of widowhood,
Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark.
Mine, mine, all mine, mine inescapably!
But I, no longer I,
In this clear place between my thought and silence
See all I had and lost, anguish and joys,
Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass,
Blue, unpossessed and open.
_______

And all his father had found to say was that it looked like an advertisement for Nestle's milk chocolate. "Not even real chocolate," he had insisted with a grimace of disgust. "Milk chocolate."
________

"If only good intentions were enough to make good poetry!"
_______

"Well, in the bad old days," she went on . . .
_______

"We all belong," Susila explained, "to an MAC - a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old-timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents - everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy babies and toddlers and teen-agers."
Will shook his head. "Making twenty families grow where only one grew before."
________

Our recipe is rather different: Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities: steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection."
_______

"No Alcatrazes here," she said. "No Billy Grahams or Mao Tse-tungs or Madonnas or Fatima. No hells on earth and no Christian pie in the sky, no Communist pie in the twenty-second century. Just men and women and their children trying to make the best of the here and now, instead of living somewhere else, as you people mostly do, in some other time, some other homemade imaginary universe. And it really isn't your fault. You're almost compelled to live that way because the present is so frustrating. And it's frustrating because you've never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year's resolution and your actual behavior."
_______

"Thousands upon thousands of people, all on the move, and each of them unique, each of them the center of the universe."
_______

"When in doubt," said Dr. Robert, "always act on the assumption that people are more honorable than you have any solid reason for supposing they are."
_______

"The impossible had already happened, several times. There was no reason why it shouldn't happen again. The important thing was to say that it would happen - so he said it, again and again."
_______

"'Patriotism is not enough.' But neither is anything else. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do."
_______

"We on the contrary, give the stuff good names - the moksha-medicine, the reality revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved."
_______

"To scoot or not to scoot, that is the the question."
_______

"We import what we can't make; but we make an import only what we can afford. And what we can afford is limited not merely by our supply of pounds and marks and dollars, but also primarily - primarily," he insisted - "by our wish to be happy, our ambition to become fully human. Scooters, we've decided after carefully looking into the matter, are among the things - the very numerous things - we simply can't afford."
_______

"If you'd been shown how to do things with the minimum of strain and the maximum of awareness, you'd enjoy even honest toil."
_______

"If it's a choice between mechanical efficiency and human satisfaction, we choose satisfaction."
_______

"Look at his image," he said, "Look at it with these new eyes that the moksha-medicine has given you. See how it breathes and pulses, how it grows out of brightness into brightness ever more intense. Dancing through time and out of time, dancing everlastingly and in the eternal now. Dancing and dancing in all the worlds at once. Look at him."
_______

"But at the heart of the verminous darkness sits Enlightenment."
_______

"Treat Nature well, and Nature will treat you well. Hurt or destroy Nature, and Nature will soon destroy you."
_______

"There are no Chosen People in nature, no Holy Lands, no Unique Historical Revelations. Conservation morality gives nobody an excuse for feeling superior, or claiming special privileges. 'Do as you would be done by' applies to our dealings with all kinds of life in every part of the world. We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence. Elementary ecology leads straight to elementary Buddhism."
_______

Pully, hauly, tug with a will;
The gods wiggle-waggle, but the sky stands still.
_______

"I lift his head and then let go, the head falls back - thump, like a piece of meat with a bone inside."
_______

"Her love was like a kind of physical radiation, something one could almost sense as heat or light."
_______

Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses; kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.
_______

The ghost of an old habit of irreverent mischief flitted once again across Lakshmi's face.
_______

In the firmament of bliss and understanding, like bats against the sunset, there was a wild crisscrossing of remembered notions and the hangovers of past feelings.
_______

In the Eternity that was as real as shit, he went on listening to these interwoven streams of sound, went on looking at these interwoven streams of sound, went on looking at these interwoven streams of light, went on actually being (out there, in there, and nowhere) all that he saw and heard. And now, abruptly, the character of the light underwent a change. These interwoven streams, which were the first fluid differentiations of an understanding on the further side of all particular knowledge, had ceased to be a continuum. Instead, there was, all of a sudden, this endless succession of separate forms - forms still manifestly charged with the luminous bliss of undifferentiated being, but limited now, isolated, individualized. Silver and rose, yellow and pale green and gentian blue, and endless succession of luminous spheres came swimming up form some hidden source of forms and, in time with the music, purposefully constellated themselves into arrays of unbelievable complexity and beauty. And inexhaustible fountain that sprayed out into conscious patternings, into lattices of living stars. And as he looked at them, as he lived their life and the life of this music that was their equivalent, they went on growing into other lattices that filled the three dimensions of an inner space and changed incessantly in another, timeless dimension of quality and significance.

Yazarin ölmeden önce yayimladigi son kitabi. Belki bundan ötürü, cokca bilgi yüklü, dili agir ve kurgusu diger kitaplarina kiyasla zayif kalmis. Yazar, felsefesini, düsüncelerini ve Cesur Yeni Dünya'da olusturdugu evrene zit bir dünya yaratip, kendi antitezini kurmayi amaclamis. Pasifist yaklasimi benimsemis bariscil insalardan olusan Pala adasi, zen budizmle harmanlanmis ve tüketim cilginligindan uzak, dogayla uyum icinde yasayan bir topluluk olmayi basarmis. Bu haliyle, Cesur Yeni Dünya'da sunulan totaliter rejimin panzehiri gibi.

Little to no literary value, long rants on the specifica of Buddhism, no climax and no antagonist. Characters are predictable, conversations feel forced onto the characters and a substantial amount of social critique is not elaborated well.

I read Brave New World 30 years ago and it got me interested in Psychology. I understood this book was the utopian world to the dystopian Brave New World.

So I started Island about 18 months ago but gave up. It just didn’t seem to have a proper story and was a collection of ideas and ramblings that just hurt my head.

Over the last few weeks I have been cruising my narrowboat and have listened to it on YouTube while I cruise and I have warmed to it. It starts with a man who visits an Island which has a different way of life. I can’t believe the book is 60 years old when it could have been written yesterday. It’s main message for me is to pay attention to the here and now, with birds that call out ‘Attention’ as a reminder. It merges ideas from East and West. Use technology but only selectively, work but not too much, balance it with your interests and hobbies. Commercialism doesn’t work. Be your self. A lot of hippy lifestyle in there, communal living (adoption clubs), expressive sex, drugs for enlightenment. I do like the teaching of children through playing. We have now moored up on an idyllic little island on the Thames and I have finally finished it, what do I think? I didn’t love it. Still lots of ramblings. But like Brave New World I think I will remember some of the ideas from this book for the next 30 years.

One hundred pages through this book and I cannot understand or make sense of anything of what is told there. This book is a hotchpotch of stuff which probably are fantastic and offer the key to a perfect life but it bothers me to maximum.

The thing that made me definitely stop reading - this female queen goes to study in Switzerland and there she is told that she should be the head of the Crusade of Liberation or something like that. Now, wait a minute...Crusade was a thing specific to the Christians. She wasn't supposed to bring christianity to the Island. So, why Crusade...?

One star refers to my impossibility to understand this book. There was nothing in 100 pages to like. Maybe it is great, not for me though.

The social concepts and themes in “Island” are several and large, too much to cover in just a few comments, but these might stimulate interest at a time of social and political upheaval in the United States. The novel is set on the island of Pala, off the coast of India, and it is described as a small utopia, where the value and happiness of individuals takes precedence over materialism and profit, which is opposite to the dystopian colony in his novel, “Brave New World.“ It is clear that defending this utopia against the forces of the outside modern, techno-consumer world is an enormous and probably a hopeless task.

At the time I am writing these notes, it was supernatural timing for me to finally read this the last novel produced by Huxley, who died in 1963. While I have read a lot of Huxley in my life there are a several of his works that I missed, and this novel was one of them. This book includes many ideas and concepts held by Huxley over his lifetime, but one upshot is how to avoid turning a democracy into a dictatorship. Is this not au courant in America in 2025!

One idea elucidated was about the early intervention and evaluation of children to line up proper therapy to get them off to a good start in life without harmful physical, mental, or emotional conditions holding them back. This approach is something I have long advocated, and here is something similar posited by Huxley.

Such utopian ideals cannot be fostered in the western world, which is already past the point of no return with cultures dominated by profit, overpopulation, consumerism, environmental damage, loss of dignified physical work, and psychological and personality aberrations, the effects of which are ratcheted higher each time a better computer chip is developed.

The best that could be hoped for within western cultures at this point might be the establishment of a few scattered utopian communities where humans are valued more than objects and money. Without early intervention and education of young people such communities would be impossible to sustain.

Getting through this novel takes some patience, and it helps if the reader has some prior knowledge of Huxley’s personal history and work, including his interest in psychedelics and eastern mysticism. Unfortunately, the tale highlights the terrible conditions humanity has created for itself.

I have always had the thought that the way out of our human and ethical dilemmas is to concentrate on education, especially on the way children are reared and educated. And I was gobsmacked to find this idea fleshed out here in prismatic detail. My primitive assumption had been that a child can be made into anything if we start early enough, but in Pala children are first evaluated from DNA outward, and only then are they set on an individual path that is likely to lead to personal and collective success, and by success I don't mean as industrial producers and consumers. I feel vindicated but in the humblest possible sense. Surely, "Island" must be considered the sum of the total accumulated brilliance of Huxley as he neared the end of his life.