From a calypso tent in Trinidad to the Mayan ruins of Copan, Huxley's account of his journey through the Caribbean, Guatemala and Mexico during the 1930s is a travel writing classic.
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Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is the author of the classic novels Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Devils of Loudun, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles.
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5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Superior White Man Among the "Primitives",
By Johns (London, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Beyond the Mexique Bay (Flamingo Modern Classics) (Paperback)
A travel writing classic it says in the Product Description. I found Huxley's account of his trip round Guatemala, Mexico and the Caribbean boring. For him, Indians are uncivilized. "The village Indian can read, but his mind is so conditioned that he cannot understand what he reads," he says. Still, it seems Huxley doesn't think much of the masses in general; "The intrinsic and congenital stupidity of the majority is as great as it ever was. Universal education has created an immmense class of what I may call the New Stupid."
After reading this, I would classify Huxley among his ranks of the New Stupid. He states on page 152 that "to civilize primitives may be impossible". He seems to have been influenced (brainwashed?) by D.H. Lawrence's book The Plumed Serpent. According to Huxley, "No-one has ever written more forcibly than Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent of the hopeless squalor and stuffiness of human beings who have not yet reached the spiritual and mental stage of consciousness." In an Indian colonel he sees "a profound, hopeless melancholy". Huxley's explanation: "He had, I suppose, enough of our education to make him aware of his own Indianness." After reading this, I suspect that people like Huxley and Lawrence had reached the stage of hopeless stuffiness, although it's not clear if Huxley shared Lawrence's view, as expressed in vol 3 of the Letters of D.H. Lawrence, that "To learn plainly to hate mankind, to detest the spawning human being, that is the only cleanliness now," but it seems he was at least on the way to such a perspective.
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