Themes and Variations (Essay index reprint series) [Hardcover]

Aldous Huxley (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Ayer Co Pub; First Edition edition (June 1950)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0836918835
• ISBN-13: 978-0836918830
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,528,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Elegant and Stylish Essays, April 30, 2011

By 

Dr. Damon Labarbera (Florida) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Themes and Variations (Essay index reprint series) (Hardcover)

This book is not much read nowadays, or hardly even available. But the essays are elegant, witty and informed descriptions of idiosyncratic Huxley interests. The first and major essay concerns the French early nineteenth century philosopher Maine De Biran, with information gleaned fromBiran's diary, his Journal Intime. Huxley opens rather comically, with this introspective and often sick philosopher at age fifty, attempting to rise in the morning, lamenting his ailing body, ruing the time spent socializing when he should be working, and, as always, regretting how much of his life has been spent in politics when he ought not to have been a "man of action" or of committees, but a sage or contemplative. Huxley describes the funny paradoxes of Biran's character--his tendency to base an entire epistemology on his introspection, his need, so wasteful of time, to make a public name for himself, and his propensity to follow the herd from party to party each evening. Biran had, too, a self-consciousness so extreme that he could turn down no request for a loan, rarely was repaid, and often found himself, for the sake of his own comfort, agreeing to opinions he radically disagreed with, just to not seem disagreeable. Philosophically he was opposed to less contemplative philosophers like Condorcet or before him Voltaire, who mocked the quietism and passive style of Biran's methods. Huxley discusses Biran's day to day struggles dealing with the coarse, political world of his own choosing, meanwhile having to dodge the vicissitudes of political change that sent many of his contemporaries to jail, to the gallows, or into banishment. Worth reading just for humorous and expert prose and mammoth corpus of knowledge. There are of course, the usual Huxleyen digressions where he editorializes about his favorite pet themes (e.g. the evils of nationalism, etc), but otherwise worth reading. Also, for a psychologist, his description of Biran's temperament according to the old somatotype (Sheldon) model, is interesting. Also worth a bedtime read are the other essays, about, of all things, the appearance, in historical time, of skeleton sculptures in cemeteries, the relation of art to society, and the painter El Greco. Damon LaBarbera, Ph.D.