Aldous Huxley on the Transcendent Power of Music and Why It Sings to Our Souls
“There is, at least there sometimes seems to be, a certain blessedness lying at the heart of things, a mysterious blessedness.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Without music life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche proclaimed in 1889. But although a great many beloved writers have extolled the power of music with varying degrees of Nietzsche’s bombast, no one has captured its singular enchantment more beautifully than Aldous Huxley (July, 26 1894–November 22, 1963). In his mid-thirties — just before the publication of Brave New World catapulted him into literary celebrity and a quarter century before his insightful writings about art and artists and his transcendent experience with hallucinogenic drugs — Huxley came
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Without music life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche proclaimed in 1889. But although a great many beloved writers have extolled the power of music with varying degrees of Nietzsche’s bombast, no one has captured its singular enchantment more beautifully than Aldous Huxley (July, 26 1894–November 22, 1963). In his mid-thirties — just before the publication of Brave New World catapulted him into literary celebrity and a quarter century before his insightful writings about art and artists and his transcendent experience with hallucinogenic drugs — Huxley came