Drugs, Bikes and the Real

Celebrating Two Classics of the Twentieth Century

Thank you to everyone who completed my poll on how often you’d like a fresh newsletter post and what you’d like me to cover. No-one voted for a two-month gap, so apologies for the hiatus these past weeks. Up and running again now and I’ll be aiming to write something worthy of your time around once per month.

Amongst the projects that have kept me away from these pages are two that involve influential books with major anniversaries this year. The first is Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, about which I’ve written a short essay for Engelsberg Ideas. Now seventy years old, it’s an account of the Brave New World author’s experiment with a psychedelic called mescaline.

I remember reading The Doors of Perception as a teenager and being intrigued by Huxley’s claim - made by others before him and since - that the brain doesn’t so much produce consciousness as filter it. It does so, he claimed, on the basis of our basic needs: for safety, sustenance and passing on our genes. Aside from…