ABSTRACT
I thank you for The Doors of Perception, but I fear I cannot generate the enthusiasm which this book provoked in you. It demonstrates the last, and I would almost insist, the most audacious form of Huxley's escapism, which I could never appreciate in this author. Mysticism as a means to that escapism was, nonetheless, reasonably honorable. But that he now has arrived at drugs I find rather scandalous. I get already a guilty conscience because I take a little Seconal or phanodorm in the evenings in order to sleep better. But to put myself during the day in a position in which everything human becomes indifferent to me and I should succumb to unscrupulous aesthetic self-indulgence, would be repulsive to me. This, however, is what he recommends to the whole
world, because otherwise stupidity at best and suffering at worst would become the lot of worldly existence. What a use of 'best' and 'worst'! His mystics should have taught him that 'suffering is the fastest animal which will bring us to perfection,' which one cannot say of doping; and meditating over the awesome existence of a chair and on various delightful color illusions has more to do with stupidity than he thinks.
