Today I got back from Trios-Rivieres Quebec

So recently I read Island by Aldous Huxley, and what a fantastic book it was. Basically it’s about a journalist that is paid by some oil baron to go and investigate the potential merits of some resource rich tropical island paradise, and try and convince the local leadership to join in the industrious ways of the rest of the world. Of course the theme has been visited many times by many authors and filmmakers, this conflict between nature and paradise and man and industry, but in this story the island people are so much more then benign savages. They are actually quite developed scientifically and culturally, but where they really shine, and what really sets them apart from the rest of men, is their uncharacteristic sensitivity to the dynamism of man. Their mantra, rather then efficiency, is to develop human beings. All men have potential and it can be realized – as man changes so too does the way in which he experiences himself and the world around him. As such, they have, more or less, rejected truth. In some ways they allude to Heidegger and Foucault as they denigrate the onto-theology and clinical psychology of the West. It is up to man to recognize his situatedness in a world worlding as he himself becomes, and it is up to him to recognize how he effects this process in constructions of truth yadda yadda. Man has an extraordinary power to shape himself and his own society and all the rest – but how romantic it all is in this lovely tropical setting. It’s one thing to speak abstractly of these things, but reading Huxley’s attempts to synthesize an account of the real thing – how it might take place – is an absolute delight, and nothing short of motivating. Something that really stood out for me is their emphasis on forming the body (though at times the story seems to drift eerily near to eugenics), something real, if not the most rudimentary of components, but something I often tend to overlook.

Aah! This post blows, but read the book anyways for a loose account of how I’d build the society I’d like to build, should that be an option that any of us could actually have. Furthermore, although utopian, as someone that has studied all of this junk, what surprised me about Huxley’s account was that it seemed oddly possible. However, perhaps this only attests to his skill as a writer.