http://www.ft.com/cms/s/6f255d18-1ba7-11dc-bc55-000b5df10621.html
It struck me that this was a parable about the opening and closing of minds, and especially the American mind (though not exactly in the sense Allan Bloom meant). Aldous Huxley is probably the best-known of the writers who sought an opening of the doors of perception (the Blakean phrase he used for his book on the subject) through LSD and other entheogens. The Doors of Perception is a poignant book, partly because it reveals the human frailties and yearnings of a very cerebral writer.
Huxley spent most of his life in a state of semi-blindness. Even as young man, his sight was so poor that George Orwell, who was briefly taught by Huxley at Eton, recalls the boys at the back of his class paying no attention to their tall, myopic teacher. When Huxley took the entheogen mescalin, legal at the time but now banned, at his home in California in the 1950s, he experienced an epiphany of vision - he saw colours more brightly and vividly than ever before. The visual epiphany led to a spiritual epiphany - seeing things in all their beauty stopped Huxley in his tracks and made him appreciate being in the world rather than being in his head. "The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out, " Huxley wrote. "He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied."
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