Laura Huxley

In his case, it was to see.

And that quest for sight took him indeed to psychedelic experiences, but it took him to inner sight, to meditation, to understanding how mystics have spoken time to the unspeakable but the visualizable So for Huxley, I think there's a progression of seeking raw sight in the physical sense, in moving to France and Italy where the sun was strong and he could see, to in his last home in the Hollywood Hills on famous Mulholland Drive, where he moved into and remodeled a house with Laura Huxley, his second wife, which had a two-story wall made of glass.

Now that was a room where Huxley could see.

David, thank you so much for such a stunning overview of Huxley's struggles with his eyesight and how that marked his writing career and his approach to psychedelics and mysticism and it's such a fantastic example of how we can take a certain aspect of a thinker and a writer's life and how it changes how we view that person and their work and I think that this leads nicely on to the next question that we had for you Because obviously you have worked as a oral historian and you've conducted many interviews and your invocation of Huxley's Hollywood years leads us to wonder how your work as an oral historian has changed our view of Huxley during this time.

And I was at their library, the Charles E.

Young Research Library, where they have the Aldous and Laura Huxley archive.

And there's a little box, which was an actual box that Huxley had where he'd get an idea and he'd write it down, he'd scribble it down, and he put this note in the box.

And then his wife, either like Maria or later Laura Huxley, would take these and type them up on sheets of yellow paper.

So they have both the box, the notes, and the yellowed, you know, sheets of paper.

And one of these little notes that Huxley, it's like, you know, you get an ID and you write a note to himself, right? So it was dated June 25th, 1962.