Insulated from the insanity gripping the world that day, Huxley by all reports died the peaceful death he had described not long before in the climactic scene of his last novel, Island (1962).

Island is utopian, the beautiful yang to the frightening yin of Brave New World. In the dystopian BNW Huxley extrapolated the worst of human, especially Western, history into a monolithic future nightmare of control, repression and suppression. Island, a rich distillation and condensing of a creative lifetime, asks the reader to imagine a society that eliminates the worst and combines the best of both East and West.

Pala, the small island country referred to in the title, seems to lie either off the coast of India or perhaps off southeast Asia, like Sri Lanka perhaps. Long a more or less peaceable kingdom that attracted little interest either from mainland satraps or from European colonizers, the island was transformed in the 19^th century by (oxymoron alert!) an enlightened native ruler and a visiting (second oxymoron alert!) enlightened Scot. Combining the best of Buddhism (instruction in meditation and applied ethics from an early age) and the best of Western (reformed) education along with a kind of benevolent but radical social restructuring (children exist in families extended beyond bloodlines and thus have many "parents"), Pala sees itself as an on-going experiment in creative, constructive living.

Utopian novels are not noted for their plots, which at best are rickety structures set up to give the author the opportunity to preach. What saves Island of course is the fact that Aldous Huxley is a cleverer preacher by half than your typical hidebound religious zealot. The plot, such as it is, involves a shipwrecked Brit journalist who compulsively specializes in covering wars ("Nice, comfortable people just don’t have any idea what the world is like," he says at one point), whose personal life is in ruins and whose professional life is in danger of being severely compromised by his close ties to a kind of early-day Rupert Murdoch.

As we follow Will Farnaby around Pala, we’re not supposed to so much identify with him (though most Western readers will find they share many of his troublesome biases and conditionings). The character’s main function is to be our eyes and ears as Huxley shows us human society as it might function in a better world—and to make us think about the contrast with our own "modern" civilization just over the horizon (people on Pala refer to Westerners as "motorized television addicts").

A little preaching goes a long way and there are passages where eyes may glaze over, but anytime you start to yawn, Huxley soon enough pulls another sociological thought-provoker out of his capacious, eclectic sleeve. As often as not, details of this carefully thought-out paradise will stimulate, or grate, or perhaps even offend, but the reader who stays with Huxley will be rewarded with many ah-ha! moments.

Pala after all is rife with sex and dope (no rock n roll). Yes, pubescents are carefully and responsibly trained in Tantric sex. And yes, they are also carefully and responsibly trained in the occasional, ritual ingestion of mushrooms such as you’ll never find in a Campbell’s soup can.

Huxley, both preacher and teacher, doesn’t just throw these behaviors in your face. He’s intent on showing them to us and giving the best possible explanations for why he put them here.

Whether you agree or disagree, whether you’re discomfited or encouraged, his ideas have the bracing effect of urging you to think and re-think your own beliefs and behavior.

At the end of a long, thoughtful, and creative  life, Huxley is well worth listening to. Some examples:

A small sample of the ideas in Island gives only a limited sense of the richness of thought in its pages. Agriculture, politics, dance, education, religion, painting, music, theater, science—Huxley looks at civilization in toto and suggests a way out of the dangerous, destructive mess we’ve made of it. (Remember Gandhi's reply when somebody asked him his opinion of Western civilization? "I think," he said, "it would be a good idea.") Huxley understands that any viable solution must come from within, dealing with what he calls "the symptoms of you." A world created by selfishly ego-driven creatures ("three thousand million Devil’s Islands") requires first attention to that terrible internal reality where tyrant ego reigns.

At the end, Will Farnaby is taken by a teenager to the hospital where the wife of one of his island friends is dying of cancer.

Farnaby’s young companion is curious: "You never saw anybody dying, and you never saw anybody having a baby. How did you get to know things?" "In the school I went to," he said, "we never got to know things, we only got to know words."

After witnessing the blunt, deeply ambiguous reality of the woman’s death, Farnaby allows himself to experience the altered perception afforded by the islanders' mushrooms. The resultant trip is itself ambiguous, ranging from immersion in what he calls "luminous bliss" to brutally clear awareness of human iniquity. (The long description of the trip at the end of the book is one of those [non-pejorative alert!] purple patches that few writers achieve.)

He emerges stunned and thoughtful, only at story's end to see the island overwhelmed by a military invasion from a mainland despot. As, before his eyes, paradise is lost, he reminds himself that he at least has learned that "disregarded in the darkness, the fact of enlightenment remained."