"[..]
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and
in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand
into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers
desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single
self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit
is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings,
insights, fancies -- all these are private and, except through symbols
and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about
experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to
nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of
inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into."
Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole
with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of
course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in
certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even
nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the
insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places
where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common
ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow
feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and
events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms
of experience.
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less
important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But
what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a
radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know
what it actually feels like to be mad? Or, short of being born again as
a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the
worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were
home? And how can a man at the extreme limits...
The foregoing is excerpted from The Doors of Perception and Heaven and
Hell by Aldous Huxley. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins
Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022