A review by justkirstie
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley

4.0

"confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgement - or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgement which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognised as a chair - I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. this, I suddenly felt, was going too far. too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. the fear, as I analyse it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear."

"that humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. most men and women lead lives at worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few minutes, is and has always been one of the principle appetites of the soul."

"but the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. he will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."