Credit: Dangerous Minds / Aldous Huxley

One can only imagine how the family of Aldous Huxley might have felt about their most famous son getting really into LSD.

Not only because it was the 1950s and that sort of thing was still a radical act on the cutting edge of modern culture, but because the Huxley family was an extremely prominent one in both English high society and in academia at large. I mean, just look at Aldous’ brothers. His older brother Julian was one of the most celebrated biologists of the age, the first director of UNESCO and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund. Also a raving eugenicist. It’s the English upper class, of course, there’ll be a bit of fash in there.

His younger brother Andrew was a Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, and both Andrew and Julian would end up being knighted. Aldous, however, in a fairly on-the-nose sign of how at odds he was with his family, turned down the Royal Family when they offered to knight him as well. While the rest of his family were men of science, Aldous was a man of letters. A writer of renown from the moment he graduated from Oxford, but also an outspoken pacifist and critic of the Western establishment. One wonders what he thought of Julian’s beliefs.

In the early 1950s, Aldous had his first brush with the psychedelic drug mescaline. He’d been writing for years about the idea that the brain acts like a reducing valve, limiting our consciousness – and mescaline, he thought, might be the key to opening things up. What followed was one of his most influential works, The Doors of Perception, and a lasting fondness for the drug that stayed with Huxley for the final decade of his life.

What were the last days of Aldous Huxley like?

In 1960, Huxley was diagnosed with oral cancer and over the next three years, his health dramatically declined. Huxley himself was never the picture of health, having famously struggled with his eyesight for nearly his entire life. However, by 1963, Huxley was fully bedridden and, what’s more, unable to talk. What happened over the last few days of his life was written out by his wife, Laura, in a letter to Julian, and to this day is still a moving remembrance that speaks to their loving relationship.

Laura begins by saying that the last thing that Aldous Huxley wanted to do was stop working. Despite his decreased mobility and ability to communicate, his faculties never left him, and the two of them read and wrote together in the weeks leading up to his passing. On November 22nd, the very night that John F Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Huxley made a written request for “LSD, 100 μg, intramuscular.” Laura administered the shot, and in the letter, Laura elaborated on what happened next.

She wrote, “After half an hour, the expression on his face began to change a little, and I asked him if he felt the effect of LSD, and he indicated no. Yet, I think that something had taken place already. This was one of Aldous’ characteristics. He would always delay acknowledging the effect of any medicine, even when the effect was quite certainly there, unless the effect was very, very strong, he would say no. Now, the expression of his face was beginning to look as it did every time that he had the moksha medicine, when this immense expression of complete bliss and love would come over him.”

From then on, it’s clear that Huxley’s time was up and that he would pass away on this trip. Laura was with him every step of the way, encouraging him to “let go, darling; forward and up. You are going forward and up; you are going towards the light.” Within a few more hours, Aldous Huxley peacefully and serenely breathed his last, his love by his side, on a trip that will remain entirely his own.