These conversations are mainly really interesting but can get a bit tedious if you're not in the right mood for them.

Susila's husband Dugald (Robert's son) recently died in a climbing accident, and Susila is still grappling with the grief. Thus, what could have been a ridiculous/didactic/dull work, becomes a serious suggestion for the reader's consideration. I have seen many say it is considered the flip-side novel of the dystopian society presented in Brave New World.This is a book widely circulated in the 1960's which corresponded with the positive outlook of the times, leaving behind the grey pessimistic 1950's. The Palanese also circumspectly incorporated the use of " moksha medicine", a fictional entheogen taken ceremonially in rites of passage for mystical and cosmological insight. So we're preserved from the plagues of popery, on the one hand, and fundamentalist revivalism on the other. Both the Rani and Murugan were raised outside of Palanese culture, however, and so both are largely westernised, with Murugan especially influenced by materialism and consumerist greed.

That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. One of the biggest arguments presented in the book (one I happen to agree quite strongly with) is that each of the disciplines (in the Arts, Sciences, and Religions) of life fails, in its collective Ego, to understand that it alone is not the solution to life's problems, nor the answer to its most important questions. First, because it simply isn’t possible for Pala to go on being different from the rest of the world. This Huxley exhibits with careful sensitivity, as much as an exhibition of careful sensitivity is permitted by the novel's form/genre.Although his utopian vision fitted in well with the youthful aspirations that were beginning to blossom at the time, there are concerned glances at the peripheral corporate greed eager to take over (take out 'oil' and insert 'fracking' for instance for a contemporary take). Naturally the purpose of a Utopia is either for the author to explode it - either to show us that it is dystopia or to show it is unsustainable in the face of the 'real' that is to say the author's beliefs about the worldworld. Spend a few nights with your mom down the road, and when everyone has cooled down, come back with a clear head. Its a great novel and every one who consider themselves to be a truth seeker will be delighted to read this book. Laura followed the instructions, and came to a book entitled Eternity is Real (or that’s the general idea, as my faulty memory now dictates).

Anyway we realise that this island has to be Utopia because the women wear very few clothes and everybody has plentiful and satisfying sex as well as psychedelic experiences for which the islanders are prepared through their education system. In the 1950s she had wanted to make a film about the Palio, the annual horse race run through the streets of Siena in Italy. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference. The Palanese are so intimately connected with the reality of the moment that they even have taught the local myna birds to say "Attention" and " Karuṇā", to remind the people to stay focused on the here-and-now and to have compassion.

Island is an active dialogue between relatively few characters who bring Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy to a narrative form. Early on, Huxley hangs a lantern on its Erewhon influence: stumble across a weird and isolated society, hear about its utopian elements one by one, the reader must reflect on how garbage their own society is.