Aldous Huxley’s poignance first found me during life’s earlier stages of disillusionment: high school English class.

Brave New World materialized the scattered seedlings of skepticism, mysticism, and (that most loaded term) existentialism encroaching on the edges of my youthful purview. The novel’s dystopian setting, as far as I was concerned, was merely a backdrop to affairs strictly internal.

Eyeless in Gaza swaps this dystopian backdrop for a (probably) realistic portrayal of 20th-century English socialite life. Thus, the setting here is as unrelatable to my own as that of Brave New World. Fortunately, we (I) do not read to be affirmed by places and faces familiar to our (my) realities; we (I) read to be transported beyond the limits of our (my) minds and means. And few lived such expansive lives of the mind as Aldous Huxley.

Anthony Beavis is neither admirable (not even in a self-destructive way, as John the Savage was) nor wise; he is a witty, overly self-aware prick occasionally capable of real insight — human, of a neurotic sort. The novel trapezes in time and perspective, from 3rd-person to 1st (particularly by way of journal entries).

Reading in this manner was frustrating (though never gimmicky) for a time; however, once setting and characters were sufficiently imbibed by my short-term memory, the effect of hovering across dimensions was like assuming the detached, dispassionate perspective of God — at least, God in London, for one man, from 1902 to 1935.

The book is laden with the volatile conjectures of a young man (some amalgation of Beavis the character and Huxley the writer). Likely in your reading you will star your own medley of personal favorites. Here is a representative one:

The sabbath was made for man. But man now behaves like the Pharisees and insists that he is made for all the things — science, industry, nation, money, religion, schools — which were really made for him. Why? Because he is so little aware of his own interests as a human being that he feels irresistibly tempted to sacrifice himself to these idols. There is no remedy except to become aware of one’s interests as a human being, and, having become aware, to learn to act on that awareness. Which means learning to use the self and learning to direct the mind.

“Volatile conjectures”: volatile, because we are slave to fickle emotion in youth. Conjectures, because youth, by definition, is a state of inexperience.

Perhaps it is to Eyeless in Gaza and not Brave New World that I will return most often over the years, when (if I am so lucky) steady wisdom has supplanted volatile conjecture.