I am enjoying the letters book very much. It begins with a very charming letter to his brother, Julian. Huxley was 7 years old at the time.
May 1901
Dear Julian,
The weather is lovely hear. Baby is so mistchivas, she can't keep still for a moment now. We had one or 2 showers yesterday. The kitten can warlk now and go around the room.
Aldous
I'm currently reading a number of his letters to his mistress, Mary Hutchinson, while he and and wife are on a long trip to India and other places in the East. He is around 32 at the time and takes quite an arrogant view of the so called "light from the east" which he dismisses as all nonsense. Of course, later in life he embraces and appreciates the mysticism. But at the moment both the white colonials and the Indians come in for quite a drubbing.
"Our life here runs on its usual course-quiet reading and writing, tempered with periodic socialbilities. These last are interesting, not because the people concerned are remarkable, but for precisely the opposite reason--because they are so very very ordinary. They make one realize how excessively odd and remote is the society of high brows and immoralists which we generally frequent. These folk, as Tommy would say, whether Indian or European, are mostly just nice upper-middle class folk, with all the ideas and absence of ideas, and prejudices of their class. One moves among them like a Martian. The Indians are distinquished by a certain childishness, which is particularly engaging."
In another letter...
"The spectacle of the people bathing and drinking in the holy and filthy river is curious. One goes out in a boat in the early morning and watches them gambolling about at the water's edge, bathing, saying prayers, cleaning their teeth, rinsing their noses, drinking, washing their clothes and throwing bits of burnt corpses into the water. The corpses are put on neat little bonfires which crackle away in the most cheerful manner....
