“Time out of mind is time nevertheless, cumulative, informing the present,” Annie Dillard wrote in her meditation on living in the present moment. “From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt — older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath.”
Indeed, it is only to a heightened awareness that the great door to the present opens at all. Yet many of us do the opposite: We move about our lives in a slumber-like state, becoming mere motions in the shadows of our egoic selves.
Only through certain reminders, and only for a moment, we can glimpse a tiny fragment of pristine reality free of discursive thinking. This is what writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley (July 26, 1894–November 22, 1963) explores in his novel Island, which was written in his later years when he became interested in spirituality. It starts with this gentle reminder:
‘Attention,’ a voice began to call, and it was as though an oboe had suddenly become articulate. ‘Attention,’ it repeated in the same high, nasal monotone. ‘Attention.’
Lying there like a corpse in the dead leaves, his hair matted, his face grotesquely smudged and bruised, his clothes in rags and muddy, Will Farnaby awoke with a start. Molly had called him. Time to get up. Time to get dressed. Mustn’t be late at the office. ‘Thank you, darling,’ he said and sat up. A sharp pain stabbed at this right knee and there were other kinds of pain in his back, his arms, his forehead.
‘Attention,’ the voice insisted without the slightest change of tone. Leaning on one elbow, Will looked about him and saw with bewilderment, not the gray wallpaper and yellow curtains of his London bedroom, but a glade among trees and the long shadows and slanting lights of early morning in a forest. …
“Who’s there?” Will Farnaby called in what he intended to be a loud and formidable tone; but all that came out of his mouth was a thin, quavering croak. There was a long and, it seemed, profoundly menacing silence. From the hollow between two of the tree’s wooden buttresses an enormous black centipede emerged for a moment into view, then hurried away on its regiment of crimson legs and vanished into another cleft in the lichen-covered ectoplasm. “Who’s there?” he croaked again.
There was a rustling in the bushes on his left and suddenly, like a cuckoo from a nursery clock, out popped a large black bird, the size of a jackdaw — only, needless to say, it wasn’t a jackdaw. It clapped a pair of white-tipped wings and, darting across the intervening space, settled on the lowest branch of a small dead tree, not twenty feet from where Will was lying. Its beak, he noticed, was orange, and it had a bald yellow patch under each eye, with canary-colored wattles that covered the sides and back of its head with a thick wig of naked flesh. The bird cocked its head and looked at him first with the right eye, then with the left. After which it opened its orange bill, whistled ten or twelve notes of a little air in the pentatonic scale, made a noise like somebody having hiccups, and then, in a chanting phrase, do do sol do, said, “Here and now, boys; here and now, boys.”
The words pressed a trigger, and all of a sudden he remembered everything. Here was Pala, the forbidden island, the place no journalist had ever visited. And now must be the morning after the afternoon when he’d been fool enough to go sailing, alone, outside the harbor of Rendang-Lobo. He remembered it all — the white sail curved by the wind into the likeness of a huge magnolia petal, the water sizzling at the prow, the sparkle of diamonds on every wave crest, the troughs of wrinkled jade. And eastward, across the Strait, what clouds, what prodigies of sculpted whiteness above the volcanoes of Pala! Sitting there at the tiller, he had caught himself singing — caught himself, incredibly, in the act of feeling unequivocally happy.
Would you like to feel happy while having mysterious birds waking you up to the present moment with their magical “Here and now, boys; here and now, boys”? Then check out Aldous Huxley’s novel Island. Here’s a short description of the book:
In the novel Huxley considered his most important, he transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Farnaby, is shipwrecked there. What Farnaby doesn’t expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and—to his amazement—give him hope.
Complement with Mary Oliver on living in the present moment and Annie Dillard on living in the moment.
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