Heaven + Hell

I thought that Heaven and Hell was a very interesting read. When first venturing into this part of the book, I came to the conclusion that it was going to be about the religious Heaven and Hell, however, once I read further, I realized that Huxley seemed to be speaking about Good and Evil. It was about the visionary experience - the beauty in the world - and then for Hell he used a schizophrenic as an example.

On page 134, it says: "Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss brings to Renee only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality. The summer sunshine is malignant; the gleam of polished surfaces is suggestive not of gems, but of machinery and enameled tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object, when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt as a menace."

The pictures that he paints with his use of descriptive text allows the reader to envision exactly what he is seeing. On page 103, it says: "There exists, he tells us, an ideal world above and beyond the world of matter. 'In this other earth the colors are much purer and much more brilliant than they are down here.... The very mountains, the very stones have a richer gloss, a lovelier transparency and intensity of hue. The precious stones of this lower world, our highly prized cornelians, jaspers, emeralds and all the rest, are but the tiny fragments of these stones above. In the other earth there is no stone but is precious and exceeds in beauty every gem of ours.'" It was interesting the way he described Heaven to be of this pure beauty, something that no one has ever experienced before, and something that no one could imagine. The beauty of Heaven surely exceeds the beauty and pureness of our planet earth and what we perceive Heaven to be.