Elegant Essays

Book review from Amazon.com by Damon LaBarbera

Themes and Variations is a collections of essays by Aldous Huxley. The address a number of topics. Far reaching and elegant, they are extremely well written. The first and major essay (and my favorite) concerns the French early nineteenth century philosopher Maine De Biran. Information is gleaned from Biran's diary, his "Journal Intime". The story starts with an inelegant view of Biran rising to greet the day while staying at a French spa. Feeling old and worn out, his nerves are irritated, twanging like an Aeolian harp. Thus proceeds Huxley with his description of this extremely introverted, avoidant philosopher who was always loaning money. Biran's inner landscape is remarkable--he rues consistently his deficiencies. He regrets how much of his life has been spent in politics when he ought not to have been a "man of action" or of committees, but a sage or contemplative. Huxley describes the funny paradoxes of Biran's character--his tendency to base an entire epistemology on his introspection, his need, so wasteful of time, to make a public name for himself, and his propensity to follow the herd from party to party each evening. Philosophically he was opposed to less contemplative philosophers like Condorcet or before him Voltaire, who mocked the quietism and passive style of Biran's methods. Huxley discusses Biran's day to day struggles dealing with the coarse world of his own choosing, meanwhile having to dodge the vicissitudes of political change that sent many of his contemporaries to jail, to the gallows, or into banishment. Worth reading just for humorous and expert prose and mammoth corpus of knowledge.