Themes and Variations: The Aldous Huxley Podcast

In this episode of Themes and Variations, we explore the topic of pain in Huxley’s work, bringing his literary and philosophical reflections together into dialogue with contemporary neuroscience.Emily interviews Ryan O’Shea, a PhD researcher at Queen Mary University of London, whose work explores religion and pain in literary modernism. The conversation traces how pain shifts across Huxley’s career—from a social and psychological discomfort in his early satirical novels, to a civilizational problem in Brave New World, and ultimately to a potential site of spiritual insight in his later religious writings. Along the way, Toby and our other guest, Dr Sam Hughes, a Senior Lecturer in Pain Neuroscience, provide a striking confirmation of Huxley’s intuition that suffering cannot be understood solely as a physical sensation.The episode opens by framing pain as a complex and unstable category: pain can be physical, emotional, psychosomatic, or even “phantom”. Modern pain theory increasingly defines it as a sensory and emotional event, which is also informed by cultural attitudes. This framework illuminates Huxley’s writing, which often blurs bodily suffering, psychological distress and spirituality. In his early satirical novels, Emily notes, pain appears mainly as wounded vanity, jealousy, embarrassment, or social awkwardness, exposing the absurdities of modern intellectual life. By Brave New World, however, pain becomes central to Huxley’s critique of civilization, as a traumatized society attempts to abolish suffering through comfort, pleasure, and technological anaesthesia.The discussion then situates Huxley among modernists such as Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. Drawing on Woolf’s On Being Ill and the argument that pain “destroys language,” Ryan highlights the paradox that pain is both difficult to express and urgently needs to be shared. Huxley’s response is to make pain communicable and intellectually examinable, which we can link to Huxley’s final novel, Island, where naming pain becomes the first step toward healing.Finally, the conversation explores pain in relation to war, psychology, and religion. In Brave New World, pleasure culture represents an overcorrection after mass trauma. Yet Huxley does not simply valorize suffering: while he becomes increasingly interested in religious mortification, he also warns of its slide into masochism. By the time of The Perennial Philosophy, he seeks to restore a sacred framework for suffering, suggesting that pain can prompt spiritual transformation.At the heart of this discussion lies a question that feels unmistakably contemporary: what happens to a society that treats all pain as meaningless and all comfort as good? Huxley’s answer, as this episode shows, is not simple asceticism. Rather, it is a warning that a culture devoted entirely to convenience, distraction, and anaesthesia may end by dulling itself intellectually, morally, and spiritually.Bringing Huxley into dialogue with contemporary neuroscience, Toby and Sam connect Huxley’s ideas to contemporary pain science, virtual reality, chronic pain treatment, environmental psychology, and psychedelic research. The result is one of the podcast’s richest episodes so far: a wide-ranging discussion of pain as biology, culture, theology, politics, and prophecy.Chronic pain impacts roughly 28 million people in the UK alone, and the emerging approaches discussed in this episode suggest that the future of pain treatment may lie not only in new drugs, but in new ways of understanding consciousness, environment, and the human mind. Remarkably, many of the questions that researchers are now asking were anticipated decades ago in Huxley’s work.These conversations reveal that, as researchers today develop new therapies for chronic pain (drawing on psychology, environmental design, and even psychedelics) Huxley’s work offers a surprisingly relevant framework for thinking about why pain matters and how it might be transformed. Reading Huxley is not simply an exercise in literary history; it is a way of engaging with ideas that are shaping the future of medicine, psychology, and our understanding of the human mind.About our guestsRyan O’Shea is a PhD researcher at Queen Mary University of London, funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. His doctoral project, Sacred and Profane: From Mortification to Masochism in Modernist Writing, examines how early twentieth-century writers represented religious practices of mortification and how these were increasingly interpreted through psychological concepts such as masochism.His research explores the intersections of modernist literature, religion, sexuality, and the sensory experience of pain, drawing on global religious traditions and modernist experimentation in literary form. Alongside his academic work, he is also a writer, editor, and teacher. You can read more about his project here: https://www.lahp.ac.uk/student/ryan-oshea/Dr Sam Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in Pain Neuroscience at the University of Exeter whose research focuses on how the brain modulates both experimental and clinical pain states. His work examines endogenous analgesic systems in the central nervous system and uses neurophysiological and psychophysical methods to develop new, mechanism-driven therapies for chronic pain. He also leads interdisciplinary research initiatives, including the Exeter Pain Group, which brings together experts in neuroscience, psychology, data science, and clinical medicine to improve understanding and treatment of pain. You can find out more about his work here: https://experts.exeter.ac.uk/39853-sam-hughesWorks MentionedBy Aldous Huxley* Brave New World (1932)* Time Must Have a Stop (1944)* The Perennial Philosophy (1946)* Grey Eminence (1941)* Island (1962)* The Doors of Perception [and] Heaven & Hell* Jacob’s HandsNovels* Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf* A Passage to India by E. M. Forster* On Being Ill by Virginia WoolfScholarly works* Christian Asceticism and Modern Man, translated by Walter Mitchell and the Carisbrooke Dominicans (Blackfriars Publications, 1955)* Ryan O’Shea, ‘‘the Self which underlies [...] separate individuality’: pain and the transcendence of selfhood in the work of Aldous Huxley’, Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English, No. 42 (2021), doi: https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/281 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themesandvariations.substack.com

In this episode, we are delighted to interview Dr Gerri Kimber who is a world authority on Katherine Mansfield, a central figure in literary modernism. Gerri is the author of a brand new biography - Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life, now available from Reaktion Press.This episode focuses on Huxley’s early years as a writer. While most people are more familiar with his later novels, such as Brave New World, his earlier works remain less explored, and perhaps less valued. This discussion aims to shed a little more life on Huxley’s early writing and his relationship with Katherine Mansfield and the Garsington Set. In 1917 at Garsington Manor the young Aldous Huxley, met Mansfield, a tantalising New Zealander who wore scarlet stockings, sported fashionable short hair and wore French perfume unlike the rest of the Blooms Berries (as she named them). Virginia Woolf called her common. In fact, Mansfield was the daughter of the Chairman of the Bank of New Zealand, educated at Queen’s College London, and as we learn in this podcast, had lived an astonishingly racy life before meeting John Middleton Murry. The interview in this episode paints a picture of the world that Huxley and Mansfield co-inhabited and explores the friendship that might have been. Both were acute observers of human nature, socially aware, and psychologically sophisticated modernists. Huxley immortalized Mansfield in his early novel as part of the inspiration for Anne in Crome Yellow and the self-conscious Mary Thriplow in Those Barren Leaves. For her part, Mansfield captured Huxley in her story “Bliss” as the affected, dandyish Eddie Warren with his “strange accent on certain syllables.” In 1918, facing serious health problems, Mansfield married John Middleton Murry. Gerri Kimber is blunt: “He was the worst possible man she could have married.” When Murry became editor of The Athenaeum in 1919 and hired Huxley as a subeditor, Huxley saw through him immediately. The friendship with Mansfield collapsed as collateral damage. By 1920, she was calling Huxley’s work “bilge” in capital letters. In 1922 she refused to read Crome Yellow: “The idea bores me so terribly.”After Mansfield’s death from tuberculosis in 1923, Murry launched what might be seen as “the Mansfield cult”—publishing her posthumous writings and writing poems about her. By the 1930s, Murry was “the most hated man in English letters.” Huxley took revenge on Murry depicting him as the odious Dennis Burlap in Point Counter Point, a manipulative editor with a dead wife named Susan, whom he canonizes to boost his own cultural image, exploiting her suffering, sentimentalizing her pain. Alongside Gerri’s scintillating interview, in its ‘aphorisms’ segment the episode picks out a sentence offered by the garrulous philosopher Mr. Scogan in Crome Yellow: ‘One is also alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world’. We also turn to the ways in which depiction of the emptiness of Mrs Viveash’s experiences of leisure in the postwar London of Antic Hay anticipates the sophisticated critique of consumer culture. Here are the links to the works discussed in this episode:By Katherine Mansfield:* Bliss and Other Stories (1920) - Collection including “Bliss” featuring Huxley as Eddie Warren* The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) - Her most famous collectionBy Aldous Huxley:* Limbo (1920) - First collection of short stories that Mansfield reviewed harshly* Crome Yellow (1921) - First novel, set at Garsington, featuring Mansfield-inspired character* Those Barren Leaves (1925) - Features Mary Thriplow, based on Mansfield* Along the Road (1925) - Essay collection with critical assessment of Mansfield’s work* Point Counter Point (1928) - Features Dennis Burlap, a portrait of Murry This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themesandvariations.substack.com

In the 1930s, as authoritarian leaders tightened their grip across the world world, Aldous Huxley threw himself into the pacifist movement and the Peace Pledge Union. His 1937 book Ends and Means became the pacifist manifesto of the era, built on one simple but devastating premise: bad means produce bad outcomes, always.This was a direct shot at utilitarianism and the Machiavellian logic that “the ends justify the means.” Instead, Huxley argues that the means, in fact, become the ends. Use violence to achieve peace? You’ll get more violence. Revolutionary terror to create justice? You’ll get more terror. It’s a principle that feels simultaneously obvious and impossible to accept.Football as Rehearsal for WarHuxley’s critique of violence extended to surprising places. In Ends and Means, he argued that international football matches do “almost nothing but harm” in a world without a shared philosophy. He argued that these sporting events aren’t building bridges—they’re tribal rehearsals for conflict, “preliminaries to more serious contests.” Given how modern football culture accepts routine violence between fans as the price of admission, maybe he had a point.But Huxley wasn’t naive. He knew what he was asking people to do was nearly superhuman. Non-violence, he argued, requires supreme discipline combined with the willingness to take “four or five punches” without fighting back. Gandhi’s movement in South Africa proved it could work, but the time and training required—three to four years of preparation—made it hard to scale up.The Problem With Everyone’s SolutionsHuxley rejected all the easy answers. Capitalism? It created military-industrial complexes with obsolescence problems—weapons had to be used before competitors developed better ones. Communism and socialism? They promised utopia through violence and centralized power, which would inevitably corrupt. Nationalism? An “idolatrous worship” that turned citizens into cannon fodder.His diagnosis of war’s root causes went deeper than economics: nationalism, ideological idolatry, centralized power, and—most disturbingly—the maniacs who rise to lead nations. He called them out by name: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini. These weren’t aberrations. They were predictable outcomes of systems that concentrated power.Non-Attachment: Not What You ThinkHuxley’s solution sounds cold at first: non-attachment. But this isn’t about being emotionally distant. It’s about breaking free from the obsessions that make us subhuman: attachments to money, power, ideologies, even religious beliefs that become fetishes.We should stop trying to be perfectly rational machines. Instead, we should work on ourselves through meditation, breathing exercises, and contemplation in small groups of 20-30 people.By the mid-1930s, Huxley realized his earlier philosophy of “balanced excess” was lethal in a world of Stalins and Hitlers. He pivoted to something more mystical: grace. Not religious dogma, but an awakening to genuine humanity through inner transformation.Time was his biggest problem. Can you really fix the world through meditation when fascism is spreading like wildfire? The solution of Huxley’s socialist and communist contemporaries would have been to immediately change the socioeconomic conditions, even at the threat of killing millions. In a time of deep political divisions and actions seemingly without precedent, these are questions that feel as urgent now as they did in Huxley’s time.Huxley’s answer was radical then, as it is now: No amount of external change will work if humans don’t change inside first. And in our current moment, with violence justified from every ideological corner, maybe we need to sit with that uncomfortable truth.Works Discussed* Ends and Means (1937) - Inquiry into the nature of ideals and methods for their realization* Eyeless in Gaza (1936) - Novel exploring pacifism and personal transformation* Those Barren Leaves (1925) - Features “Caesar poems” referenced in the transcript* Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) - Travel writing with examples of successful non-violence* Island (1962) - Utopian novel featuring mutual adoption societies and the aphorism about irrationality* Science, Liberty and Peace (1947) - Essay on decentralisation and his prediction about efficient batteries This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themesandvariations.substack.com

What if the “self” you think you know isn’t one single person, but a crowd of selves constantly shifting, colliding, and negotiating within you? Aldous Huxley believed exactly that—and it’s one of the reasons his writing on psychology, relationships, and therapy feels so radical even today.In the latest episode of Themes and Variations: The Aldous Huxley Podcast, Tobias Harris, Emily Reed and Robin Hull (author of Aldous Huxley for Beginners) explore Huxley’s 1937 essay collection Do What You Will. The conversation dives deep into how Huxley saw human psychology not as a static structure, but as a fluid and multi-layered phenomenon. Think of it less like Freud’s id, ego, and superego—and more like a bustling auditorium of voices competing for the spotlight.Huxley’s life story explains why he was so fascinated by the fractured self. Born into the powerful Huxley-Arnold dynasty, young Aldous endured an avalanche of personal losses: the death of his mother, his brother’s suicide, and a devastating eye infection that nearly blinded him. These early experiences forced him to reinvent his understanding of relationships and individuality from scratch.Unlike Freud or Jung, Huxley was influenced by thinkers like William James, F.W.H. Myers, and even Buddhist philosophy. He believed that awareness—true, embodied awareness—was the key to transcending our “ordinary” mechanical selves and connecting with a deeper, more creative consciousness.Huxley wasn’t interested in therapy as endless talk. He wanted practices that worked. His final novel, Island, is a blueprint for holistic healing—where mental health, emotional resilience, and physical well-being are treated as inseparable. One memorable scene features a character receiving “mental first aid,” a process of verbally unpacking trauma until it loses its sting—an approach that feels strikingly modern.While he appreciated the potential of art, Huxley loathed mass entertainment when it dulled human awareness. His essay “Silence is Golden” (from Do What You Will) skewers early “talkies” as tools of homogenized distraction. If alive today, he’d likely have a scathing critique of influencer culture and personal branding, which he might see as worship of our shallowest selves.One of Huxley’s most arresting ideas is that humans are “amphibians,” living both on the surface (our ordinary, everyday identity) and in a deeper oceanic consciousness. For him, real growth meant breaking free from the tyranny of the superficial “I” and learning to flow between these layers with awareness.Huxley’s voice remains urgent because he calls for something we still lack: a society built not on distraction and ego, but on awareness, balance, and genuine connection.Works by Huxley Discussed in This Episode:* Do What You Will (1937) – Read on Archive.org* Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) – Read on Archive.org* Island (1962) – Read on Archive.org This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themesandvariations.substack.com