Themes and Variations: The Aldous Huxley Podcast

Themes and Variations
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Produced by the Aldous Huxley Centre Zürich, Themes and Variations is your window into the mind and ideas of the author of Brave New World. Huxley was far ahead of his time and this podcast uses Huxley’s ideas to engage with some of the most difficult questions of our own: the environment, the state, war, work, technology and the family. Huxley had perhaps read more widely than anyone else alive at his time, which means this podcast is also an excellent introduction to the history of literature, science, philosophy and religion. Find out more at https://huxleycentre.ch/ themesandvariations.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 6. When Huxley met Mansfield

    12/14/2025

    6. When Huxley met Mansfield

    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 collection By 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

    54 min

  2. 11/21/2025

    5. Special Episode: Huxley Now!

    In this very special episode to commemorate the third annual Huxley Day, and in collaboration with the Aldous Huxley Centre Zürich, Toby and Emily speak to some of the teenagers involved in a recent cinematic adaptation of Brave New World. The film, Follow Me, provides a fresh and incisive take on Huxley’s classic dystopia, speaking to contemporary manifestations of paranoia and control in our digital age today. We are lucky to be able to share a snippet of the film with you, as well as bring you some insightful discussion from the next generation of filmmakers and thinkers. In this episode, we discuss social media, the role of technology, control through pleasure, and surveillance, among other topics. Bringing young people directly into conversation with Aldous Huxley, we also share a snippet from Huxley’s interview with Mike Wallace (1958), in which he discusses his thoughts on technology’s power to control and surveil. Back then it was radio, today it is the algorithm. Huxley’s warnings about ubiquitous technologies that fall into the wrong hands prove evergreen and as urgent as ever. Describing people sleepwalking into technologies that encourage us to do things we didn’t foresee or intend, he questions the value of achieving convenience and comfort at the cost of our own agency. These very thoughts are still being voiced by teenagers today, almost 70 years later. The link to the full film is below, and we wish you a very enjoyable Huxley Day, however you may choose to celebrate it. Follow Me (Film): https://www.filmkidsplus.ch/video/BDbD1m5dl2/ Huxley’s interview with Mike Wallace (1958): E M Forster - The Machine Stops: https://share.google/Ze8emannX52Bam5RO Aldous Huxley - Brave New World Revisited: https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited.pdf Triumph of the Will (Film): https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxohCX-PyVLIJ_tHvzsQHpJlFECdakZuJt Peter Kreeft - Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Heaven_and_Hell_(novel) 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

    49 min
  3. 4. Aldous Huxley and Violence

    11/05/2025

    4. Aldous Huxley and Violence

    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 War Huxley’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 Solutions Huxley 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 Think Huxley’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

    41 min
  4. 3. Aldous Huxley and Personal Relationships

    09/30/2025

    3. Aldous Huxley and Personal Relationships

    The latest episode of Themes and Variations, the Aldous Huxley podcast, explores a facet of his life many biographies gloss over: Huxley and his wife Maria lived in what we’d now call an open or polyamorous relationship. But here’s the twist—it wasn’t some free-love utopia. It was messy, painful, and required Maria to scout sexual partners for her “cerebrotonic” husband. She’d arrange dinners with attractive admirers of Huxley’s work, facilitate brief encounters, and receive back “a very satisfied and pleasantly exhausted husband” the next morning. One relationship, with Mary Hutchinson, became a years-long ménage à trois. The podcast connects this personal history to Huxley’s broader critique of modern life. Dating apps? He’d loathe them. Not for moral reasons, but because they turn people into commodities you swipe through like items in a supermarket aisle. The mechanical, habit-forming nature of endless swiping represents exactly the kind of “downward self-transcendence” Huxley satirized in Brave New World—where many relationships are encouraged but none can be serious. Nuking the Nuclear Family In a scorching 1930 essay titled “Baby’s State Property,” Huxley predicted the family’s extinction within generations. His argument? As we pursue self-fulfillment, we have fewer children and less willingness to do the hard work of child-rearing. The state steps in to standardize education and care, effectively nationalizing childhood. But Huxley didn’t leave it there. In his utopian novel Island, he imagined “mutual adoption societies”—voluntary family units of 40-50 people where children could choose different families if their birth family failed them. This resonates powerfully with modern queer concepts of “chosen family” and family abolitionist movements that see traditional family structures as privatizing care that should be communal. Efficiency, Success, and the B***h Goddess Huxley saw modern society worshipping two false gods: Taylorist efficiency and what William James called “the b***h goddess of success.” These forces turn us into robots pursuing mechanical optimization—the productivity influencer waking at 5 AM, chugging supplements, grinding all day, hitting the gym, then collapsing into structured leisure. His remedy? “Systematic inconsistency.” Instead of repressing our multiplicity of selves, acknowledge them. Our minds are “colonies of separate lives existing in chronically hostile symbiosis.” Fighting this makes us more robotic. Accepting it—balancing excess with awareness—might actually make us human. The podcast leaves us with an uncomfortable question: Can we be happy robots? Huxley’s answer, threaded through his novels, is a resounding no. True happiness requires acknowledging 100% of what we are, not just the 1% our ego finds acceptable. Works by Huxley discussed in this episode * Do What You Will (1929) - Essay collection * Point Counter Point (1928) * Brave New World (1932) * Island (1962) * Crome Yellow (1921) * Grey Eminence (1941) * “Babies: State Property” (1930) - Found in Hidden Huxley edited by David Bradshaw 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

    52 min
  5. 2. Aldous Huxley and Psychology

    07/20/2025

    2. Aldous Huxley and Psychology

    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

    43 min
  6. 1. Why read Aldous Huxley?

    06/19/2025

    1. Why read Aldous Huxley?

    Imagine a writer so multifaceted, his ideas ripple across politics, spirituality, and ecology decades after his death. That writer is Aldous Huxley. Known widely for his novel Brave New World, Huxley was far more than just a novelist. He was a polymath and a pacifist who believed deeply in humanity’s potential—and its peril. In the first episode of the "Themes and Variations" podcast, hosts Tobias and Robin dive headfirst into the dazzling world of Aldous Huxley, uncovering why his insights resonate even more powerfully today. So, who was Aldous Huxley? Robin Hull describes him succinctly as a genius and mystery, "one of the most stimulating writers of the 20th century." Born into an intellectual dynasty, Huxley’s lineage boasted great minds like Thomas Henry Huxley and Matthew Arnold. Yet, Huxley distinguished himself by living deeply within his thoughts while striving to connect profoundly with the world around him. Despite near blindness, he penned insightful works across genres, continuously challenging himself—and his readers—to embrace awareness, not merely knowledge. Today, Huxley’s insights feel eerily prescient. His views on personal relationships, for instance, speak directly to our era of mindfulness apps and mental health awareness. For Huxley, meaningful relationships hinge on knowing oneself—an elusive quest given our ever-shifting internal states. Yet, he argued that without genuine self-awareness, authentic connection remains impossible. Huxley’s ecological perspective was decades ahead of his time, rooted not just in political advocacy but spirituality. He argued for an approach to the environment intertwined with our inner lives and community structures, envisioning societies built around decentralized, grassroots democracy. His influential essay, "The Politics of Ecology," even defined 'ecology' for the Oxford English Dictionary. Who would have guessed a novelist—not a scientist—would shape how we understand our planet today? At the heart of Huxley’s philosophy lay a powerful commitment to pacifism. His stance evolved profoundly after World War I, influenced by thinkers like Gandhi. Huxley insisted that true peace demands profound psychological transformation and non-violence resistance, a stance that positioned him controversially during World War II. Huxley boldly advocated meditation and mindfulness, believing lasting peace could only stem from inner transformation. His philosophy rejects centralized power and nationalism, championing instead a world connected through voluntary collaboration. Intrigued? Ready to dive deeper into the mind of this visionary? Robin Hull’s new book, Aldous Huxley for Beginners, is the perfect starting point. Crafted for today's young, engaged readers, it captures Huxley’s humor, groundbreaking ideas, and practical wisdom, alongside fresh artwork and compelling anecdotes. Why should we still read Aldous Huxley? Because, as Robin Hull shows, he speaks to the dilemmas we face today—personal, ecological, political—with unmatched clarity and depth. 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

    28 min
  • 6 Episodes

About

Produced by the Aldous Huxley Centre Zürich, Themes and Variations is your window into the mind and ideas of the author of Brave New World. Huxley was far ahead of his time and this podcast uses Huxley’s ideas to engage with some of the most difficult questions of our own: the environment, the state, war, work, technology and the family. Huxley had perhaps read more widely than anyone else alive at his time, which means this podcast is also an excellent introduction to the history of literature, science, philosophy and religion. Find out more at https://huxleycentre.ch/ themesandvariations.substack.com

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