When I use a word . . . The psychedelic mind’s eye

William Blake, George Russell, and Aldous HuxleyAldous Huxley (1894‒1963) is best known as a novelist, particularly for his futuristic science fiction novel Brave New World (1932), although most of his other well known novels were social satires.However, Huxley was also a poet and essayist, his best known essays being two that are often published together: The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956). In the former, Huxley described his disappointing experience with mescaline:“I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results. … From what I had read of the mescalin experience I was convinced in advance that the drug would admit me, at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake and AE. But what I had expected did not happen. I had expected to lie with my...