Island Universes

“Every Human Group Is A Society Of Island Universes.” Aldous Huxley

In a real sense, I am my own island universe. I, with my tribal genes and steeped in my tribal culture struggle, and often fail, to see beyond my orbit.

Maria Popover in Brain Pickings, (now called Marginalian), examines the struggle through the lens of Aldous Huxley’s metaphors in his book The Doors of Perception.

Maria starts out :

Half-opaque as we are to ourselves, we keep trying to communicate to others what we want, what we mean, what it is like to be us. Even at their most honest and self-aware, these transmissions are irresolute and incomplete. Often, they are warped by our yearning to appear a certain way to the receiver, to achieve a certain effect with the signal….

[T]hey are all fragments of self-expression frozen in time, expressing a self fragmentary and discontinuous across the sweep of a life, fragments that can never reconstitute for posterity a complete and cohesive portrait of a person, because to be a person is to be perpetually contradictory and incomplete. In Aldous Huxley’s words:

“Human beings are immensely complicated creatures, living simultaneously in a half dozen different worlds… None of our motives is unmixed, none of our actions can be traced back to a single source….”

The confusion only deepens when two complexities try to make sense of each other… we inhabit, in Huxley’s lovely poetic image, “island universes.” He writes:

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

“Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy…”

But in certain cases those other minds appear to “belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe” — none among us can be anything more than a bewildered visitor to the wonderlands which Bach and Blake called home…. The limitations of language…keep us from inviting others into the place where we live. Huxley writes:

“The mind is its own place… Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually   exclusive realms of experience.”