Aldous Huxley’s Time Must Have a Stop

The waning of the reputation of one of the most famous figures of the 20th century engendered an article by John Derbyshire in London’s New Criterion of 21 February 2000, titled, “What Happened to Aldous Huxley?” Derbyshire wrote:

Metaphysics is out of fashion…. Living as we do in such an un-metaphysical age, we are in a poor frame of mind to approach the writer [Huxley] who said the following thing, and who took it as a premise for his work through most of a long literary career.

It is impossible to live without a metaphysic. The choice that is given us is not between some kind of metaphysic and no metaphysic; it is always between a good metaphysic and a bad metaphysic. (Online)

Derbyshire is right on! As early as 1916 in a letter to his brother Julian, Huxley wrote: “I have come to agree with Thomas Aquinas that individuality in the animal kingdom if you like is nothing more than a question of mere matter. We are potentially at least, though the habit of matter has separated us, unanimous. One cannot escape mysticism; it positively thrusts itself, the only possibility, upon one” (Letters, 88). And in 1925: “I love the inner world as much or more than the outer. When the outer vexes me, I retire to the rational simplicities of the spirit” (Along the Road 110). The quest for choosing between a “good metaphysic and a bad metaphysic,” and forming a way to live within the good metaphysic, is the fulcrum from which Huxley’s entire body of fiction and non-fiction was launched. Even when he was at his most cynical and satirically sarcastic, this was a cry by an angry young man who depicted the worst so that one could try to imagine something better to take its place. He spent his entire life seeking the “something better” and knew it would be found in the world of the metaphysic over the physic. This itself from 1920 to 1963 was the major innovation of his work—only the presentations changed, as Huxley grew older, wiser—and less angry.
Huxley’s novels of ideas are always about moral dilemmas that need to be sorted out. In the 1920s his characters wallow in the philosophy of meaninglessness with sarcasm as their defense veiling a prevalent despair. The other side of a cynical man is a fallen hero—or an aspiring hero. The characters secretly—or openly—seek a vehicle that can give meaning to a world that has realized that science, technology, and industry are not the answers. Huxley’s protagonists evolve as either upward seekers of The Perennial Philosophy of mysticism, or they devolve downward into an even greater disaffected nihilism.



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But thought’s the slave of life, and life’s time fool,
And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop
Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I

Huxley, despite his being called godless in the 1920s and 1930s, was far from being unspiritual. His cynical fiction was meant to display a world that was falling far short of the human potentiality that the mind, seeking, rather than rejecting an intuitive spirituality, could fulfill in a world where spirit would overcome materialism. Since much less has been written about Huxley’s American writings after 1939 than his British writings before 1939, the full importance of Huxley’s belief in the Perennial Philosophy and this philosophy’s meaning, has been given little coverage, which means that his American work cannot be fully understood and appreciated. One cannot do justice to Huxley without a proper account of his mystical beliefs.
When he came to America in 1939 with Gerald Heard, they both had been interested in the nature of evolving consciousness for many years. Heard and Huxley began attending the lectures at The Vedanta Society of Southern California. Vedanta, a mystical philosophy, is the basis for all subsequent mystical branches of the Hindu, Greek, Roman, Judaic, Islamic, and Christian religions. In 1945, Huxley anthologized the mystical writings of all religions in his book, The Perennial Philosophy, augmented with his brilliant commentary. This book would lead to a booming renewal of interest in Eastern and mystical philosophy that is still prominent with the 1960-1970s perhaps the zenith with translations of the Vedas selling in the millions.
In the novel Time Must Have a Stop (1945) Huxley intends to introduce the Perennial Philosophy to readers and also to write of Uncle Eustace’s dying in terms of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, aka the Bardo Thodol, a Mayahana Buddhist text that describes the transitional state between the death of one body and the spirit of that body having a rebirth in a new body.
A body is a suitcase that carries the spirit around; suitcases may wear down or change, but the spiritual contents remain. The fact that the youth Sebastian later loses a leg is meant to signify that while his body has changed; his spirit has grown and this is what measures his existence, not his body.
The first half of the novel sets the stage for the second half. Huxley as narrator very early indicates where he is heading in this passage on Sebastian, “…he had read Nietzsche, and since then had learned to Love his Fate. Amor fati—but tempered with a healthy cynicism” (2). At seventeen, one can intellectualize amor fati, but its reality requires trials more severe than just teenage angst. Huxley introduces Nietzsche here but is also nodding at Nietzsche’s mentor, Schopenhauer, who was the first notable Western philosopher to be thoroughly guided by Vedanta philosophy. To love fate is to accept that one’s finite corporeal existence and that existence’s travails are secondary to one’s infinite spiritual existence. Hence, immediately in the novel, Huxley, in an incidental way, foreshadows the very serious considerations of fate and spirituality that are forthcoming.
Readers first encounter Bruno Rontini in a conversation about him while he is not yet present. Eustace says of Bruno: “He’s the last person to gossip about a man when his back is turned…. There’s nothing that so effectively ruins a conversation as charitableness. After all, no one can be amusing about other people’s virtues” (82). Bruno’s good nature is here explained; he is, in fact, an exemplar of Vedanta’s two simple rules of ethical conduct: do no harm and compassion for all. Two pages later Eustace reads aloud a passage from a book he just purchased:

“Grace did not fail thee, but thou wast wanting to grace. God did not deprive thee of the operation of love, but thou didst deprive his love of thy co-operation. God would never have rejected thee, if thou hadst not rejected him.” He turned back to the title page. “Treatise of the Love of God by St. Francois de Sales, he read. “Pity it isn’t de Sade” (84).

Eustace’s cynicism dots the text, which is counterpoint to his spiritual experience in the novel’s second half.
The message that Eustace reads in de Sales is that one chooses to intuit God and seek upward transcendence; one, however, may, like de Sade, choose downward transcendence away from God. One rejects God; God rejects no one.
A character, Paul De Vries, an American from “New England,” (home of Vedanta-inspired American transcendentalism) is fascinated by Einstein, (Huxley’s reminder of the space-time possibilities that Einstein introduced.), and seeks any evidence of an undifferentiated unity. He was hoping,

…that someday one might get a hunch, an illuminating intuition of the greater synthesis. For a synthesis there undoubtedly must be, a thought-bridge that would permit the mind to march discursively and logically from telepathy to the four-dimensional continuum…. There was the ultimate all-embracing field—the Brahma of Sankara [Vedanta] the One of Plotinus, the Ground of Eckhart and Boehme [German mystics]…” (92).

Huxley is giving readers an introduction to the Perennial Philosophy, which will be continued in Bruno’s bookshop. A young man comes in and asks for a book on “comparative religion. Bruno shows him the standard didactic selections, which the aspiring young philosopher buys. Bruno adds, “if you ever get tired of this…” …in their deep sockets the blue eyes twinkled with an almost mischievous light. “…This kind of learned frivolity … remember, I’ve got a considerable stock of really serious books on the subject…. Scupoli, the Bhagavatam, the Tao Te Ching, the Theologica Germanica, the Graces of Interior Prayer…” (102). Thus, does Huxley suggest texts if readers are so inclined to learn more.
Bruno becomes a source for felicitous thoughts that also teach; often, these thoughts come as pas de deux with the cynical Eustace, such as one on goodness:

Eustace: …if only people would realize that moral principles are like measles…. [that come and go].
Bruno: One doesn’t have to catch the infection of goodness, if one doesn’t want to. The will is always free…. If only you could forgive the good [that refutes Eustace’s cynicism]. Then you might allow yourself to be forgiven… for being what you are. For being a human being. Yes, God can forgive you even that, if you really want it. Can forgive your separateness so completely that you can be made one with him” (105).

The verbal duets between Eustace and Bruno are discussions of oppositions that need to be reconciled. Bruno’s importuning to Eustace that he drop his cynicism and seriously consider his spiritual future takes on great significance when later Eustace is dying. Throughout the novel, passages both serious and lighthearted speak of the nature of the Perennial Philosophy and names many of its advocates that are in Huxley’s anthology, The Perennial Philosophy, which would be published the year after Time Must Have a Stop, as if the latter was meant to introduce the former, which, in fact, it was.
The second half of the novel mainly concerns Eustace’s dying. Peter Bowering writes that it is divided into three parts:

The Chikhai Bardo which describes the happenings immediately after death; then, the Chonyid Bardo which deals with karmic visions and hallucinations; and, finally, the Sidpa Bardo which is concerned with the events leading up to reincarnation. In the Chikhai Bardo the deceased is faced with the … Dharma-Kaya, or the Clear Light of the Void. This is symbolic of the purest and highest state of spiritual being…. If, through a lack of spiritual insight, the dead person is unable to recognize the light as the manifestation of his own spiritual consciousness, karmic illusions begin to cloud his vision … and he enters into the second Bardo. In the Chonyid Bardo he is subjected to what Evans-Wentz calls the, “solemn and mighty panorama” of “the consciousness-content of his personality.” If the deceased is spiritually immature and unable to recognize the fantasy world confronting him as the product of his own consciousness he will pass into … the Sipa Bardo [and] the person becomes aware that he no longer has a corporeal body and the desire for a new incarnation begins to dominate his consciousness…. As Jung points out … “freed from all illusion of genesis and decay … life in the Bardo brings no eternal rewards or punishments, but merely a descent into a new life which shall bear the individual nearer to his final goal [a final complete merging into spiritual consciousness]…. This … goal is what he himself brings to birth as the last and highest fruit of the labours and aspirations of earthly existence.” This is the essential teaching of Time Must Have a Stop. (Bowering, 167-68)


Eustace was, just as Bruno knew, “spiritually immature at the time of his death.” Sebastian, years later and after learning mysticism from Uncle Bruno, is more advanced spiritually and further along in the path of evolving spiritual consciousness and union with the Divine Ground of all existence. In the epilog, Sebastian is looking through his notebook of thoughts and quotations concerning mystical spirituality. This notebook had its real counterpart as Huxley was accumulating material for The Perennial Philosophy. Sebastian reads from his notebooks and readers lean more about mysticism.
Sebastian also remembers taking care of Bruno when he was dying of throat cancer and gradually lost his speech. There is great irony here as Huxley would die of throat cancer eighteen years later. Sebastian remembers Bruno’s suffering.

But there had also been the spectacle of Bruno’s joyful serenity, and even, at one remove, a kind of participation in the knowledge of which that joy was the natural and inevitable expression—the knowledge of a timeless and infinite presence; the intuition, direct and infallible, that apart from the desire to be separate there was no separation, but an essential identity (286).

The last pages of Sebastian’s notebook concern how time must have a stop in the mystical sense of the “vast landscape.” These ruminations are followed by The Minimum Working Hypothesis, which by this juncture of the reader’s mystical education resonates with the full import and impact of this spiritual novel.
In 1954 when Maria Huxley was dying and had reached the pre-death state of unconsciousness, Huxley read to her from the Bardo.