Shortly after midday on 22 November 1963 Aldous Huxley, novelist turned consciousness-expander, was lying in bed dying. And not just dying, but dying on acid. As his wife prepped his final dose of LSD she heard on the radio that something else had happened. John F Kennedy had been shot. This presented a dilemma.
Did Huxley really need to be told, that, by the way Aldous, I know you’re dying on acid right now, but one of the most mind-blowing events of the 20th century has also just happened? In the event, Huxley was allowed to drift off, swaddled in his private ecstasies, undisturbed by half-grasped visions of grassy knolls or the Dallas police. And the reason for mentioning this here is that this image has sprung to mind a lot in recent weeks while being entertained and distracted by professional sport; and at the same time half-following the endless scroll of news and counter-news from what we must, out of habit, call the “real world”.
