English_books / New Cambridge Advanced

A letter to the editor

Creative writing

This is the first part of an article that appeared in a magazine which is mainly read by 18to 25-year-olds. After you've read it, discuss these questions:

•What are your reactions to the article?

•How relevant is it to the readers of the magazine?

•What kind of people and what age groups would be interested in this kind of article?

The reader of a letter to the editor isn't actually the editor, but the readers of the publication. Try to interest typical readers and make it easy for them to follow, in the hope that they'll agree with

your views.

Island...

the book that spelled out the ingredients for Utopia

LONG BEFORE JOGGING in Central Park became the fashion, intellectuals on the tropical island of Pala used to put in a couple of hours hard digging every day. They weren't obliged to. But the Palanese were very advanced in matters of health: they didn't separate minds from bodies, venerating brains at the expense of the whole human organism.

In economic matters too, Palanese thinking was very advanced. Export crops were discouraged: the islanders were fed first. Money was wasted neither on status symbols nor on weapons. The government bought no armaments: there was no army.

Where was this Utopia? Only unfortunately, between the covers of Island, Aldous Huxley's final novel. In it he detailed his prescription for a sane society — especially for Third World countries short on money but rich in human resources.

Huxley showed how colonialism had carved out a false channel for most developing countries, draining them of their.wealth and their culture. He advocated a siege economy, to stop the leakage. Pala was closed to the outside world, especially out of bounds to merchants, missionaries and media-men, the usual links between the developing world and the West.

Within the walls of the island fortress, radical changes were brought about. For example, wealth was shared more equally

— the richest Palanese earning not more than four or five times as much as the poorest. And jobs didn't define personal worth, since the Palanese swapped jobs regularly. Being a doctor for six months and then a farmer for the rest of the year not only made a Palanese a more rounded person, but also made sure he didn't consider himself superior to people who got their hands dirty The personal and social integration achieved were, for the Palanese, worth more than the time and money spent on making the changeover.

Huxley takes, one at a time, every important social ingredient that he can squeeze into a 300 page novel — schools, newspapers, politicians, religious and scientific beliefs, ideas about family life — and examines it to find its

value. What, for example, is there worth saving in family life? And what is constraining about it? Huxley doesn't polarise the issue into pro-family or anti-family camps. He concocts his own variation of a family that accommodates both the closeness and security that come from a two-parent set-up as well as the variety and freedom that come from a child having several homes to choose from. Palanese society, therefore, is an amalgam of the best in every society that Huxley knows.

First published in 1962, Island had a powerful influence on the young idealists of the day. Many of the ideas were so advanced that they are only now being widely recognised— like Huxley's insistence that Western medicine and holistic health care techniques should be allies, not enemies.

But there is one huge snag. Pala is fiction. Huxley is the God of Pala. How are real people in real countries to shift to this paradisal willingness to live cooperatively? For instance, it might not help a real country to adopt a siege economy: who would stop the big bad unequal world outside the fortress walls from being reproduced within the walls as a small bad unequal world?

Huxley's answer leads him out of the political realm into the realm of spiritual values. His islanders have evolved inwardly. They have all experienced a transpersonal dimension where they are part of a universal oneness; when they return to the material world, they remain inspired by the glimpse of the ideal.

Dangerous waters. Perhaps to forestall critics tempted to dismiss Huxley as a dreamy 1960 mysticism-junkie, he included among his cast of characters a group of spiritual fakes, charismatic guru figures who use their followers' gullibility to gain political power and line their pockets. Huxley sets these vigorously apart from the genuinely spiritual, whose spirituality is infused matter-of-factly into their everyday lives, in everything they do — eating dinner, making love, coping with an injury. It is their constant awareness of the here and now — a phrase popularised more by Island, surely, than by any other book—that does the trick.

In Huxley's Brave New World, everything from muzak to mechanical sex was used to blot out consciousness and turn people into manipulable zombies. The result was a hell on earth. In Island, everything, including sex and drugs, is partaken of consciously to heighten individual consciousness still further. The result is Pala, Huxley's heaven on earth.

Anuradha Vittachi

Now you can own property along the beaches of Nosara in peaceful

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There's only so much time for dreaming...

SOL DE NOSARA

PO Box 1084 Centro Colon

San Jose 1007

Costa Rica

She has some grey hairs.

She has grey hair.

There's a hair in my soup!

There's the hair - in my soup!

Ask a teacher if you have a question. Ask any teacher if you have a question. Ask the teacher if you have a question.

After leaving school he went to sea.

I'm going to buy a paper.

I'm going to buy the paper.

She has some grey hair.

She has a grey hair.

There's hair in my soup!

There's some hair in my soup!

After leaving the school he went to the sea.

I'm going to buy some paper.

I'm going to buy paper.

Our teacher has offered to arrange a two-week study visit for our class to your country - and your city is on our list of

possible places to go to. We have read a brochure about the city and it sounds nice, but what is it really, like? What do you think we would enjoy there? Why would it be a good place for us to stay, bearing in mind that we are all t8-i9 years old ana none of us have traveled overseas before?

When you have a lot to say, and it all seems relevant, it's hard to decide what to omit. Thinking about your readers and what might interest them (rather than what interests you) can help you

to decide what to write.