In Christopher Isherwood’s brilliant novel ‘A Single Man’ his main character George (an English professor teaching in an American University) introduces his students to the work of the English writer Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963) :
‘slowly, deliberately, like a magician, he takes a single book out of his briefcase and places it on the reading desk.’
The book on the desk is Huxley’s ‘After Many a Summer.’ As if sat in the same classroom, I too am introduced to this wisest of writers…And there is much enlightenment in this beautifully written exchange between George and his student Kenny – listen for the unforgettable line, a quotation from Huxley:
‘Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him’
Words to live by!
