Kris Van der Bijl

Aldous Huxley is most famous for his dystopian novel Brave New World. The novel unpacks themes of control wrought on individuals by societal norms. Many of them, particularly the natural reproduction controls, negatively affect bodily autonomy. While critics, fans, and narcissistic teens tend to flock toward Brave New World, I flock to The Art of Seeing in my eternal attempt to be unique. I found it by chance and have been hooked on it ever since.

Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing: An Adventure in Re-education could be more enjoyable. In it, Huxley discusses being diagnosed with keratitis punctate, an eye issue that left him nearly blind at age sixteen. This “defective vision” remained with him for life, and he had to find ways of dealing with it. The Art of Seeing is about this. It describes techniques for better sight.

It is nonfictional and semi-autographical. Most of the book explains the “Bates Method” of visual education. Huxley credits one of Dr. W.H. Bates’ students, Mrs Margaret D. Corbett, as “a teacher I owe the improvement in my own vision.”

Bates advocates for people to exercise to improve their sights. Huxley uses this to question why, as a society, we accept crutches on eyes and not crutches on legs. To quote:

A good teacher, using the right technique, can often educate a victim of accident or paralysis into gradual recovery of his lost functions, and through that recovery of function, into the re-establishment of the health and integrity of the defective organ. If such things can be done for cripples’ legs, why should it not be possible to do something analogous for defective eyes?

These two sentences contain what the book is about. The rest of the pages are exercises he read about, and I find this immensely fascinating. Most of the book is not his original thoughts. They, quite explicitly, are quotes from eye specialists who wrote books about exercises. The book then exists as a collection of exercises a person could find and use throughout life.

I don’t wear glasses, but I was enthralled by the exercises. This is not because Huxley is a fascinating writer here but because he has developed a deeper understanding of the notion of seeing. What most interested me was that he wrote an entire book about exercises from books like Mrs. Corbett’s How to Improve Your Eyes. I didn’t see how someone could get away with it.

I imagine that its medical guidelines are outdated today. The very premise of the cripples legs feels like the cliche be-a-man response to bodily pain and misery.

He appears to have written this book to share knowledge but didn’t want to think beyond the initial argument in the opening pages.

This book opened Huxley and the author as different figures. There’s a great fantasy of authors doing earnest work with solemn topics, and this book ruined my illusion of this.
I found it in a charity store for R5 and expected an introduction to a new perspective. I wanted a different and expressive take on the art of seeing that I could use and extrapolate upon at imaged salons. I wanted opium-tipped cigarettes, and Huxley did not provide them.

The author’s figure was shattered, particularly the type found on a Greatest-of-All-Time list. Books could be a retelling of your morning exercises to see better. They could be you describing something that others have already written about as if you are doing something novel.

I wanted this captured under the alluring title “The Art of Seeing.” I’m drawn to this book not because of what it says but because of what I want it to say. It’s so suggestive and reaches so close to being a book about seeing. Huxley surely knew this.

I want to claim that this social hierarchy I imposed on Huxley, the author, is the same type he writes about in his most famous novel, Brave New World.

At the same time, I am ambivalent about the extent to which I need to develop my argument and state my case. I wish to avoid this process to prevent rereading Brave New World. I read it in high school, and it made me think. It holds a special place in my heart that I’d prefer not to destroy.

It was a place of teenage conspiracy. When you are sixteen, you feel more brilliant than you were. In my case of Huxley, I felt smarter because everyone was reading 1984, and I was reading Brave New World. I was different and brighter because of this.

I remember thinking Brave New World was closer to how dystopias function because it was less popular than 1984.

I remember comparing George Orwell’s fear in 1984 of misinformation through double-speak with Huxley’s fear of books simply being banned. This seemed so natural then because, in my mind, I was the only person reading. Everyone was falling for Orwell’s double-speak while I saw the real suppression from Huxley’s lack of popularity.

Obviously, this was a fault with my view of the world. I saw what I wanted and vicariously and lazily constructed an argument to support my facts.

Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing: An Adventure in Re-education reminds me of my failures to see when I was sixteen and, admittedly when I was still older. I like to see the book as an example of Huxley’s more extensive world. He published it to tell more people about eye therapy, and I imagine he made some quick money doing so.