The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

Published 1954 · 192 pages · 16,627 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Nonfiction, Philosophy, Memoir

How hard is The Doors of Perception to read?

The Doors of Perception scores 35 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Philosophical vocabulary from multiple traditions — Western mysticism, Buddhist philosophy, aesthetics, neuroscience — woven into accessible prose.
Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
Huxley's discursive style with embedded quotations, parenthetical asides, and long sentences that track the movement of altered perception.
Abstraction: 65 out of 100
Sustained philosophical argument about the nature of consciousness and perception, anchored in but not limited to the concrete mescaline experience.
Information density: 55 out of 100
A very short work packed with philosophical references, art-historical asides, and theoretical argument. High content-to-page ratio.
Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
First-person experiential account with direct philosophical commentary. Huxley describes what he sees and says what he thinks it means.
Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
The flowers, the chair, the folds of cloth function as both literal perception and symbolic gateways. Huxley treats them as evidence for a philosophical argument.
Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
Huxley's characteristic wit is present — he is amused by his own condition — but the predominant tone is wonder and intellectual excitement.
Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
Huxley reaches clear conclusions about the reducing-valve theory of consciousness. The essay resolves its arguments, though the mystery of consciousness remains.
Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
A single continuous essay moving chronologically through the mescaline experience with philosophical digressions. Simple and elegant structure.

How The Doors of Perception is regarded

The Doors of Perception holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where The Doors of Perception sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (33 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Doors of Perception scores 58 out of 100. A second mythos, irony, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
Symbol: Anagogic
Like the flowers, they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colors, a profounder significance.
Mythos: Romance iii (romance iii)
But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.
Genre: Confession + Anatomy
Alas, this Paradise of cleansed perception, of pure one-sided contemplation, was not to endure.

Where the story of The Doors of Perception takes place

  • Los Angeles, May 1953, the main setting
  • Huxley's study and garden, Los Angeles, May 1953

7 things that are true of The Doors of Perception, with the passage for each

  1. Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water.

    I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.

  2. The vase held exactly three flowers: a rose, a carnation and an iris.

    The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris.

  3. The pill was taken at eleven and the looking at the vase began an hour and a half later.

    I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase.

  4. The Zen master answers a question about the Dharma-Body of the Buddha with 'The hedge at the bottom of the garden.'

    "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ... the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden."

  5. The brain is described as a reducing valve for Mind at Large.

    Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.

  6. A trip to the World's Biggest Drug Store, where he finds Van Gogh's chair in an art book, comes four or five hours after the event.

    I was taken for a little tour of the city, which included a visit, towards sundown, to what is modestly claimed to be the World's Biggest Drug Store.

  7. Huxley says that Western societies spend more on drink and smoke than on education.

    We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education.

Scenes in The Doors of Perception that Frye would name

22 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Confession, untitled
I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Introverted self-analysis forms the register of the whole account.
Anagnorisis, untitled
The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level... but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. The pivotal recognition: the narrator understands mystical terminology from inside.
Point of epiphany, untitled
I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. The study with the vase is where the ordinary and sacred worlds touch.
Apocalyptic imagery, untitled
Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz A jeweled, transfigured vision of the world, the apocalyptic imagery of the book.
Anatomy, untitled
Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero's draperies. An encyclopedic catalogue of painters and their drapery.
Agon, untitled
Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment... I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. The contest stage: fear of being overwhelmed by reality.

Books that share these scenes with The Doors of Perception

About the author

Aldous Huxley