Death
On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife Laura for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular". According to her account of his death in This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and a second one a few hours later; Huxley died aged 69, at 5:20 pm on 22 November 1963, several hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Huxley's ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, a village near Guildford, Surrey, England.
Media coverage of Huxley's passing was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day, as was the death of the British author C. S. Lewis, who also died on 22 November. This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley. Huxley's literary legacy continues to be represented by the literary agency headed by Georges Borchardt.
Read more about this topic: Aldous Huxley
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“I asked myself, “Is it going to prevent me from getting out of here? Is there a risk of death attached to it? Is it permanently disabling? Is it permanently disfiguring? Lastly, is it excruciating?” If it doesn’t fit one of those five categories, then it isn’t important.”
—Rhonda Cornum, United States Army Major. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, “Perspectives” page (July 13, 1992)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)