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Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) http://tinyurl.com/Huxley

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Joy City

From Los Angeles. A Rhapsody, 1926.

Reader: Kevin Hearle

If you're an outsider, you might be baffled, intrigued, and even disgusted at the prodigious display of speed, color, and chaos that makes southern California culture unique. If that's the case, you're in good company.

When English writer Aldous Huxley visited Los Angeles in 1925, he was astonished not only by the "bright California daylight" so dear to Hollywood movie directors, but also by the hedonistic energy generated by the citizens of the great "Joy City of the West."

And oh, how strenuously, how whole-heartedly the people of Joy City devote themselves to having a Good Time! The Good Times of Rome and Babylon, of Byzantium and Alexandria were dull and dim and miserably restricted in comparison with the superlatively Good Time of modern California. The ancient world was relatively poor; and it had known catastrophe. The wealth of Joy City is unprecedentedly enormous. Its light-hearted people are unaware of War or pestilence or famine or revolution, have never in their safe and still half empty Eldorado known anything but prosperous peace, contentment, universal acceptance. The truest patriots, it may be, are those who pray for a national calamity.

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception evidently didn't find Joy City such a bad place, since he returned there in 1937 and made it his permanent home.