Emerging Mysteries With Aging
Aldous Huxley:
… do you feel, as I do, that the older one gets, the more unutterably mysterious, unlikely and totally implausible one’s own life and the universe at large steadily become? For practical purposes, one tries to make a little scientific technical sense of it all; for non-practical purposes – aesthetic and ‘spiritual’ – one cultivates Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness’ and opens oneself up receptively to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans within and without. (in a letter to Juliette Huxley, 1963).
Leaves of the Tulip Tree: p. 225