Seven Blocks to the World's Biggest Drugstore

“The Owl Drug Company was known as the World's Biggest Drugstore. Huxley examined its art books while under mescaline and concluded that Botticelli had stood where he was standing.”

At some point during the eight hours, after the flowers and the folds of grey flannel trousers and the Vermeer thought, Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond and Maria Huxley made a seven-block walk through West Hollywood to a pharmacy called the Owl Drug Company, known locally as the World's Biggest Drugstore.

This is the strangest passage in The Doors of Perception, stranger, even, than the flowers. Huxley, under mescaline, in a pharmacy. He browsed art books in the magazine section. He turned pages. He looked at Botticelli's Judith and observed, in the purple silk of her pleated bodice, the same 'is-ness' he had been finding all morning in his living room. He concluded that Botticelli had looked at drapery with the same eyes he was currently using. He looked at Van Gogh and found him insufficient, Van Gogh's flowers were symbols of flowers, not flowers. He returned the Van Gogh to its rack.

The episode is routinely skipped over by commentators who focus on the flowers and the philosophy. But it contains Huxley's most specific claim about art: that certain painters had access, constitutionally or momentarily, to the same perceptual register that mescaline temporarily opened. The claim is not that art is inferior to the direct experience, though he says that too, but that the best art is the record of this register, and that it can be identified from within the experience.

Standing in the World's Biggest Drugstore, surrounded by aspirin and cosmetics and pop magazines, Aldous Huxley was conducting what amounted to a quality-assurance review of Western art history. Botticelli passed. Van Gogh did not. Vermeer, consulted earlier from memory, was the standard. The setting, fluorescent lights, commercial pharmacy, the mundane hum of Los Angeles in 1953, only sharpens the absurdity and the precision of the observation.

He turned the pages. He made his assessments. He walked the seven blocks back.

Sources

• Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)
• Wikipedia, The Doors of Perception
• MAPS edition, The Doors of Perception PDF