/lit/ - Literature

Instead of pleading to god, this guy (absolute madman) did psychedelic drugs on his deathbed, basically making his death an experiment on the fleeting moments of consciousness and also basically making whatever trip you go through as you die 100 times more intense.

I am not sure if he was Atheist or Agnostic though.

Does this introductory paragraph have a good thesis?

In the very last line of “Time and Machine”, the author Aldous Huxley claims that industrialism and its symptoms have birthed a “new consciousness” displacing the pre-industrial age’s “old consciousness”. A consciousness thoroughly indulged in a new sense of time – time expressed in mechanically measured units. These mechanically measured units; seconds, minutes, hours, “eight-hour days and six-day weeks”, have been given their weight by the obliged actions, curtly carried out within them. Aldous Huxley paints an argument where modern men’s actions are beholden to comply with machine’s paces - the paces of train schedules, the paces of factory machinery, and the paces of factory and office deadlines. Huxley very plainly asserts that this sense of time is wholly unnatural: “The time of which we have knowledge is artificial, machine-made time.” Huxley also describes a sense of time not machine-made, but one molded by the cosmic movement of the earth, stars, moon, and sun. But the “townsmen”, in his urban environment, is harbored from these cosmic rhythms. Or as was phrased by dear old Huxley; he is “walled off from the world of nature”. I agree with this sentiment, I believe even in modern times we are quite literally “walled off”. In the Information age, the Machine has grown into something more. It has grown more efficient, more demanding, and more inherent. Consequently our consciousness has changed.