Pleasure is no inconvenient word. This simply implies anything that may confer happiness and delight. Musical performance, horse
racing, cinema show, and any similar performance may definitely form pleasure. This gives distractions in life and does away with
boredom.
Aldous Huxley, however, has used the term ‘pleasure’ in his treatise, “Pleasure,” in a different way. He refers, no doubt, to distractions in
human life, but this distraction is somewhat unpleasant, somewhat self-poisoning. His very enumeration of the sense of pleasure in which he has used it may be worth quoting here:” ‘Pleasure’ (I place the word between inverted commas to show that I mean, not real pleasure, but the organized activities officially known by the same name) ‘pleasure’ what nightmare visions the word evokes!”
As stated by him, the word ‘pleasures’ evokes ‘nightmare visions’to Huxley. This indicates the theme of his essay, which is, as stated by
him, the horrors of modern pleasures. His essay is concerned with the modern pleasures which, according to him, “arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile”. He continues to demonstrate how the pleasures of modern generations have proven somewhat inimical to the vitality of life, causing insipidity and apathy everywhere. In his opinion, the effortless pleasures of today are nearly readymade distractions and “surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were.”
Huxley’s essay is all about pleasures, of course, in no conventional sense. His pleasures are not really enjoyable and inspiring to life but
somewhat adverse to intellect and mind, and lead to a kind of “premature senility”. Of course, he is not all wrong here. His observations on modern diversions are definitely sound and undeniable, and the sooner the contemporary generation gets out of this, the better. As Huxley’s writing is all about pleasures, as he means by the term, the title seems suggestive and explanatory enough, though rather with sarcasm underneath.
