"The Desert," from the fifth volume of Aldous Huxley's Complete Essays, is Huxley at his most brilliant. He explores the desert both physically and metaphysically — the desert of the flesh and the desert of the spirit — from his perch in the Mojave cabin where he lived for several years in the 1940s. He opens with a reference to Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, a radical 13th century theologian who conceives the divine as "a sheer pure absolute One" — an experience that comes into

—Ruben Martinez