There was a bubbling cauldron of green goop sitting on my buddy Antonio’s fridge. When I asked him what the goop was, he laughed maniacally, adjusted his glasses and went back to working on his remote-controlled airplane. He was slowly whittling down a Styrofoam block into a tube with a hot wire cutter. Each slice puffed a soft plume of carcinogenic smoke into the dorm and sent a singed piece of aircraft body falling to the floor. His desk and the floor around it were completely covered in chunks of Styrofoam. He frequently terrorized his roommate by blowing bits of shorn fuselage onto his side of the room with an electric jet turbine he had bought for his plane.
Antonio’s desk was cluttered with loose antipsychotics, a handle of Fireball, a gallon of milk to chase that Fireball, an elaborate hookah setup, a pound of Turkish tobacco, a couple of psych textbooks and airplane paraphernalia. His fridge was occupied by the goop, precariously balanced on a hot plate and gushing thick clouds of odorous steam. His bed was piled with books, and the ceiling was lined with pruning black balloons. Taped over his desk was an article from the student newspaper that he had furiously annotated and a spider that he had immolated with a dab torch.
His roommate’s side of the room was much cleaner. All his possessions were neatly packed into cardboard boxes under his bed. His room change petition had been accepted earlier that day. All that remained was the flag of India tacked over his neatly made bed. His desk was missing for reasons Antonio refused to discuss.
While Antonio’s roommate did not appreciate his feral joie de vivre, I was a safe enough distance away to admire it. I got the clearest picture of where this energy came from and his life philosophy when I asked him if he had read “The Doors of Perception,” Aldous Huxley’s account of taking the psychedelic mescaline for the first time. I had lent him the book a couple of months ago and was curious to hear what he thought about it. I was also sick of him stonewalling me on the goop question.
He told me that he hadn’t finished it because he was having trouble sourcing the cacti. I asked him what he was talking about, and he told me I clearly hadn’t understood the book at all. I told him I knew more about the book than him because I had finished it, and he let out another maniacal laugh.
I could tell he was gearing up for one of his rants, where he would pace around the room, proposing wild theories connecting studies on collapsing mouse colonies to dating culture, or Haitian folklore to the production of antipsychotic drugs. His favorite thing to do was diagnose his friends and various historical figures with profound mental disorders. He thought Jesus had schizophrenia, Marcus Aurelius had autism and that his suitemate had a deep, Freudian psychosexual urge to worship authority.
His basic idea was that there is a correct and an incorrect way to read a book. To correctly read a book, you have to realize that words are not things. No matter how real the prose might feel, you have to realize that you are sitting in a room reading a book, rather than chasing a whale across the Pacific or tripping on mescaline. Once this feeling of jealousy becomes unbearable, you have to throw the book away and search like mad for something that will satisfy your curiosity.
Only in a horrifying Matrix-esque VR machine would our desire for experience be completely eradicated through an artificial means (I think this is where he got weird and started talking about porn) and books should merely, in his words, tease you. Entertainment begins to feel perverse and dystopian when it tries to fully replicate and replace elements of the human experience. Books, art, and movies should not pacify you, entertain you or serve as an escape. They should draw you deeper into your own life.
That’s why “The Doors of Perception” is such a brilliant essay. It is primarily about the ineffability of the psychedelic experience and discusses the inadequacy of language at length. It announces its own impotence incredibly clearly when Huxley says: “Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves.” The book then stokes the reader’s curiosity with beautifully poetic phrases such as “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”
The essay celebrates, and owes its existence to, the inadequacy of language and the spirit of exploration: Huxley felt compelled to try mescaline and catalog his experience after feeling dissatisfied with the drug’s scientific literature.
Antonio concluded his argument by saying that I was a completely soulless geek for not immediately trying to get my hands on some mescaline to experience the moment of naked existence. He then told me the boiling pot of green slime was full of a mescaline-containing cactus and that he was close to completing the first step of the drug’s distillation process.
Sometimes I worried my friendship with Antonio was the result of a perverse desire to study him — to turn him into one of my characters and put him on display like the scorched spider taped to his wall. I told him this, and he told me to go for it, saying that he felt much more like a character in a book than a real flesh-and-blood person. The conversation convinced me that it’s my duty to immortalize Antonio in all his mad crackling genius. I also owe him for completely changing the way I think about books, movies and art my freshman year of college when he finally told me, in the most roundabout way possible, what the giant cauldron of green goop was doing in his dorm room.
I tried my best to heed Antonio’s advice for the next four years of college. I turned an old Dodge into a campervan after reading a book about a man building a cabin and I tried to climb California’s Matterhorn after reading “Dharma Bums.” Even more importantly, I met people who had a similar lust for life that at times bordered on insanity. One of my best friends decided to build a sauna after reading an article on them. Another one made a run of homemade moonshine after watching a PBS documentary on bootlegging.
I write to encourage similar behavior. I hope my abridged inventory of Antonio’s desk makes you want to ransack it for hidden treasure, and my description of airplane construction encourages you to bury your own dorm in a pile of smoking Styrofoam. Just try to refrain from blowing the debris onto your roommate’s bed or implicating yourself in the mysterious disappearance of his desk.
Liam Riley PO ’26 thoroughly enjoyed his time at TSL.
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