In the evening of 5 May 1953, the tree-lined streets running off Sunset Boulevard “trembled on the brink of the supernatural” and the houses in the hills of nearby Hollywood “gleamed in the sunshine, like fragments of the New Jerusalem”. For Aldous Huxley, this was a last, dazzling glimpse of a vanishing Eden. Eight hours earlier, he had swallowed four-tenths of a gramme of mescaline, courtesy of Dr Humphry Osmond, the psychiatrist now riding in the back seat, and immersed himself in the quivering “is-ness” of his everyday surroundings. The downtown drive to the ‘World’s Largest Drug Store’ confirmed what Huxley had suspected: “transfiguration was proportional to distance.