The Huxley Model

The Huxley Model states that at any given moment an essay is moving into three different directions the subjective, the objective and the abstract.  Overly Documented Life by A.J. Jacobs does just this in his essay in Esquire magazine. The essay is a document of the experiment Jacobs performs on himself where he goes into the depths of “lifeblogging.”  Jacobs states, “In 2013, Google plans to release Internet-enabled glasses that, the company boasts, have the capacity to display data on the lenses and also to record every moment (including, presumably, those moments when you get beat up for wearing Internet-enabled goggles). Very spooky.”  This excerpt is most obviously objective. It states a series of facts about google goggles and what the capabilities of the product are.  Then from there it starts to become very subjective and abstract. The abstractness comes from the creativity of the sentence, he puts his opinion in parentheses to separate it from the objective piece then puts his own personal feelings towards it, which is where the subjective parts enter. All three almost simultaneously occur in the essay and Huxley’s model is once again in effect. It is not always like this though there can be different combinations and intensities of the three parts. Jacobs later in his paper states, “It clues you in to how often your emotions fluctuate. It reminds you that your morning funk is temporary. As dark as the world seems at the moment, you will climb back to level 9.”  This piece seems to be more dominated by the subjective. There is more feeling in the author’s voice and the reader has more feeling as the excerpt is being read. Yet, there are still moments of objectivity as in the first sentence of the quote when it is clear that there is much less emotion than in the rest of the quote. And at the end of the quote he italicizes “will” this is the point where the abstract shows most brightly. He uses the italicized word to emphasize his statement and it seems to pull out a little more objectivity to this more emotional part by making it seem like more of a true statement. An object fact.