| Brave New World - Aldous Huxley A lot of people like to read this book as a doomsday chronicle, gloomily noting how close the present resembles the future Huxley describes. In their voices is a superiority, a sense of "I'm the only one who can see what's going on while the rest of you are duped." Rather a silly notion, since this is such a well-read book and so many other folks are saying the same thing. Furthermore, I am not yet convinced the world is going to hell; in fact, I'm not all that convinced it's any worse than it was a thousand years ago. Naturally I'm crippled in this judgement by the fact that I wasn't around a thousand years ago. Yet much of what Shakespeare wrote is hardly less vulgar, shocking, sensational than what's in the theaters today (especially in the context of his culture) and the same can be said of Greek literature (ever read Lysistrata?) And so I find the accuracy of his future predictions entertaining, amusing, but not exactly haunting or frightening. It's fun when he's right, it's even more fun to join him and proclaim our society "hurtling towards" the predictions that have time yet to come true. But the greatest effect the similarity between his Fordian future and our own society has is to help us relate to the universal, timeless issues that make this book interesting and almost a classic. Stability versus passion (remember Achilles choice?) Happiness vs knowledge (Adam and Eve...at least in literature), society vs individual, nobility vs indulgence. It's a little heavy-handed as it deals with these things, it lacks subtlety and complexity and eloquence, but that's probably why so many of us have read it in high school english classes. You have to start somewhere, and if you try to start with Homer, good luck. Some nice tidbits I particularly like: "For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society." (2) Philosophers, along with poets and prophets and anyone else trying to see a thing wholly, belong on the margins of society. A fit description of the television: "Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob." (32) "But everyone belongs to everyone else..." (46) Sexual communism! Maybe the best quote in the book: Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier...Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers." (51) "Progress is lovely, isn't it?" (118) "Yes, and civilization is sterilization." (128) Another quote that is bigger than the book: "One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies." (214) "But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." "In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy." "All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." (288) |