Brave New World

So, I finally finished Brave New World.  I'm gonna blab for a while here, just so yas know.  I gotta say, it didn't catch me like 1984 did.  In fact, I was not reading at all, so I had to download the ebook so I could listen on my walk to & fro work, which got me through it much quicker.  The thing was, it did not feel like the same type of book as 1984.  Maybe I should have known that ahead of time, not sure.  Somehow 1984 seemed grander, maybe because of it's correllaries to today, maybe because it felt more like the main charcter, though he was an individual, had a very common story.  This book felt more focused on Bernard, and then John, as if they were rarities.  It's easy to extrapolate that the events are commonplace, but it doesn't seem the point, maybe I got it wrong.

 

There's also some analysis of the nature of people I found interesting, in a very different way than 1984.  Somehow very interesting and fundamental, but does not feel epic like 1984 did.  Nonetheless, these three quotes are good ones:

"I'd rather be myself.  Myself and nasty.  Not somebody else, however jolly."  That one strikes me in a certain way.  In a way which I imagine only people from whom it rings true would get.

"Success went fizzily to Bernard's head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory." A sort of obvious one, I guess, but seems important to me.

"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."  Yikes, eh?

 

The nature of the society only became very interesting toward the end when the Coordinater is explaining it all.  The first half is an almost insultingly basic "reveal" of how the society works, but the second part is legitamately interesting analysis of some aspects of the society.  I'd have to quote the whole chapter to discuss it here, and I'm sure you have all stopped reading already.  There is some of the natural utopian discussion.  If we are all happy but don't choose to be so, is that ok.  If you are given everything you could possibly want, there is no passion, so no instability.  Are we less for never having to deal with unhappiness.  There are also some very cool thoughts on the use of god(s) in society - that their presence was their purpose in older socities, but that their absence is their purpose in this one of permanent happiness.  Gah, it's too much to go into, but it is a great chapter.

Elsewhere in the book, though, there some other good passages:

Very early on, as we are introduced to this world, the Controller is explaining how history doesn't matter.  "He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae.  Whisk.  Whisk - and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? ..."  That's a good one yeah?  Very similar to 1984, or rather 1984 similar to it.

In the foreward, some time is given to Huxley's own comments on the issues of the day.  Discussing overpopulation (a continually threatening, dramatized, reconciled, and again threatening circle we seem to deal with), and the international conflicts it would create, he says "Permanent crisis justifies permenant control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government."  Seen the latest Osama/Zarqawi/Bush ad?

 

So, obviously, it's still a very good book, just didn't have the impact on me as 1984.  I don't think I'll read Revisted, leastaways not right now, it doesn't seem to have been very well accepted.  I might take a break for a horror/scifi podcast novel by Scott Sigler real quick.  But then I'll have to get into We before I forget 1984 and ABNW (though I'm hoping these posts help with that)

Okay, /blabbing