Brave New World

Good, but flawed. It worked for me all the way up to the end, where the believability starts spiralling away into the clouds. The hero whips his own back in religious fervor to punish himself for lusting after a woman. His whip til he bleeds, and he curses himself for even thinking about her. It is outrageous, for the simple fact that you just can't relate. His earlier doe-eyed astonishment of a world of extreme brings initially you into his character. When he asks why things are the way they are, we ask with him. When he criticizes some of their ways, he merely speaks for us. When he cries for his dying mother, we feel his rage and sorrow. Then he starts RAPING HIS OWN BACK!!!! It just comes out of nowhere. But, Aldous Huxley admits as much, saying that to bring it to such an absurd end was amusing to him at the time. Well fuck that.

Other thoughts

- Huxley knows what being truly alone feels like. There are alot of outsider type heroes in popular culture, but Huxley deftly expresses the pure despair of being alone. There is at once both anger and yearning, to intentionally rebel and to still feel somehow you have to fit in somewhere. You search and you search, and you may find some like-minded individuals, but you still feel alone. It becomes a spiritual journey, and you feel forever in darkness. Eventually and maybe suddenly, it reaches a point of pure terror, when you realize that nobody in the fucking universe can help you. You are stuck there in the darkness, and it's fresh and immediate and alarming. Then you realize: it's just you.

The main hero feels this despair. When he is introduced as person stuck between two cultures I was immediately hooked. The book then became something more than just a sci-fi exploration of a future technological path. Y'know, maybe it became rather an exploration of outsider status to identity. Too bad it went off the goofy side.

- This man's vocabulary is fucking amazing. I'm studying for the GRE and it's like Huxley was given an assignment to write a book with every single GRE word in there. No wonder they assign it in highschools.

- Huxley also admits another fault: instead of having to choose between a cold, clinical modern world and the brutal, violent reservation, Huxley would've included a third option that fit somewhere inbetween those two. He considers the book in it's current state philosophically incomplete, and I agree. It bothered me for a bit, because what the book as written is saying if you aren't living your emotions and desires to their complete end, you aren't living as an adult. The people of the book's modern world are genetically programmed and environmentally conditioned to be 24/7 satiated so that no strong desires arise. That state of being is related as being a child, or maybe immature. It's funny, the whole time they're talking shit about being content, I'm wondering if Huxley has an anti-Buddhist agenda. Anyways, he sets up that world as the diametric opposite of the reservation life, and clearly it's the reservation life that he champions. The reservation life with disease, mob violence, substance abuse, and an extreme in-group mentality. The reservation life that causes the hero so much misery and self-conflict that he starts whipping himself. And you read on and on til the end and you wonder why, with all these evils, is it being championed. And you read the foreword and you find that it's for no good reason, other than it's amusing. Sorry, I'd agree with Huxley himself, I'd change it. I felt too much for this guy for him to descend into some half-assed cartoon.