Yes boys and girls, this book lover had never read Brave New World until this week. Whoopsie. Well, it is all part of my quest to bone up on the classics. I re-read The Great Gatsby, originally assigned to me as a junior/senior in high school where I pretty much enjoyed it. But, re-reading it as an adult, I realized how absolutely wonderful it was. Most of you will say, well duh. But, I'm getting distracted here.I'm not going to tell you what Brave New World is about because I expect that, unlike me, you all have read it. Man, I love me some dystopian literature! I thought that the best and most moving parts of the book come in the last thirty pages, when the Savage and the Resident Controller (Mustapha Mond) duke it out over the meaning of...life, essentially. It was clear to me that the Savage was used as a sounding board for the philosophy and passions (including religion) of Aldous Huxley. I think that the Resident Controller played the role of the rest of the world - the scarily modernizing, and de-humanizing world that Huxley foresaw. The most interesting part of the character of Mustapha Mond was that he had once been like the Savage and was a man of great knowledge about the past: literature, religion, science, etc. In the end, he had given up his happiness in order to assure what he saw as universal happiness. The arguments between the two were really gripping and I wished I was underlining passages as I went but I was walking ten blocks down Wabash Avenue as I finished this up.
The ending is shocking and sad - dystopian literature at it's best. I think all adults should re-read the books they were forced to read as kids. I'm glad I got to read this as a 27 year old and not as a 17 year old.
Favorite Passage
"My dear young friend," said Mustapha Mond, "civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political ineffiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended - there, obviously, nobility and herosim have some sense. But there aren't wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is."
