7/25

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.  Inspired and Sad.  Not sure if there is much more for me to say about this book.  It didn't light me up like Fahrenheit 451 did a few years back,  but it definitely made me uncomfortable.  Primarily, it has me evaluating the role of beauty and truth - which I have always put at the top of every priority.  And Science - which Beau places very high if not at the top, which I've thereby begun to value more and more as well through our conversations and debates. Here, in this futuristic world, they find that beauty and truth are enemies of happiness and comfort.  I can't help but think of Byron and Keats - would they perhaps agree and choose the pursuit all the more for the danger and pain that is implicit and required?  I think perhaps so.

If you have not yet read it, you like classics and books that discuss topics such as above - then yes, read it.  After all, it is a short book. 

I feel my humanity ignored. When I'm walking down the street I don't feel recognized by strangers as another, like them.  I feel unattractive. Unnoticed. Un-human. At work, I feel more and more like a piece of a machine, a tiny mechanism to be tinkered and fixed.  At best left alone to operate efficiently and clean, leaving as little loss as possible along the way. Replaceable. One in a line that can be switched, changed, unnoticed and unnamed.

It could have something to do with Brave New World.  Each day I've spent my commute lost in the laboratories and Fetus assembly lines, carried along in their pre-conditioned lives.

It could be my work.  Could be our consumer-loving new world, driven by the twin demons of large corporations and personal autonomy obsessions. Could be my perspective and lack of attention to my own humanity.