Brave New World: Rocks and Bones and Lonely People

It’s late; too late to be up when school is starting in a few days, but I want to savor my last moments of leisure.

Today I reread a passage I underlined earlier in Brave New World, and I thought I’d write some thoughts on it.

 On page 138 of my edition:

“He was all alone. All alone, outside the pueblo, on the bare plain of the mesa. The rock was like bleached bones in the moonlight. Down in the valley, the coyotes were howling at the moon. The bruises hurt him, the cuts still bleeding; but it was not for pain that he sobbed; it was because he was all alone, because he had been driven out, alone, into this skeleton world of rocks and moonlight.”

Did you read it? Good.  Now read it again. Let the words wrap around your mind, and let your tongue wrap around the words. There’s poetry in this, a genius musicality; strip it of its meaning and the cadence is still there. In the punctuation, the repetition, the sound of syllables.

Did you read it five more times? Did you write it down? Good.

This passage is so achingly sad, every word biting into me with an icy rawness. What’s worse, Huxley writes with an otherworldly, surreal voice, etching eeriness into the mundane. The rock isn’t white or light in color, it’s bleached bones in the moonlight. John’s standing on a skeleton of a world, a world that’s missing all the fleshy parts, the pieces that really matter. A globe of bone. A hollow, skeletal place where people who are different – people like John and Bernard – are left alone on the mesa in the moonlight, sobbing with no one to hear.

And then, half a page later...

“Alone, always alone,” the young man was saying.

The words awoke a plaintive echo in Bernard’s mind. Alone, alone… “So am I,” he said. … “Terribly alone. … You see,” he said, mumbling and with averted eyes. “I’m rather different from most people, I suppose. …”

“Yes, that’s just it.” The young man nodded. “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”

    Writers are infamous for their solitude, but in many ways they reach out more than the most social butterflies. Aldous Huxley’s work has been immortalized, and because of that I’m reading his book, and connecting with his deepest, most profound thoughts on loneliness, 80 years after he recorded them. Some writers are reclusive, but the very act of writing is one of the best ways we have to connect with people. Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, a writer or a door-to-door salesperson, you want to form connections with people just as much as…everyone else.
  
 That's important to keep in mind. Don't push away those who don't seem like you. Because in the end, the otherness is an imagined thing, and it matters little - no, it matters not at all. What matters is that we don't put people on the mesa. When one puts another on the mesa, so to speak, they're no better than the passive citizens of the World State, consuming soma and revolving endlessly around shallow occupations, ignoring the humanity within them, within all of us. It's a primitive, pre-evolutionary, horrible thing to do, and yet we do it all the time. We put ourselves on mesas; we push others there.

  Until next time, happy reading – and if you’d like, leave a comment so that I don’t find myself on a blogspot mesa, sobbing to a virtual moon. :)

     Also: Thank you to everyone who has signed up for my giveaway! I had this fear that no one would, and I’d be left looking like a dweeb on the internet, but I’m very pleased to be getting all of your comments. I’m taking you book suggestions seriously too. Thank you very much, and I’ll announce the winner on Wednesday!

What Makes This Brave New World of Ours Happy?

                I was standing on a cliff in Point Reyes, overlooking the beach and an endless blue. There were people around me, but not many. Sea lions below me. For a moment – just a single, precious moment – everything was perfect in its tranquility. I felt my mind stretching over the undulating hills in the distance, and I knew that the smile I was wearing could have never left my face, if I just stood on that same cliff for years and allowed myself to be eroded with the stones and sand.

                It’s a memory I’ll keep forever, and it’s already so romanticized in its original state that I don’t have to worry about time distorting it into a hyperbolic depiction of flawlessness. It really was perfect. I felt a wholesome contentment I don’t care to thoroughly explain. And it made me think of Brave New World. 

                One of the fascinating facets of stories is how one’s perspective of them can change due to the environment one read them in. I read Brave New World while in California, so my memories of the book are now intertwined with my memories from that trip. The pristine beauty of Point Reyes is on every page of Brave New World, its splendor at constant battle with the discontentment in the novel.
                Throughout the book, Lenina must assure the depressed Bernard that she’s happy. The entire world is happy, she says. Why is he dissatisfied? Because of Ford, Bernard can spend the rest of his life playing outdoor sports and consuming soma and being so. darn. happy.

                It’s common knowledge that if one must assure oneself of one’s happiness, then such happiness doesn’t exist.
        
        Happiness comes from several elements*: Producing beautiful things, experiencing beautiful things others have produced, and experiencing beautiful things that exist without human intervention. These three elements are broad. The first – the act of producing – could mean anything from stringing beads on a bracelet, playing tennis, making a Youtube video, going to a satisfying job, inducing another’s smile with your joke, etc. The second probably doesn’t need explaining. The third is being connected to nature – whether that means going to Point Reyes or looking at the clouds in the morning and breathing in the air and thinking such things are grand.

**(Psst! These astericks mark a footnote!)

                Interestingly, dystopias almost always lack all three elements. In Brave New World, humans are artificially made and mass produced in order to mass produce other stuff. Talk about unsatisfying! No one creates anything, and many of the people in the caste systems have been brainwashed to hate nature.
               
                You have to pity fictional dystopias, because the people in them lack the means to be productive. And as much as people resist using energy nowadays, using energy is what makes us smile.
                I think Huxley realized that. He saw the technology being produced around him and was concerned by his society’s need for constant convenience. With the Internet, that need for convenience has expanded into a need for brevity.
                I wonder if dystopias are possible outside of the bounds of fiction. When you strip a population of its right to produce, surely revolts will occur. Surely there would be such outrageous objection that the dystopia would never form in the first place. 

                In this way it’s difficult to take books like Brave New World or 1984 seriously. In real life, people will refuse to be destroyed and they will insistently create. And yet…

                And yet…
                As long as humans remain confused about what makes them happy, Brave New World will have a place on our bookshelves.

             

   Here’s more of my thoughts on Brave New World. This brings us to the middle of the novel. Don’t forget about the giveaway – it ends September 14^th! Until then, happy reading!   

                 

*At least my happiness. I've assumed this is universal, though, as most things are. Note that I could be wrong and you may get angry and say, "But Hannah, only GRAVY makes me happy! The rest doesn't matter!" and in that case you're right, completely right, and I'm just going to stand here awkwardly in this imaginary corner, and I want you to know that you're free to be made happy by gravy, and only gravy, although I have no idea what you're doing with that gravy and why it makes you so happy and I really don't want to know, although I do want you to know that while I may present certain ideas of mine as facts on this blog I do this only because it helps make my sloppy writing somewhat less sloppy, and not because I don't believe gravy doesn't make you happy. Please don't be offended.

** Note that all of these Point Reyes pics were found online, and do not belong to me, because I didn't take any pictures while in CA. I'm a firm believer in "you'd do better living more and commemorating less***," which is also a group of words that don't belong to me, but rather to the band the World/Inferno Friendship Society. It appears nothing much belongs to me today. That's okay. I'm not feeling possessive anyway.

***From the song Tattoos Fade.