But I don’t want comfort
Inside Huxley's Brave New World
‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’
Impressions
Huxley’s Brave New World seems to be asking: Do we become happier when we remove suffering from our consciousness?
The new world (portrayed through London in the book) is designed to enable the perpetual presence of dopamine, to make suffering inexistent. To make this happen, children are bred in a laboratory and the leaders of this society define each child’s role at birth, conditioning them to perceive reality (and their place in it) in a specific manner. The result is a type of caste system where no one feels guilty about or discontent with the role they play in each other’s lives and everyone is happy about living.
For particulars, as every one knows, make for virture and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. — The director of hatcheries and conditioning explains to a group of young students
Books are forbidden.
Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks–already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.”They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an ‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned.
[…]
He could see quite well why you couldn’t have lower-cast people wasting the Community’s time over books, and that there was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes.
[…]
“Our library,” said Dr. Gaffney, “contains only books of reference. If our young people need distraction, they can get it at the feelies. We don’t encourage them to indulge in any solitary amusements.”
Pain is nullified with Soma, a substance that shifts anyone who takes it into a relaxed, happy state.
Why you don’t take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You’d forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you’d be jolly. So jolly.
Punctured, utterly deflated, he dropped into a chair and, covering his face with his hands, began to weep. A few minutes later, however, he thought better of it and took four tablets of soma.
Nature is not considered a worthwhile part of reality to engage with.
A love of nature keeps no factories busy.
Solitude is too strange a practice that anyone who seeks it is deemed mad.
But people never are alone now,” said Mustapha Mond. “We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it.” The Savage nodded gloomily
Love is a thing of the old world.
For everyone belongs to everyone else
The idea of being intimately connected with another (a mother, friend, romantic partner) is sacrificed for the ultimate reward of order.
The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma.
Old age is an appalling state of self and people are conditioned to view death as a painless passage (and of course, it’s hard to feel pain when you don’t have an intimate connection with anyone).
Finally–and this was by far the strongest reason for people’s not wanting to see poor Linda–there was her appearance. Fat; having lost her youth; with bad teeth, and a blotched complexion, and that figure (Ford!)–you simply couldn’t look at her without feeling sick, yes, positively sick. So the best people were quite determined not to see Linda.
But do we become happier in the absence of these?
Well, frankly, one cannot be what they do not know. We see this in real life itself where, if you’re born into a specific culture or religion, it almost always becomes your lens for reality. A society built on the premise of perpetual glee will be the norm for those who are a part of it.
What I did observe, though, is that those elements removed from the new world are colors that make us human and give life meaning. Literature connects us, nature is where we’re most human, solitude reveals parts of us (and life) we didn’t know were real, books (standing as tools for awareness in the story) take us closer to the truth, and love and pain, what is life without both?
Without these elements, life becomes an in-and-out affair, we miss the in-betweens, and happiness loses its purpose as the other half of sadness.
Chasing freedom
There were moments when I thought it possible for a character to break free of their conditioning and was again reminded that it takes a great deal of conscious effort to let go of the world-view you’ve held for a long time as true.
I saw it in Helmholtz when he experienced that elemental force of human nature — the knowledge that there’s more to being and the longing to add meaning to this world through your work. It’s also interesting that Helmholtz is a writer experiencing this, an artist without the freedom and know-how to be an artist. Not having the freedom is one thing, but not knowing how to be an artist? That’s a whole other kind of suffering.
Here’s what he says in a conversation with Bernard Marx:
I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it–only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power. If there was some different way of writing … Or else something else to write about …”
He was silent; then, “You see,” he went on at last, “I’m pretty good at inventing phrases —you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you’d sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they’re about something hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn’t seem enough. It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.”
“But your things are good, Helmholtz.” “Oh, as far as they go.” Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. “But they go such a little way. They aren’t important enough, somehow. I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one’s expected to write about?”
“Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly–they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. That’s one of the things I try to teach my students–how to write piercingly. But what on earth’s the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing–you know, like the very hardest X-rays–when you’re writing about that sort of thing?”
But then he contradicts his desire for something other than his reality when he hears a passage in Romeo and Juliet from John.
“Is there no pity sitting in the clouds, That sees into the bottom of my grief? O sweet my mother, cast me not away: Delay this marriage for a month, a week; Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed In that dim monument where Tybalt lies …” when Juliet said this, Helmholtz broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing. The mother and father (grotesque obscenity) forcing the daughter to have some one she didn’t want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having some one else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly comical. He had managed, with a heroic effort, to hold down the mounting pressure of his hilarity; but “sweet mother” (in the Savage’s tremulous tone of anguish) and the reference to Tybalt lying dead
I also saw the desire for freedom from the character, Bernard Marx. But his was a longing to be seen, heard, and held in high regard, not to truly be free. It made me wonder how many things we do for freedom are just us balming our insecurities.
The old world meets the new world
At some point, the old world and the new world intertwine when (1) Linda, a member of the new world gets stuck in the old world for decades and (2) her child, John (Aka the savage), who was born and grew up in the old world, spends time in the new world.
As both worlds collide, we find their conception of reality falling apart.
For Linda:
Here [in the old world], nobody’s supposed to belong to more than one person. And if you have people in the ordinary way, the others think you’re wicked and anti-social. They hate and despise you. Once a lot of women came and made a scene because their men came to see me. Well, why not? And then they rushed at me … No, it was too awful. I can’t tell you about it.” Linda covered her face with her hands and shuddered. “They’re so hateful, the women here. Mad, mad and cruel.
And it’s no wonder she quickly rushes her body with Soma when she returns to the new world as an old woman.
…there she remained; and yet wasn’t there at all, was all the time away, infinitely far away, on holiday; on holiday in some other world, where the music of the radio was a labyrinth of sonorous colours, a sliding, palpitating labyrinth, that led (by what beautifully inevitable windings) to a bright centre of absolute conviction; where the dancing images of the television box were the performers in some indescribably delicious all-singing feely; where the dripping patchouli was more than scent–was the sun, was a million saxophones, was Popé making love, only much more so, incomparably more, and without end.
For John:
In a scene where Lenina, a woman from the new world, expresses her attraction to him, John leans into the reality he had adopted in his world with the Indians — a world where religion and marriage are a part of the vocabulary and monogamy is a sacred institution.
Still wearing her shoes and socks, and her rakishly tilted round white cap, she advanced towards him. “Darling. Darling! If only you’d said so before!” She held out her arms. But instead of also saying “Darling!” and holding out his arms, the Savage retreated in terror, flapping his hands at her as though he were trying to scare away some intruding and dangerous animal.
Four backwards steps, and he was brought to bay against the wall. “Sweet!” said Lenina and, laying her hands on his shoulders, pressed herself against him. “Put your arms round me,” she commanded. “Hug me till you drug me, honey.” She too had poetry at her command, knew words that sang and were spells and beat drums. “Kiss me”; she closed her eyes, she let her voice sink to a sleepy murmur, “Kiss me till I’m in a coma. Hug me, honey, snuggly …”
The Savage caught her by the wrists, tore her hands from his shoulders, thrust her roughly away at arm’s length. “Ow, you’re hurting me, you’re … oh!” She was suddenly silent. Terror had made her forget the pain. Opening her eyes, she had seen his face–no, not his face, a ferocious stranger’s, pale, distorted, twitching with some insane, inexplicable fury.
Aghast, “But what is it, John?” she whispered. He did not answer, but only stared into her face with those mad eyes. The hands that held her wrists were trembling. He breathed deeply and irregularly. Faint almost to imperceptibility, but appalling, she suddenly heard the gneding of his teeth. “What is it?” she almost screamed. And as though awakened by her cry he caught her by the shoulders and shook her. “Whore!” he shouted “Whore! Impudent strumpet!”
We, the readers, are then asked a significant question about reality in this collision: Is something any less good simply because it doesn’t fit our framework of reality?
Notes on being
Actionable takeaways from the book
- Engage with art to expand your worldview. For art, in all its forms, is the most faithful bearer of the human condition.
- Never think that your way of seeing the world is the only way there is.
- Question. Question reality, others, and yourself.
- Be open to what others have to say about their world.
- Learn to lavish in the good and bad of life, knowing that it is what makes you human and you will not be here forever.
- When your heart yearns for more, for soul food, welcome solitude and return to the language of art. Remember that you can be an artist because you know how to be one.
- Be patient with other people.
- Consider the trade-offs between truth and happiness in society.
What did I disagree with?
With the character, Linda, Huxley seems to be saying that no amount of time away from a reality you’ve grown used to can decondition you from it.
Linda was away for decades, yet she still hungered for constant happiness. She still yearned for what she’d always known, only alluding to John’s birth as the only worthy light she found in the old world.
But come on, something inside you has got to shift when your reality shifts. Sure, you might miss what you once knew but, surely, when you merge both worlds, you can find a ground that makes life a more interesting place than it was.
Something I didn’t fully understand
I don’t quite get the significance of referencing Shakespeare’s work throughout this book.
Favorite sayings
But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
Beautiful sentences
Lines I liked for how beautifully written they were
- While the pencils scurried illegibly across.
- He lapsed into the silence of reminiscence.
- The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio–rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord–a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig’s dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began.
- Success went fizzily to Bernard’s head.
- And the reason came in and showed itself. (see context in the scene below)
Bernard. “Marx,” he said, “can you show any reason why I should not now execute the judgment passed upon you?”
“Yes, I can,” Bernard answered in a very loud voice.
Somewhat taken aback, but still majestically, “Then show it,” said the Director.
“Certainly. But it’s in the passage. One moment.” Bernard hurried to the door and threw it open. “Come in,” he commanded, and the reason came in and showed itself.
This book reminds me of
George Orwell’s 1984.
A book to read next
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.
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