At first, the book disoriented me. Huxley doesn’t ease you into his world—he shoves you into it, sterile and bright, where babies are engineered, happiness is bottled in pills, and nobody ever really feels pain. And for a while, I almost felt seduced by it. Imagine never worrying about heartbreak, or money, or rejection. But then I realized—that’s exactly what made it horrifying. It’s not chaos that runs the world; it’s control disguised as comfort. That thought stayed in my head like a splinter.
The scene that really stuck in my mind was the initial scene in the Hatchery where you can see how the people are actually manufactured, as opposed to being born. The informal manner in which the director discusses the breaking of embryos, choosing who was to be smart and who was to mop floors--it gave me the shivers. I recall that I sat in my chair and sipped my coffee and thought to myself, it is more terrifying than any dystopia with violence or destruction. Since in this case, people do not even desire freedom. They have been conditioned to love their cages. That got me.
And then there’s Bernard Marx. Bernard frustrated me. He is the demystifier of the system, alienated in a society that idolizes conformity--but when he finally receives attention and authority, he has the same hold on it as any other person, and he is as desperate to hold on as they are. That contradiction struck a bitter type of laughter in me, in that it was so human. How many times do we claim that we wish we were different, then the moment we get a bit of that belonging we sink in it? I did not like seeing Bernard fall apart as it brought to my mind myself, people I know, how easy it is to compromise.
But to me the heart of it was John, the “Savage.” His opening was a shockwave--so abruptly, out of a clear sky, here is a character who experiences, who loves, who believes in suffering as a part of being alive. The one in which he reads Shakespeare to Lenina, that broke me. He does not know why she would not respond to the passion, the naked hunger with which he speaks, as she cannot know why he speaks. The entire dialogue seemed like two individuals screaming on two sides of a chasm that can never be crossed. I could feel John aching my chest, that need to be acknowledged in a world that does not want to feel.
And the conclusion, the conclusion broke me. The despair of John, who tries to find at least some form of purity in a place where there is none left. I will never get over the image of him, standing on the lighthouse, torn between the emptiness and the sense of the world pressing in on his shoulders. Not only is it tragic--but it is inevitable. That’s what makes it hurt. You close the book and you have this silence, this awkward realization of how frail meaning is when the world demands to take it away.
What struck me as funny, strangely enough, were the little hypocrisies that Huxley sprinkles through. How they recite their slogans with machine-like cheer or how they talk about community and still manage not to have anything even resembling a connection. It is a satire, but it is so close to our reality that it cannot be considered as funny only. It is the type of laugh that chokes in your throat because you are aware that it is directed at us.
Since it pushes you to consider the trade-offs we all make on a daily basis we get comfortable instead of truth, distracted instead of deep, numb instead of pain. And it poses the question that kept bouncing around in my head even after I was done: Would you rather experience something and know it, or sail through life in a cloud with your fingers not touching anything?
The experience of reading Brave New World was not reading a novel, it was looking through a twisted mirror. And the most frightening thing about it was not the dystopia that Huxley developed--but the fact that so much of it was so present in such little, silent forms around us.
The last three images was gotten from web:
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