“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!”
I am rereading this for about the 10th time I think. I read it in high school and college, and then a few times since. I am also thinking about teaching it this year in replacement to another teacher teaching Never Let Me Go. This book has plenty of sex and drugs too, but it’s a little more indirect and the specific language is a little less dicey. Anyway, what strikes me about this book is how malleable it is in terms of theme and motivation. What is lost in the Brave New World society is all things that (according to the book especially in the view of John Savage) give humans a soul. So this means religion, art, and philosophy, but also discretion, free will, suffering, pain, aging, death, and all the other innately human experiences. While for the book this takes on a Christian ethos in terms of religion (and Huxley was never very religious), it’s clear from rereading the book it’s about free will. Mustapha Mond is equally down on art, religion, and science in terms of the restricted topics, and while John is a kind of Christian, with an Indigenous religious influence, this is a product of who he is, not a total summation of what is lost to the new society. And even looking just at John, he’s just as enraptured with Shakespeare (for good reason) as anything else. If Shakespeare doesn’t represent all that is possible, then nothing does.