Brave New World

The education in the small Northern WI town in which I grew up wasn't exactly "prep school", and I didn't manage to really get the idea that "reading/education is fun for it's own sake" until a few years into a corporate career when "making a living", at least in the sense of food/shelter/clothing/Bass Beer became assured enough that I felt I could "waste some time" on recreational reading. I finally got around to reading Aldous Huxley: "Brave New World".

Other than a rather strange obsession with sex, and the kind of almost cute replacement of god with "Ford", I doubt that it will be memorable. The rise of consumerism and the need for perpetual mental occupation with nothing of meaning seems to be a pretty good prediction of where modernism moved. His writing style has been criticized, but while I didn't think it added much, it also didn't get in the way for me.

While Huxley is concerned with the masses being "infantile", the book is founded on that infantile idea that there is "some controller" or "some conspiracy", or "some secret human knowledge" that is someone helping "those in the know" and enslaving the rest of humanity. Oh if it were only so, then such "knowledge" COULD "get out", unfortunately, it doesn't exist and a bunch of fallible humans are all just making it up as we trundle along.