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As many of you know, I started my little literary experiment of centireading—reading a book 100 times—this week.
I chose to use T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets for the experiment.
So, I started that this week as I rushed to finish up my prior reading so that I could focus exclusively on that until I finish it.
Rereading Brave New World: The Disturbing Reality of Pleasure-Based Control
I had taken a literary quiz on Facebook a few weeks ago and got a question about Brave New World wrong.
I had read it so long ago that I honestly couldn’t remember much about it.
I knew there was a savage who comes to civilization and wreaks havoc, but that was about it. So, I made it a point to reread that classic dystopian novel as soon as I got some time.
The world that Aldous Huxley builds in this book is staggering.
If we think of science fiction as the ability to take a concept in the world and explore its extreme progression, then the world in this novel pushes utilitarian efficiency to its absolute limit.
Think of the novel We, which may or may not have been the basis for Huxley—the world presented in it is the result of Taylorism in the Soviet system pushed to the extreme.
Or Dune, with its artificial intelligence and ecological destruction.
Sci-fi allows the author to explore the limits of a world, and the world Huxley presents is not controlled through the threat of pain but through the over-intoxication of pleasure.
It is almost like the opposite of 1984—threats are not needed because everyone is captured in an excess of superfluous pleasures.
However, both novels present language as an essential means of control.
The Weaponization of Language: How Words Shape Reality
That was the thing that most captivated me on this read—language is the very thing that structures the behavior of the population.
From infancy, people in Brave New World are immersed in linguistic strongholds that form the foundations of how they behave and view reality.
John the Savage provides the antithesis to this.
He isn’t shaped through the proscribed linguistic apparatus but rather by Shakespeare, and this shaping becomes the very problem for him in returning to civilization.
The wildness of Shakespearean language cannot conform, and thus he seeks solace away from both the civilized and uncivilized—ultimately, in the end, from the world itself.
Bernard Marx is also an outsider figure, but unlike John, he is enamored by the meaningless. He is jealous above all, trapped in his inferiority complex.
Whereas Bernard cannot exist in civilization because of his relationships with others, John cannot exist because of his relationship with himself.
He fights against his very nature, ultimately becoming corrupted in his Shakespearean linguistic excess.
The novel proves that words and language are the very elements of freedom—or, when controlled, the foundation of oppression.
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Joseph Brodsky and the Exile of Language
Someone who grew up in a controlled linguistic world was Joseph Brodsky. He was ultimately exiled in 1972 for being a “social parasite.” Despite his fame, I’m not sure I had ever read him before this week.
I picked up his 1980 collection A Part of Speech at a wild little bookstore in SE Portland called Wallace Books.
It’s an old house where every single square inch is a bookshelf, often with two rows of books stacked on them.
The poem from which the collection takes its name captivated me the most, and I wrote about it further here. Overall, the collection is plagued by the sense of exile.
This is its pervasive theme—both as a sense of our own exile from ourselves in the postmodern age and as the poet’s own exile from his native country, where he left not only his own life but also his son’s.
Brodsky has this great ability to shift from a more normative sentence structure, with an almost conversational quality, into dramatically short declarative sentences that foreground the immediate material quality of a fact in the world.
So, outside of the traditional ways a poet creates rhythm—the meter inside a line and the movement from one line to the next within a stanza—Brodsky sets up these quite pleasant little shifts in rhythm, creating a lush and often surprising musical composition.
Decoding Aristotle: Why His Philosophy Still Matters Today
Lastly this week, I read a nice little book on Aristotle by Edith Hall, Aristotle’s Way.
Aristotle, for me, is a philosopher who always needs an interpreter.
His writing is so dense, and if you’re not making a comprehensive study of him and simply want to see how he can add to your life, then I’d definitely recommend this book.
Hall is able to take the complexity of his thought and make it relevant—perhaps most importantly, practical.
She applies Aristotle’s ideas to modern life—using his insights on rhetoric and persuasion to land a job or following our true potentialities in our careers.
Over the last few years, I’ve noticed a proliferation of practical philosophy publications geared toward the everyday reader, particularly on Stoicism.
I am thankful we are starting to see philosophers who, in my opinion, have much more profound things to say about life and actually need an interpreter to make them accessible.
Stoic philosophy—like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations—doesn’t need to be popularized like it is today.
Any single reader could pick it up, understand it, and apply it to their life.
But Aristotle demands a guide.
No mind in all of the history of philosophy touches Aristotle’s.
He is someone I often think of when I hear some crazy conspiracy theory—like flat Earth or the idea that birds don’t exist.
His golden mean is something that needs to be more well known, so we can begin to have more humility in our thinking and refrain from the extremes.
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