Something to Ponder.

"Maybe this world is another planet's hell." -Aldous Huxley

This quote caught my attention this morning, which then inspired me to check out Aldous himself. I knew he'd written Brave New World. I read it once upon a time...but needed a quick refresher.

The quote is something to ponder...especially once you refresh yourself with what his BNW was all about... Huxley was said to be outraged by the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness, sexual promiscuity, and inward-looking nature of many Americans which inspired his famous book, Brave New World. Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place (from http://www.huxley.net/). This is because Huxley endows his "ideal" society with features calculated to alienate his audience. Typically, reading BNW elicits the very same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it depicts has notionally vanquished - not a sense of joyful anticipation. In Brave New World Revisited (1958) Huxley describes BNW as a "nightmare". Though...he ended his life loving psychodelics and some even call him the father of "hippies." You can't help but wonder, what would HE think of today's society? Does anyone else feel like this world is quickly becoming a world of clones--acting and reacting in the way everyone is supposed to? Where did our individuality go? Which brings me back to the quote...maybe we are simply living someone else's hell?