‘Island’ by Aldous Huxley is quite the opposite of ‘Brave New World’. In Island, man is represented at his greatest and most perfect, as embodied by the Pacific Island of Pala. This island of Pala is the equivalent of a sort of paradise, created by a doctor and a Buddhist king - a combination of western science, philosophy and humanism of the East. The story talks of how a cynical, disillusioned journalist, William Farnaby arrives in Pala under the guise of being shipwrecked, in order to investigate their vast resource of oil, and how others outside might profit from it. During his short stint at Pala, he is introduced to their extraordinary way of life, their philosophies and gradually starts to heal from within. Slowly, he is convinced that this way of life should remain unspoilt and becomes faced with a dilemma. Some have likened ‘Brave New World’ as huxley’s glimpse into hell, if so, then ‘Island’ is his vision of utopia…
Personally, I felt that this was an even harder book to read than ‘Brave New World’. The concepts were simple, but they were so simple that my utterly complicated mind found it hard to grasp. Ironic, isn’t it?
This is a quote I quite like… though it doesn’t tie in with the general theme over here…
“One has no right, one has no right to inflict one’s sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn’t sad.”
Being able to accept that you are sad, and to undergo an appropriate phase of griefing is something therapeutic in itself. I don’t believe in repressing emotions, especially if they’re negative ones. It’ll make you very bitter and cynical. Not pretty. It’s best to be honest with things like emotions, spend an adequate amount of time experiencing them, then move on.
This excerpt got me thinking about our state of education, and sent quite a few chills down my spine…
“of two people I met last time I was in England. At Cambridge. One of them was an atomic physicist, the other was a philospher. Both extremely eminent. But one had a mental age, outside the laboratory, of about eleven and the other was a compulsive eater with a weight problem that he refused to face. Two extreme examples of what happens when you take a clever boy, give him fifteen years of the most intensive formal education and totally neglect to do anything for the mind-body which has to do the learning and the living… How pathetic! And, poor things, how curiously repulsive! … … … Reading Plato or listening to a lecture on T.S. Eliot doesn’t educate the whole human being; like courses in physics of chemistry, it merely educates the symbol-manipulator and leaves the rest of the living mind-body in its pristine state of ignorance and ineptitude.”
The last idea within the book which caught my interest was this:
“Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
I’m not sure I can understand this theory fully, but I’d like to try. It seems like we all take the blows in life too hard at times, and I’m sure all of us can learn how to cushion them blows… Hmmm don’t know how to put it, erm but I think I’m slowly learning how to do it. :D
