Personal Letter to the Author of Brave New World

¶ … Mr. Huxley:

All of my life, I have felt as though I have been trapped in a play not of my own making. In my wildest dreams, I imagined myself a Hamlet-like character, suffering the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." Hamlet said: "to die, to sleep, aye, that's the rub," when contemplating suicide. However, in my present world, I have come to realize that all of those around me including my late mother have been dwelling in a kind of living sleep, not of their own making. Your satire is so apt, so accurate -- it highlights how the false pursuit of pleasure is a false notion. Although I do not desire suicide, rather I feel that the entire world in which I live is committing a kind of spiritual suicide and rejecting all that is truly good in life, versus what is pleasurable. "Grief and remorse, compassion and duty, all were forgotten now" (Huxley 144). Your barbed wit makes this sadly clear.

Much like Hamlet, I look around me and see a world which is full of lies. People are happy and numb to any kind of grief, sickness, or tragedy. Children play amongst the sick and dying, so inculcated in the hypnopraedic conditioning they receive from birth that they are unable to question the tenants of their society. Even leisure is engineered to create dependence on the state. "Nowadays the controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the components of existing games" (Huxley 20).

The lowest-caste members of the world are conditioned to accept rather than question their fates. I alone wear the dark cloak of mourning, mourning a world which does not seek the light of intellectual truth and merely believes that the pleasures of the moment are enough to sustain the human animal. At first, like Miranda I thought this brave new world was a wondrous place; now like Prospero I am too wise about all of its evils. Even the one woman I thought was good and beautiful was just as drugged and numb to reality as the rest of them.

Humans have brains as well as bodies. As Hamlet says: "What is a man/If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more." That is precisely what people do in my society -- they merely sleep, feed, and -- making them even lower than the beasts -- take the drug soma every time some unpleasant thoughts drift across their consciousness. They might as well be dead.