I shuffled into a bedroom, tastefully decorated, and felt nothing. It was dark at this point, the hills across the canyon an inky black. Huxley - a half-blind Englishman, ever in the musty suits of an academic, at 6 feet 4 towering over the rest of us both physically and intellectually and towering, to some extent, over dystopian fiction - maybe I’d get a sense of him there. Later, when Miryana Isabella Babic alluded to a “theory that part of the house is haunted,” and McBride offered to show me the room where Huxley died, I felt voyeuristic but eagerly said yes. It was one of the few times the fact that we were at Huxley’s former home was addressed directly. “So, when he lived here?” asked Connally.
McBride mentioned a couple of rumors about Huxley’s promiscuity later in life. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) Searching for Huxley Was that Huxley’s prescience reaching across the veil? A brave new world indeed. The dopamine hit of a text alert, the Pavlovian thrill of a retweet, are modern addictions. Was it watching us? And what would Huxley have made of a drone hovering over his roof?īecause a book club at Huxley’s house held the romantic promise of somehow connecting to the author more deeply, we were looking for him everywhere.Ī reader in attendance, Hiawatha Bradley, ventured that the opiate of the masses “just has to be technology,” adding, “your brain is wired to the phone.” Alex Hoffmaster drew a parallel between social media and “Brave New World’s” drug Soma, which keeps society numbly happy and subservient. True, surveillance is the territory of a different literary dystopia, George Orwell’s “1984,” but for a moment, the intrusion felt eerie. No, during a deep-dive into one of literature’s most compelling dystopias, someone had spotted a drone. The occasional helicopter had already torn past, momentarily drowning out voices (“a humming overhead had become a roar,” as Huxley describes their sinister advance in the novel’s climactic scene) but that hardly merited a pause in conversation. They weren’t peering at the softening evening sky or at the Hollywood sign, which loomed so close it looked like white plastic lawn furniture, a prop to rest a drink on. Seated on a veranda high in the Hollywood Hills, a few book clubbers who had gathered to discuss Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” in the author’s last Los Angeles home craned their necks.
0 kommentar(er)
