I've been planning for a while to write this as the first post today, but I'm pleased to see that there are many news stories this morning honoring the 3 men who shared a death date. You may have noticed who entered the world on the same day as you. (Perhaps I had a conversation with Rush Limbaugh in the antechamber to life.) But will you know who passes through the departure gate alongside you?
ADDED: In The Guardian: , the author Laura Miller writes:
Apart from the Narnia books, the work of Lewis's I most cherish, "An Experiment in Criticism," makes the almost postmodern – and at the very least radically humble – proposition that we might best judge the literary merit of a book not by how it is written, but by how it is read. If "we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale." That is a faith I am happy to share.And Nicholas Murray writes:
The FBI kept a fat file on [Aldous Huxley] but failed utterly to find anything damning (as his biographer I was sorely disappointed when it slid out of the jiffy bag). He was nevertheless refused US citizenship...AND: "Yes, 'Everybody’s happy nowadays.' We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way." Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (Kindle Locations 1167-1169).
He has survived his detractors and remains an eloquent critical voice, warning against our tendency to "love our slavery" – Brave New World's dystopian idea of manipulation and conformity and our tendency to submit to soft power, so clearly vindicated by the extraordinary complacency with which the public seems to have greeted the Snowden revelations of illegitimate surveillance. A free democrat to the core of his being, at war through words with "the great impersonal forces now menacing freedom," he shows that heroism can exist away from the noisy battlefield.
ALSO: Kindle Locations 2729-2737:
“But do you like being slaves?” the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with ardour and indignation. “Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking,” he added, exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had come to save. The insults bounced off their carapace of thick stupidity; they stared at him with a blank expression of dull and sullen resentment in their eyes. “Yes, puking!” he fairly shouted. Grief and remorse, compassion and duty—all were forgotten now and, as it were, absorbed into an intense overpowering hatred of these less than human monsters. “Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?” Rage was making him fluent; the words came easily, in a rush. “Don’t you?” he repeated, but got no answer to his question. “Very well then,” he went on grimly. “I’ll teach you; I’ll make you be free whether you want to or not.” And pushing open a window that looked on to the inner court of the Hospital, he began to throw the little pill-boxes of soma tablets in hand-fills out into the area.How is your carapace of thick stupidity today? Mine is chafing. I'm struggling not to concoct a joke out "little pill-boxes of soma tablets," Jackie's iconic pink hat, and my favorite Bob Dylan song. I need some rage to make me fluent.
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The Cliche What-If: If You Had a Time Machine Would You Go Back and Kill Hitler Before His Plans Got Started.
Fifty Years Ago Lee Harvey Oswald Returned From His Time Machine -- Where He Had Seen the Future JFK Nuke the World into Obliteration -- and Did What Had to Be Done. And Now He is Vilified for It.
C.S. Lewis knew too much.
Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin: March 5th, 1953.
Peter Kreeft wrote a book a number of years ago based on exactly that concept -- a symposium among Lewis, Kennedy and Huxley while they await their final disposition. http://www.amazon.com/Between-Heaven-Hell-Peter-Kreeft/dp/0877843899
one of my favorite lines from BNW!
A Brave New Lion in Camelot?
And, yet, you've been fooled by the gay agenda.
The hole in your head in the regard is truly astonishing.
You are blind.
Betamax: Kennedy would have been angry and confused. He probably would not have been much of a conversationalist at the time. Then a few days later Oswald arrives and claims he had just saved the world from thermonuclear annihilation. Fur flies.
“I want to look at the sea in peace,” he said. “One can’t even look with that beastly noise going on.”
“But it’s lovely. And I don’t want to look.”
“But I do,” he insisted. “It makes me feel as though …” he hesitated, searching for words with which to express himself, “as though I were more me, if you see what I mean. More on my own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body. Doesn’t it make you feel like that, Lenina?”
But Lenina was crying. “It’s horrible, it’s horrible,” she kept repeating. “And how can you talk like that about not wanting to be a part of the social body? After all, every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons …” “
Yes, I know,” said Bernard derisively. “‘Even Epsilons are useful’! So am I. And I damned well wish I weren’t!”
Lenina was shocked by his blasphemy. “Bernard!” She protested in a voice of amazed distress. “How can you?”
In a different key, “How can I?” he repeated meditatively. “No, the real problem is: How is it that I can’t, or rather—because, after all, I know quite well why I can’t—what would it be like if I could, if I were free—not enslaved by my conditioning.”
“But, Bernard, you’re saying the most awful things.”
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”
He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.” “I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.
Huxley, Aldous (2002-06-09). Brave New World (Kindle Locations 1153-1169). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition.
One might imagine them encountering John F. Kennedy in the antechamber of the afterlife.
They all went to hell?
So Nicholas Murray searches and finds extraordinary complacency in the public's acceptance of the Snowden revelations. And our own Shouting Thomas finds the same in the "gay agenda." This at a time when the greatest demand on the reservoirs of our complacency is by the supporters of the president's healthcare plan. Of course Murray's excuse is that he's British.
The oft-referenced 1984, though a great book, is overrated in modern political discourse. Brave New World was far more prescient. If I could, I would insist that every high schooler read it.
It's no Back in Mobile but ok. To each their own. The album is deep enough...
Paul Fraker,
Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin: March 5th, 1953.
As a consequence of which the news of Prokofiev's death wasn't sufficiently newsworthy to reach the Soviet press for (IIRC) about a week.
No anger is allowed. Just take another pill whenever the dystopian face shines right through the surface of utopian happiness.
I haven't read Brave New Wotld in a long, long time, but I have the vague sense that what permeates both that book and 1984 is the overwhelming class consciousness of the English. Proles and epsilons aren't as fully human as the higher breeds. This belief has nothing to do with hedonism or totalitarianism but rather with the class system of the English at that time........Class is to English writers what race is to Americans. Their pronouncements are not to be trusted.
We have our Soma, it's the welfare state. Unfortunately like any other addictive drug, the addict acquires a tolerance thus needing an ever increasing amount to stay happy and buzzed. What remains to be seen is what happens when demand outstrips supply. I suspect its going to get very ugly.
"I need some rage to make me fluent."
When it comes to fluency, have you no sympathy with the idea of emotion recollected in tranquillity? Does fluency in blog writing become an exercise in playing a virtual King Lear on the heath, vowing to kill six times over, before the words will flow?
Aldous Huxley's brother, Julian Huxley, was on the Council of the Eugenics Society in 1931 and was President of the Society in 1960. So that's where Aldous got his information about a "brave new world."
In the Thirties eugenics society members rounded up thousands of people and sent them to insane asylums the intention being that they should remain there for life. Some were slow learners, some were pregnant and in need of welfare, some were deaf. There they stayed, some for thirty or forty years, doing the cleaning work in the asylums. They were given little pills to keep them quiet and happy. "Brave New World" simply imaginatively extends their fate to the whole of society. So does the book called "That Hideous Strength" by CS Lewis. There are documentaries on them, if you look on Google under Meanwood, the name of one of the places.
"We have our Soma, it's the welfare state."
No, our Soma is consuming...our gluttonous addiction to shopping and our ravenous ingestion of the manufactured fantasies that saturate our environment.
Actually, I've never read BRAVE NEW WORLD, but isn't this very close to the world depicted therein, with its "feelies?"
"But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina?"
"If I did, I wouldn't be happy this way. Duh! Honestly, Aldous, sometimes I think you were kicked in the head by a horse as a child."
Till We Have Faces, Lewis' retelling of the Cupid/Psyche myth, is a theology book even an atheist can love.
As best I can determine, the only other day on which three well-known people died unrelated deaths was March 27, 2002 (Milton Berle, Billy Wilder and Dudley Moore).
Peter
I imagine that the first thing we lose in the afterlife is any interest in how the world regards what we did and what we left undone. An interesting meditation on that can be found in Peter S. Beagle, "A Fine And Private Place" (undoubtedly available at Amazon through the Althouse link). But if Lewis, Huxley, and Kennedy did meet in the antechamber and did have a chat, don't you think JFK would have agreed that his (public) life was the least consequential of the three? I mean that as no criticism. My public life has been as a lawyer, but I pray to God that it is not as a lawyer that I am remembered in this world, or welcomed to the next.
Huxley asks JFK whether Marilyn was really as pneumatic as they say. Lewis cringes.
"She was born in November 1963, the day Aldous Huxley died..."
Yeah, as mentioned by someone else, Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote a book -- Between Heaven and Hell -- where JFK, Huxley, and Lewis meet in a sort of limbo, and debate what's going to happen next. Lewis debates Kennedy on the former's trilemma (i.e. Lord, liar, lunatic argument), and then Lewis debates Huxley on some loopholes in it (i.e. did Jesus really present himself as God, and if so, did he mean it in the Jewish sense?). Spoiler: Lewis wins.
And, of course, Mother Teresa died the same day as Princess Diana, and we all know how the world reacted to that.
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