I tried to do some little digging about it, to make myself an opinion mostly, but I found that, as it usually happens, sources are clearly biased and they pick sides, just like media does. So after a while of alternatively reading that ones or the others are the good and the bad guys for this and that, I´m sharing with you the most reliable information I could find. Hope it helps you to understand!
lunes, 21 de julio de 2014
miércoles, 2 de julio de 2014
Time must have a stop
I finished Time must have a stop, by Aldous Huxley, a few days ago.
As usually, I tried to find a link to the book review... but in this case, I couldn´t find one I liked.
Will explain:
All of them talk about what happens in the book, the characters, the story of Sebastian Barnac and his summer in Italy. All of them (and also the cover of the edition I got) tell us how uncle Eustace shows him the pleasures of life, and how Bruno Rontini teaches him about spirituality instead.
Ok yes, that is what happens (in broad strokes, at least), but that is not what the story is about! Huxley didn´t write that book to tell us about a stupid teenager´s summer in Italy. What matters here is not what happens. The whole story is just an excuse to introduce the characters, and the characters are, each one of them, a representative of one particular ideology. This way, Sebastian´s father stands for politics (passionate politics, rather); uncle Eustace, for the joyful life (sex, art, vice) free of consequences; Bruno Rontini, for spiritualilty and insight; and Sebastian is the young guy who cares only about himself and actually believes himself to be the center of the universe, and who measures the importance of every fact in relation to the consequences it will have for him. This is only the main characters, then we have others who, not being so "main", also play their parts in the snapshot of society Huxley makes.
And, until you get that (until he exposes at least a few of the main characters), the book is boring as hell. After all, why should you care about a stupid selfish egotist (english) kid?
I bought the book because the cover said it was Huxley´s favourite among all his novels (and also, because the first lines are quite similar to something I read in one of García Márquez´s short stories and I wanted to compare the resemblance! -- I still have to). And I think the reason why it´s his fave is because he uses the characters as he pleases. He uses them to defend his own arguments over others, and at the end, he (kind of) places them in the situation he thinks they deserve as their closure...
It´s funny, because that is exactly what uncle Eustace criticizes at one point of the story, comparing Chaucer and Dante. This is what he says:
"Whereas Dante has to rush into party politics; and, when he backs the wrong horse, he spends the rest of his life in rage and self-pity. Revenging himself on his political opponents by putting them into hell, and rewarding his friends by promoting them to purgatory and paradise. What could be sillier or more squalid? And of course, if he didn't happen to be the second greatest virtuoso of language that ever lived, there'd be nobody to say a good word for him."
Well, well...
Anyway, to finish, let me share with you a few lines I liked:
"But the grace had been withdrawn again, and in recent days ... Sebastian sadly shook his head. Dust and cinders, the monkey devils, the imbecile unholiness of distraction. And because knowledge, the genuine knowledge beyond mere theory and book learning, was always a transforming participation in that which was known, it could never be communicated - not even to one's own self when in a state of ignorance. The best one could hope to do by means of words was to remind oneself of what one once had intuitively understood and, in others, to evoke the wish and create some of the conditions for a similar understanding. "
"And, of course, in an age that had invented Peter Pan and raised the monstrosity of arrested development to the rank of an ideal, he wasn't in any way exceptional. The world was full of septuagenarians playing at being in their thirties or even in their teens, when they ought to have been preparing for death, ought to have been trying to unearth the spiritual reality which they had spent a lifetime burying under a mountain of garbage."
I don´t want to share more, because I don´t want to spoil anything in the unlikely case that, one day, you decide to read the book.
(If you do, there are a few really boring and, in my opinion, absolutely dispensable chapters that you can perfectly skip -- I did. You will identify them when you get there! I tried to read them, but I think Huxley was on mushrooms when he wrote them.)
As usually, I tried to find a link to the book review... but in this case, I couldn´t find one I liked.
Will explain:
All of them talk about what happens in the book, the characters, the story of Sebastian Barnac and his summer in Italy. All of them (and also the cover of the edition I got) tell us how uncle Eustace shows him the pleasures of life, and how Bruno Rontini teaches him about spirituality instead.
Ok yes, that is what happens (in broad strokes, at least), but that is not what the story is about! Huxley didn´t write that book to tell us about a stupid teenager´s summer in Italy. What matters here is not what happens. The whole story is just an excuse to introduce the characters, and the characters are, each one of them, a representative of one particular ideology. This way, Sebastian´s father stands for politics (passionate politics, rather); uncle Eustace, for the joyful life (sex, art, vice) free of consequences; Bruno Rontini, for spiritualilty and insight; and Sebastian is the young guy who cares only about himself and actually believes himself to be the center of the universe, and who measures the importance of every fact in relation to the consequences it will have for him. This is only the main characters, then we have others who, not being so "main", also play their parts in the snapshot of society Huxley makes.
And, until you get that (until he exposes at least a few of the main characters), the book is boring as hell. After all, why should you care about a stupid selfish egotist (english) kid?
I bought the book because the cover said it was Huxley´s favourite among all his novels (and also, because the first lines are quite similar to something I read in one of García Márquez´s short stories and I wanted to compare the resemblance! -- I still have to). And I think the reason why it´s his fave is because he uses the characters as he pleases. He uses them to defend his own arguments over others, and at the end, he (kind of) places them in the situation he thinks they deserve as their closure...
It´s funny, because that is exactly what uncle Eustace criticizes at one point of the story, comparing Chaucer and Dante. This is what he says:
"Whereas Dante has to rush into party politics; and, when he backs the wrong horse, he spends the rest of his life in rage and self-pity. Revenging himself on his political opponents by putting them into hell, and rewarding his friends by promoting them to purgatory and paradise. What could be sillier or more squalid? And of course, if he didn't happen to be the second greatest virtuoso of language that ever lived, there'd be nobody to say a good word for him."
Well, well...
Anyway, to finish, let me share with you a few lines I liked:
"But the grace had been withdrawn again, and in recent days ... Sebastian sadly shook his head. Dust and cinders, the monkey devils, the imbecile unholiness of distraction. And because knowledge, the genuine knowledge beyond mere theory and book learning, was always a transforming participation in that which was known, it could never be communicated - not even to one's own self when in a state of ignorance. The best one could hope to do by means of words was to remind oneself of what one once had intuitively understood and, in others, to evoke the wish and create some of the conditions for a similar understanding. "
"And, of course, in an age that had invented Peter Pan and raised the monstrosity of arrested development to the rank of an ideal, he wasn't in any way exceptional. The world was full of septuagenarians playing at being in their thirties or even in their teens, when they ought to have been preparing for death, ought to have been trying to unearth the spiritual reality which they had spent a lifetime burying under a mountain of garbage."
I don´t want to share more, because I don´t want to spoil anything in the unlikely case that, one day, you decide to read the book.
(If you do, there are a few really boring and, in my opinion, absolutely dispensable chapters that you can perfectly skip -- I did. You will identify them when you get there! I tried to read them, but I think Huxley was on mushrooms when he wrote them.)
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