Monday, August 8, 2016
Death in Brave New World
While reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, many of it's societies ways of life made me uncomfortable. The openness to sex for example kept me cringing to think that the characters thought it was normal. However there was only one idea in the book that I thought would be somewhat useful to our society today: the knowledge of death. I know it was insensitive when it was presented in the book; I know I was frustrated with the children for not leaving John alone to remorse. But the loss of someone is something I was never prepared for, especially when it happens out of no where. My family never exposed me to the reality of death and neither did our society. When ever I heard something of someone dying or played a video game with intense graphics, it never hit me what really happens because the next second I was shown a "happier" topic. Nothing prepared me for actually losing someone that I truly loved, nothing prepared me for the intense depression that followed, nothing prepared me for those nights of crying myself to sleep, and nothing prepared me for the constant reminder that person was never coming back. I'm not saying our society is better off being insensitive, but I'm say that our society should not be so against children knowing about the reality of death. I am well aware that everyone is exposed to death in different ways and I'm not saying we need to be conditioned like the novel at all. There just needs to be something said that our society today is not saying. I don't have the solution, I just had a bad experience that could have had less drastic effects on my mental health if I was told something.
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I most definitely agree with you. I believe its best to know at a reasonable age that we are not immortal and things happen. Learning about it before we are witnesses to loss can help a lot with grief. I was lucky enough to have been told at a young age that one day we must leave this earth and that it was okay, I would also have to be prepared to let people go. Of course I still felt pain to see a few family members go, but Knowing about this years before helped me recover.
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ReplyDeleteAlthough it is fairly easy to understand the concept of death, I don't think there is a way to prepare someone for the loss of a loved one. It takes an emotional toll that can't be explained until experienced firsthand; it is a growing experience. Sadly, we'll all have to go through this type of loss at at least one point in our lives. While I was reading Brave New World, I hadn't truly understood why they got rid of the concept of "family" until they brought up death. Without family, they wouldn't feel the remorse of death when their loved ones passed on. Since we have loved ones such as family and friends, it is always going to be a difficult time when they're gone. I agree with you on the fact that we shouldn't shelter children from the concept of death, but I don't think anyone can be prepared for the emotional aspect of something that tragic.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this, death is just something that happens in the blink of an eye, one moment a person is there living and the next moment they are not. There is really no way to prepare for it because of how unexpected it is and even if it's expected, the hope that the person will live is still in us until the life has ended. And when it comes to the ones we love, there will definitely be those memories there to remind us of who they were and the thought of never being able to have that again to keep us sad. My point is, death is something random and unpredictable when it comes to the people we love and as much as me way want to deny of the moment happening, it eventually will and we will have to keep going no matter how bad we feel. I do think children should be well aware of what death brings or how it affects a person, but only to an extant since most of anyone's childhood shouldn't be so full of negativity. It's those bad things that shape people into who they are sometimes. In the end, death is something everyone will have to experience when it comes to a person in their life, heck it happens every day all around us and we don't even notice, but the point is that we will have to deal with that feeling no matter what and get over it with either the support of others or on our own and no drug should ever make us become insensitive to such a tragic event, for it is with these experiences that we not only learn to appreciate life more, but it makes the moments with the ones we loved all the more cherrishable.
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