History is bunk.

            The statement from the book ‘Brave New World’, “History is bunk”, implies that looking back on the past disrupts the present. I do not agree with this statement because, although history can be dark, George Santayana once said those, ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ This can be proven in two ways, through Brave New World, and actual history.

            If one would imagine the world created in the novel Brave New World to actually be a utopia that came after our society, then you would have to owe it to history. If our lives had not been miserable and filled with love and jealousy, than the great Ford would never have anything to break through, nothing to change. Thus by learning from the mistakes of the dictators of the past, Ford created a society where people are always happy. Also, by teaching the people about their history, Ford prevents the pain to be from being repeated. Using history, he has allowed the utopia to be almost never ending. When Mustapha Mond ignorantly states that ‘History is bunk’, he really is forgetting that without history, he would never have such a life.

             ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,’ this has been proven so many times that it would take pages and pages to state every example. Man’s biggest vice is his belief that, although what he is going to attempt has failed every time, he will try anyways. Russia, for example, was tried by Napoleon in 1812, and failed. The Russians burnt down Moscow, depriving the French of shelter in the city, and the frenchmen died of frost and hunger. But, this of course means nothing, Napoleon may have failed, but Hitler will conquer. Instead, he falls into the same footsteps as his predecessor, and history repeats itself.

            As one can see, history is not bunk, but a treasure map. If you follow what the others have done, and understand it, then you know what not to do, you have discovered the treasure. As Ford succeeded in doing, and as Hitler failed to notice, history repeats itself. Until you notice it does, you are condemned to continue it for eternity. 

Perfect Freedom

       In the beginning of the novel 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley, there is a paragraph about utopias written in french by a russion religious and political philosopher, Nicholas Bedrieaff.
'La vie marche vers les utopies', he says, life is slowly becoming a utopia . And when it does, will we try to return to a non utopian society? Less perfect, and more free? This is what Nicholas asks, and this is what Aldous implies in his novel. A perfect life, is never perfect. Nor is a good person never bad, or a smart person never stupid. Life is balanced, it's the ying and yang, and anything that ever tries to be just the yang, or just the ying will never succeed. You can never have freedom and perfection in the same equation. Nature always wins, it always manages to balance the world for a few short seconds, until a new person decides to test his luck in the quest for a utopian society.

Bernard, Mustapha Mond and John.

My name is Bernard
Until I tasted sweet fame
I questioned everything around me
Now I've been punished
And sent away, weeping.

My am Mustapha Mond
I know all about the past
I see all the faults in society
I had options
I chose power

My name is John
'Civilized Men' took me away from home
And treated me as a savage
No one listens
None understand

The Severed Garden- The Doors

Wow, I'm sick of doubt
Live in the light of certain
South
Cruel bindings.
The servants have the power
Dog-men and their mean women
Pulling poor blankets over
Our sailors

I'm sick of dour faces
Staring at me from the tv
Tower, I want roses in
My garden bower; dig?
Royal babies, rubies
Must now replace aborted
Strangers in the mud
These mutants, blood-meal
For the plant that's plowed.

They are waiting to take us into
The severed garden
Do you know how pale and wanton thrillful
Comes death on a strange hour
Unannounced, unplanned for
Like a scaring over-friendly guest you've
Brought to bed
Death makes angels of us all
And gives us wings
Where we had shoulders
Smooth as raven's
Claws

No more money, no more fancy dress
This other kingdom seems by far the best
Until it's other jaw reveals incest
And loose obedience to a vegetable law.

I will not go
Prefer a feast of friends
To the giant family.

Taylor Ruth Baldwin

 Tumblr houses many creative people, one of which is Taylor-Ruth Baldwin. As Wired explains, she first started posting panels from her diary, and in a few months, she went viral. I really enjoyed her comics, more than anything I love what she tries to say in each of them. If you have any spare time, check her out here, she really is quite funny .

In the text, "What May Happen In The Next Hundred Years (published in 1900)," John Elfreth Watkins Jr. predicts what will happen in the next 100 years.  If you compare it with Aldous Huxleys book Brave New World, you can find many similarities. Like the fact that you will be able to travel from England to any place in the world in less that two days, and that there will be a machine for everything, but none of them are as accurate as the one about how there will be no wild animals, except in menageries. Menageries, are exactly like the place where Savage comes from, "a collection of wild or unusual animals, especially for exhibition*". You can see that Aldous Huxley was greatly influenced by the predictions of the people before him. Both talked about the improvement of machines, but one about how it will lead us to good, and the other about how it will lead us to changing the face of the human race. Two predictions, portraying the same idea, somehow bring us two totally different conclusions. One about a world a step closer to utopia, the other to dystopia.

* www. dictionary . com

Our Identity

 Our homework today was to write about our englihs class today. It started with our teacher talking about the things that people had posted about the day before. He then asked us what we thought made up our identity. Our responses ranged from environment to food, genes to dreams, and many other topics. Later on our teacher  told us to pick three that we think really makes up our identity and put a percentage on how important we think it is. Mine were experiences (30%), environment (20%), health (3%), genes (7%), personality (40%). After this, we were told to pick a geometrical figure that we think best fits our identity. I picked a parallelogram because although they have two parallel side, they also have angles that can always change, they can become a square, or a diamond, or even a flat line. That's pretty much all we did today.