(“I found the whole concept grotesque and threatening beyond words.”)

I can’t quite remember when I first read Huxley’s Brave New World. I must have ordered it from the Scholastic Book Service’s catalog, so that makes it somewhere between fifth and eighth grade—late 50s-early 60s. I know it was before the Dark Side was common currency for pre-adolescents and well before the cultural revolution which Boomers lived through later in that decade. A lot of heady, depressing, repulsive ideas flowed from those pages. One I recall was soma, an unidentified “ideal pleasure drug” which stultified the populace, rendering it susceptible to easy manipulation by The World State which supplied it and encouraged its consumption.

This was long before hallucinogens had hit the campuses, when all we knew about pot we’d learned from Reefer Madness, and my mind had yet to have been even slightly altered by a drop of alcohol. With that as my referential locus, I found the whole concept grotesque and threatening beyond words.

But had I first come across this book today (or even just ten or 12 years later) how much differently would I react? A shrug? A nod? A wink? Or maybe just an acknowledgment that it might not have amounted to much difference to a generation beguiled by mass media, advertising, and political hucksterism.

So where’s the connection between the riding things I used to think and what I have learned to think so many years later? It’s just the observation that what you have not experienced is impossible to judge. Or if you do, your conclusion may carry no validity in light of subsequent developments. A cautionary tale perhaps? Or a recognition of where innocence takes or doesn’t take us.

Whenever someone says they don’t want anyone else on their horse because they “want to do it all themselves” or they think it’s somehow cheating to ride already trained horses, I remind myself what I thought of soma when I was 13 years old.