Isolation

Solitude: Welcome Freedom or Unhappy Loneliness

Everyday a person goes through some form of isolation. Whether it is from a stray thought that might differ from those around them, or a physical separation from the people they care about, isolation is a part of life and everyone experiences it. But everyone handles it differently as well. In Huxley’s Brave New World isolation is a tool, helping individual characters discover who they are, or a cage, trapping them further in a lonely world.

One of Huxley’s characters, Hemholtz, an attractive alpha-male who could live the life of leisure separates himself from the girls, the lectures, and the World States conditioning because he sees them as “second bests” (67) which are holding him back. He was decanted with mental excess that allows him to see what others in the World State are too “pneumatic” to look into or even allow them to discover. Their constant needs to move, do and never be alone and think makes Hemholtz realize that he has “some sort of extra power that [he isn’t] using” (69) and he begins to detach himself from his committees and the meaninglessness of girls. He wants to discover his “extra power” and he believes that time alone with himself will lead to the answer.

And he does discover his “extra power”. He begins to write poetry and rhymes about solitude and how an “empty night [is] more solidly than that with which we copulate” (81) showing his understanding of what the World State expects them to do. That a night sleeping with countless women is just as lonely because of its hollowness, and that a night alone with oneself would make that person isolated, but able to fill in it with meaning and expression, like Hemholtz’s poetry. Hemholtz even begins to go out of his conditioning bringing solitude to the classrooms where he teaches and not caring about the consequences. Hemholtz realizes that despite the fact that he will be abandoned for his newfound love of solitude, he...