“But I like the inconveniences.”
“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.
-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
I’ve spent so long doing what I’m supposed to be doing that I feel like I haven’t lived at all. In about seven months I’ll be somewhere new and I won’t have any idea how to navigate and interact and connect with people. I want to do things I’ll regret and I want to fight and shout and drink and fuck and tell people things. I’ve had the same friends for years but I feel like we hardly know each other.
I’ve never felt danger or sin. You can’t understand poetry and goodness without something to compare them to. All I’ve had so far is comfort and sometimes I just get a bit sick of it.
