During the chess game near the end of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda, the fourteen-year-old daughter of the sorcerer Prospero, sees drunken sailors staggering off the wreckage of a ship run-aground. “O wonder!” she says. “How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in’t!”
You gotta love the sarcasm.
Many brave new worlds, countless drunken sailors and a few hundred years later, Aldous Huxley borrowed Miranda’s O so generous words.
How beauteous mankind is!
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Just the other day at Recreational Equipment Incorporated — or REI, to the athletically challenged — I witnessed Miranda’s same goodly creatures staggering around in’t. What were their desires? O wonder! What inspired their craving for these luxuries?
They were paying out to experience THEIR brave new world — shoes designed for every trot and gate, green and red lightweight kayak paddles, Primal Warrior and Cerveza dayglow body-hugging cycling jerseys, cross-Country ski waxes, mountain bikes, urban bikes, road bikes, hybrid bikes, helmets and goggles for all things headworthy, bindings and bags galore.
In our brave new world, it’s essential that we buy the gear to go to the river, to the mountains, to the beach, to the desert, even though, in the brand name part of our brain, we defile the natural world — pollute it, sell it, strangle it, and debase it.
Beauteous people, drunken sailors, tapping their apps, GPSing their outdoor selves, wedging spandex, mounting tungsten, swiping all with a longing to experience that out-of-the-box, courageous world: all with so much apparatus it’s doubtful they know what it is.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, the people in’t believed nature’s beauty had one grave defect: it wasn’t profitable.
Nature was a distraction from buying things. It kept no factories busy. As a stand-lone, it fell short of the goal of maximum monitization. The Brave-New-World powers that be, had cancelled the love of nature and replaced it with a forged desire to consume the crutches of facing their fears.
And here at R.E.I., beautious people are doing just that. In this brave new world, it’s essential that we buy the gear to go to the river, the mountains, the beach, the desert, even though in the process they pollute it, sell it, strangle, and debase it. O brave new world! That has such people in’t!
“We condition the masses to hate the country,” Huxley wrote. “But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus.”
Our four-wheel drive, nature app, snow board, trike scooter, snow mobile, wingsuiting world — inhibits us. It runs against the heart of nature which is not in our ogling, or climbing, or conquest or “so-called” experience of it, but in our understanding and worshipping it.
Nature is always with us. It is arising through the concrete pavement, and down through vent. It is in the depth of the universe at powers of ten. A crow on a power line. A flood in the suburbs. A subatomic particle. The ice of Titan. If the site of Toyon, red with berries, out the window of a bus on Broadway doesn’t bring us closer to it, than hiking the John Muir trail fully-geared never will.
