2005-08-05 - 11:45 a.m.

For some strange reason I really want to read �The Tempest� by William Shakespeare. I have not read any Shakespeare since high school, and while I think he�s great, I don�t think of his work as �summer reading.�

And yet, I really want to read this. Perhaps I want to read the play because I think it has an interesting beginning � the play starts in a storm. Maybe it�s the cool name, �The Tempest.� What a great name for a storm. Until I was about 20, I thought this was a play about a seducer of some kind. Maybe it�s because a knowledge of Shakespeare is a hallmark of sophistication, and I gosta to looks sophisticated.

Or maybe I am led to it again by something else I read. One of the few things I have been able to read recently (I blame YOU, Naomi!) has been a short story by Joyce Carol Oates in the summer fiction issue of The Atlantic (NAME DROP!) It is called �*BD* 11 1 86� and it is about a genetically engineered high school boy. I don�t want to spoil the ending, but this, as any work about genetic engineering has, brought me back to �Brave New World� by Aldous Huxley, another author I have not read since high school.

I saw a poll once that listed �1984� as the most influential piece of literature of all time. A good choice, but I am starting to believe �Brave New World� should replace it. Have you ever thought about cloning? Really thought about it? How about picking the sex of your child? Having an organ implanted into you that was grown on another animal? What if that animal was a human?

I have steered clear of the whole stem cell issue because I really didn�t know what to make of it, but I know what the alarm is. No matter when you think life begins, the argument veers to an inevitable future where life is cheap, or, if you have the money, very expensive.

Eugenics would be a good word to use, and it is an old one word that has been pondered and, unfortunately, practiced from time to time. If we can end a life because it is just not convenient to think of it as one (regardless of what it will look like in nine months) what will stop us from thinking of it as a commodity.

And we are already there. There are labs and funding and plenty of people eager to experience better living through chemistry. Ethics, laws, society and common sense have never kept man from doing anything. We will do it because we can.

What the hell does this have to do with �The Tempest?� Huxley got the title for his book from a line in �The Tempest.�

Miranda: �O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in it!�

Perhaps I should read the play.

�

previous - next

�