I’ve been reading Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” these days. At the end of the book, there’s a retrospective article written by himself 20 years later, titled “Brave New World Revisited”.

Reading his retrospective doesn’t resonate with me as deeply as my experience reading the novel. The vague yet intense emotions brought by the novel were diluted in his reflection. He discussed many social contexts, touching on democracy, freedom, propaganda, drugs… many detailed analyses, but I don’t particularly enjoy them.

If Huxley had initially written these social commentaries instead of the novel, it would have been just another academic paper of that era, soon forgotten.

But he chose to write it as a novel, and thus it became a century-spanning classic. Even today, 100 years later, we’re still reading it.