Frenchy McVowels

. . . wrote a lovely little foreword thing in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which I began reading at 3:49 AM on Tuesday, June 14, 2011 after waking completely, abruptly and inexplicably. It's in french, though, which I don't speak, so I'm going to use Google Translate because Google is alive, so he'll probably do a good job, right?

So Mr. Nicolas Berdiaeff said this:

"Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus réalisables qu'on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: Comment éviter leur realisation définitive? . . . Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-étre un siécle nouveau commence-t-il, un siécle oú les intellectuels et la classe cultivée réveront aux moyens d'éviter les utopies et de retourner á une société non utopique, moins "parfaite" et plus libre."

I can't unquote. Why can I not unquote? Blast.

Anyway:

"Utopias appear to be much more feasible than was previously thought. And we are now at a far more frightening question: How to avoid their final completion?... Utopiasare realizable. Life march towards utopias. And perhaps a new century begins there,a century in which intellectuals and the educated class will dream how to avoid utopias and return to a non-utopian, less "perfect" and more free. "

I guess his point is that anytime there is a "utopia," it is actually a dystopia, and that's never good, so we should avoid them, even though they seem tempting in theory.