Traveling Swiftly

Tonight I finished Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift.

On the one hand, I encountered in this book exactly what I expected—a sort of Robinson Crusoe meets Honey, I Blew Up Gulliver. And then Crusoe meets Honey, I Shrunk Gulliver. But I didn’t know about Gulliver’s experience on the flying island dedicated solely to music and math. Or all about his years on the island full of Yahoos—humans in their basest form.

More significantly, the cartoon versions I saw as a kid never quite communicated Swift’s satire on human depravity. And while the book is only about 15 years short of 300 years old, his assessment of politicians and legal mumbo-jumbo sounds so “2010.” But I most appreciated his speculation about the utter misery humans would experience if our mortal bodies aged but couldn’t die. Robinson Crusoe meets Tuck Everlasting. Or more like Robinson Crusue meets Genesis 3.