Brave New World

The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter.

Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.

“Sixteen thousand and twelve; in one hundred and eighty-nine batches of identicals. But of course they’ve done much better,” he rattled on, “in some of the tropical Centres.”

The bulging flanks of row on receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with innumerable rubies, and among the rubies moved the dim red spectres of men and women with purple eyes and all the symptoms of lupus.

“The lower the caste,” said Mr. Foster, “the shorter the oxygen.”

“And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue-liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”

They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they’re only truly happy when they’re standing on their heads.

Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.

The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys’ eye-avoiding silence.

Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.

Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind.

For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.

Whisk-and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom-all were gone.

Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children). brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, “My baby, my baby,” over and over again.

The world was full of fathers—was therefore full of misery; full of mothers—therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity.

Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.

“Talking about her as though she were a bit of meat.” Bernard ground his teeth. “Have her here, have her there.” Like mutton.

Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.

Now-such is progress-the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think.

The liftman slammed the gates, touched a button and instantly dropped back into the droning twilight of the well, the twilight of his own habitual stupor.

“My word,” said Lenina, “I’m glad I’m not a Gamma.”

“I am I, and wish I wasn’t”; his self-consciousness was acute and stressing.

A mental excess had produced in Helmholtz Watson effects very similar to those which, in Bernard Marx, were the result of a physical defect.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

“Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we’re dead. Making plants grow.”

“It was some human being finally and definitely disappearing. Going up in a squirt of hot gas.”

They might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate.

Again, again-and it was not the ear that heard the pulsing rhythm, it was the midriff; the wail and clang of those recurring harmonies haunted, not the mind, but the yearning bowels of compassion.

The President reached out his hand; and suddenly a Voice, a deep strong Voice, more musical than any merely human voice, richer, warmer, more vibrant with love and yearning and compassion, a wonderful, mysterious, supernatural Voice spoke from above their heads.

He was as miserably isolated now as he had been when the service began—more isolated by reason of his unreplenished emptiness, his dead satiety.

“You can’t teach a rhinoceros tricks,” he had explained in his brief and vigorous style. “Some men are almost rhinoceroses; they don’t respond properly to conditioning.”

“I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”

“I want to know what passion is,” she heard him saying. “I want to feel something strongly.”

The Director leaned back in his chair, frowning. “How long ago was it?” he said, speaking more to himself than to Bernard. “Twenty years, I suppose. Nearer twenty-five.”

If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a Sub-Centre—preferably to Iceland.

“Five hundred repetitions once a week from thirteen to seventeen,” said Bernard wearily, as though to himself.

Of that imagined stoicism, that theoretical courage, not a trace was left.

The fence marched on and on, irresistibly the straight line, the geometrical symbol of triumphant human purpose.

One of the ropes writhed uneasily, and suddenly Lenina saw that they were snakes.

His face was profoundly wrinkled and black, like a mask of obsidian.

Lenina liked the drums. Shutting her eyes she abandoned herself to their soft repeated thunder, allowed it to invade her consciousness more and more completely, till at last there was nothing left in the world but that one deep pulse of sound.

The coyote-man raised his whip, there was a long moment of expectancy, then a swift movement, the whistle of the lash and its loud flat-sounding impact on the flesh.

He had seen, for the first time in his life, the face of a girl whose cheeks were not the colour of chocolate or dogskin, whose hair was auburn and permanently waved, and whose expression (amazing novelty!) was one of benevolent interest.

“Just think of it: me, a Beta—having a baby: put yourself in my place.” (The mere suggestion made Lenina shudder.)

“Well, here,” the other went on, “nobody’s supposed to belong to more than one person. And if you have people in the ordinary way, the others think you’re wicked and anti-social.”

The man bent over the bed towards him and his face was huge, terrible; the black ropes of hair touched the blanket.

“I’m not your mother. I won’t be your mother.”

Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London and Our Lady of Acoma and the rows and rows of babies in clean bottles and Jesus flying up and Linda flying up and the great Director of World Hatcheries and Awonawilona.

The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken.

These words and the strange, strange story out of which they were taken—they gave him a reason for hating Popé; and they made his hatred more real; they even made Popé himself more real.

“Not for you, white-hair!” “Not for the son of the she-dog,” said one of the other men.

“I stood against a rock in the middle of the day, in summer, with my arms out, like Jesus on the Cross.”

“O brave new world,” he repeated. “O brave new world that has such people in it. Let’s start at once.”

The zippers on Lenina’s spare pair of viscose velveteen shorts were at first a puzzle, then solved, a delight. Zip, and then zip; zip, and then zip; he was enchanted.

In the Decanting Room, the newly-unbottled babes uttered their first yell of horror and amazement.

Murder kills only the individual-and, after all, what is an individual?

The word (for “father” was not so much obscene as—with its connotation of something at one remove from the loathsomeness and moral obliquity of childbearing—merely gross, a scatological rather than a pornographic impropriety).

Every soma-holiday is a bit of what our ancestors used to call eternity.

Success went fizzily to Bernard’s head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory.

But the Savage had suddenly broken away from his companions and was violently retching, behind a clump of laurels, as though the solid earth had been a helicopter in an air pocket.

Redoubled, the laughted drowned even the amplified record of their groans.

Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days.

“Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma; Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny; Love’s as good as soma.”

The last electric titillation died on the lips like a dying moth that quivers, quivers, ever more feebly, ever more faintly, and at last is quiet, quite still.

“Go to hell!” bawled the exasperated voice from within.

Pierced by every word that was spoken, the tight balloon of Bernard’s happy self-confidence was leaking from a thousand wounds.

“What fun it would be,” he thought, “if one didn’t have to think about happiness!”

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

But at ‘defunctive music’ he turned pale and trembled with an unprecedented emotion.

He laughed and laughed till the tears streamed down his face—quenchlessly laughed while, pale with a sense of outrage, the Savage looked at him over the top of his book.

When one has leant forward, nearer and nearer, with parted lips-only to find oneself, quite suddenly, as a clumsy oaf scrambles to his feet, leaning towards nothing at all-well, there is a reason, even with half a gramme of soma circulating in one’s blood-stream, a genuine reason for annoyance.

“For always. They make a promise to live together for always.” “What a horrible idea!” Lenina was genuinely shocked.

The singing, thundering, magical words made her seem doubly dangerous, doubly alluring. Soft, soft, but how piercing! boring and drilling into reason, tunnelling through resolution.

Looking over her left shoulder she could see the imprint of an open hand standing out distinct and crimson on the pearly flesh.

The nurse glanced at him with startled, horrified eyes; then quickly looked away. From throat to temple she was all one hot blush.

In a moment, it seemed, the ward was maggoty with them.

Her lips moved. “Popé!” she whispered again, and it was as though he had had a pailful of ordure thrown in his face.

Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry-as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that!

Twins, twins.. Like maggots they had swarmed defilingly over the mystery of Linda’s death.

“Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking,” he added, exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had come to save.

“I’ll teach you; I’ll make you be free whether you want to or not.”

“So you don’t much like civilization, Mr. Savage,” he said.

You can’t make flivvers without steel—and you can’t make tragedies without social instability.

Even after decanting, he’s still inside a bottle—an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations.

Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

Happiness is a hard master—particularly other people’s happiness.

What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

“God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.”

Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren’t there at all.

Christianity without tears-that's what soma is.

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added, in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness.”

From time to time he stretched out his arms as though he were on the Cross, and held them thus through long minutes of an ache that gradually increased till it became a tremulous and excruciating agony.

It was as though, stumbling upon himself from the outside, he had suddenly caught himself out, taken himself flagrantly at fault.

Three days later, like turkey buzzards settling on a corpse, the reporters came.

He flung himself against them, he embraced, not the smooth body of his desires, but an armful of green spikes.

And from out of the bellies of these giant grasshoppers stepped men in white viscose-flannels, women in acetate-shantung pyjamas or velveteen shorts and sleeveless, half-unzippered singlets-one couple from each.

The Savage had retreated towards cover, and now, in the posture of an animal at bay, stood with his back to the wall of the lighthouse, staring from face to face in speechless horror, like a man out of his senses.

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left.

Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.

Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.

Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind.

Whisk-and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom-all were gone.

The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken.

The word (for “father” was not so much obscene as—with its connotation of something at one remove from the loathsomeness and moral obliquity of childbearing—merely gross, a scatological rather than a pornographic impropriety).

Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry-as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that!

You can’t make flivvers without steel—and you can’t make tragedies without social instability.

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left.