Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much.

by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts.

In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training.

Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.”

Most of the young men simply couldn’t stand the biting and stinging. But the one that could—he got the girl.”

Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it.

You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.”

Tomakin was still on holiday—on holiday from humiliation and pain, in a world where he could not hear those words, that derisive laughter, could not see that hideous face, feel those moist and flabby arms round his neck, in a beautiful world…

“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”

“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.

The others stared at him in astonishment. “Do you mean to say that you were doing it on purpose?” asked Bernard.

The Savage shrugged his shoulders. “Anywhere. I don’t care. So long as I can be alone.”

The Savage had chosen as his hermitage the old lighthouse which stood on the crest of the hill between Puttenham and Elstead.

almost too civilizedly luxurious. He pacified his conscience by promising himself a compensatingly harder self-discipline, purifications the more complete and thorough.

“Oh, forgive me! Oh, make me pure! Oh, help me to be good!” again and again, till he was on the point of fainting from the pain.

But who was he to be pampered with the daily and hourly sight of loveliness?

Whole days passed during which he never saw a human being. The lighthouse was only a quarter of an hour’s flight from the Charing-T Tower; but the hills of Malpais were hardly more deserted than this Surrey heath.

But when it came to pan-glandular biscuits and vitaminized beef-surrogate, he had not been able to resist the shopman’s persuasion. Looking at the tins now, he bitterly reproached himself for his weakness. Loathsome civilized stuff! He had made up his mind that he would never eat it, even if he were starving. “That’ll teach them,” he thought vindictively. It would also teach him.

By next spring, his garden would be producing enough to make him independent of the outside world. Meanwhile, there would always be game. He had seen plenty of rabbits, and there were waterfowl on the ponds. He set to work at once to make a bow and arrows.

The work gave him an intense pleasure. After those weeks of idleness in London, with nothing to do, whenever he wanted anything, but to press a switch or turn a handle, it was pure delight to be doing something that demanded skill and patience.

He had sworn to remember, he had sworn unceasingly to make amends.

Half an hour later, three Delta-Minus land-workers from one of the Puttenham Bokanovsky Groups happened to be driving to Elstead and, at the top of the hill, were astonished to see a young man standing outside the abandoned lighthouse stripped to the waist and hitting himself with a whip of knotted cords.

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

“We’re all crazy to know about the whip. And then something about Civilization. You know the sort of stuff. ‘What I think of the Civilized Girl.’ Just a few words, a very few…”

The other retreated a few steps then turned round again. “Evil’s an unreality if you take a couple of grammes.”

“Pain’s a delusion.”

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

He was digging in his garden—digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought.

As in a nightmare, the dozens became scores, the scores hundreds.

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” There was an almost plaintive note in his anger.

The Savage ignored his offer. “What do you want with me?” he asked, turning from one grinning face to another. “What do you want with me?” “The whip,” answered a hundred voices confusedly. “Do the whipping stunt. Let’s see the whipping stunt.”

in green velveteen shorts, white shirt, and jockey cap, a young woman.

incongruous expression of yearning distress.

“Strumpet!” The Savage had rushed at her like a madman. “Fitchew!” Like a madman, he was slashing at her with his whip of small cords.

Just under the crown of the arch dangled a pair of feet.