Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Read Free Book Online Page B

as I’ve said before, called Christianity.”
    “Ending is better than mending.”
    “The ethics and philosophy of under-consumption …”
    “I love new clothes, I love new clothes, I love …”
    “So essential when there was under-production; but in an age of machines and the fixation of nitrogen—positively a crime against society.”
    “Henry Foster gave it me.”
    “All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s. There was also a thing called God.”
    “It’s real morocco-surrogate.”
    “We have the World State now. And Ford’s Day celebrations, and Community Sings, and Solidarity Services.”
    “Ford, how I hate them!” Bernard Marx was thinking.
    “There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”
    “Like meat, like so much meat.”
    “There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.”
    “Do ask Henry where he got it.”
    “But they used to take morphia and cocaine.”
    “And what makes it worse, she thinks of herself as meat.”
    “Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.F . 178.”
    “He does look glum,” said the Assistant Predestinator, pointing at Bernard Marx.
    “Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug.”
    “Let’s bait him.”
    “Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.”
    “Glum, Marx, glum,” The clap on the shoulder made him start, look up. It was that brute Henry Foster. “What you need is a gramme of
soma
.”
    “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”
    “Ford, I should like to kill him!” But all he did was to say, “No, thank you,” and fend off the proffered tube of tablets.
    “Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.”
    “Take it,” insisted Henry Foster, “take it.”
    “Stability was practically assured.”
    “One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments,” said the Assistant Predestinator citing a piece of homely hypnopædic wisdom.
    “It only remained to conquer old age.”
    “Damn you, damn you!” shouted Bernard Marx.
    “Hoity-toity.”
    “Gonadal hormones, transfusion of young blood, magnesium salts …”
    “And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn.” They went out, laughing.
    “All the physiological stigmata of old age have been abolished. And along with them, of course …”
    “Don’t forget to ask him about that Malthusian belt,” said Fanny.
    “Along with them all the old man’s mental peculiarities. Characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime.”
    “… two rounds of Obstacle Golf to get through before dark. I must fly.”
    “Work, play—at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking—
thinking
!”
    “Idiots, swine!” Bernard Marx was saying to himself, as he walked down the corridor to the lift.
    “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—or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always
soma
, delicious
soma
, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a grammefor a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to …”
    “Go away, little girl,” shouted the D.H.C. angrily “Go away, little boy! Can’t you see that his fordship’s busy? Go and do your erotic play somewhere else.”
    “Suffer little children,” said the Controller.
    Slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the