BRAVE NEW WORLD
by
Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963)
Chapter One
A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the
words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a
shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold
for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room
itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking
some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but
finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a
laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the
workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured
rubber. 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, streak after luscious streak in long
recession down the work tables.
"And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room."
Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as
the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the
scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or
whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop of newly arrived students,
very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the
Director's heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the
great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse's
mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D. H. C. for Central London always
made a point of personally conducting his new students round the
various departments.
"Just to give you a general idea," he would explain to them. For of course
some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work
intelligently–though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy
members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows,
make for virtue a