"Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huxley Aldous)

Brave New World
by

Aldous Leonard 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 intelligentlyтАУthough 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 virture and happiness; generalities
are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp
collectors compose the backbone of society.

"To-morrow," he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality,
"you'll be settling down to serious work. You won't have time for generalities.
Meanwhile тАж"

Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse's mouth into the notebook.
The boys scribbled like mad.