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

BRAVE NEW WORLD

by

Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963)

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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 intelligentlyЦthough 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 and happiness;
generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers