"Widget" is fun to say.

"On the fringe of the little group stood a stranger--a man of middle height, black-haired, with a hooked nose, full red lips, eyes very piercing and dark." - p. 33, Brave New World

"Professor Quirrel, in his absurd turban, was talking to a teacher with greasy black hair, a hooked nose, and sallow skin." - p. 126, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

I'm just saying.

Also, I would like to point out, with no small amount of frustration on my part, that ninety-nine percent of the words I have to find in the dictionary end up making me feel uncomfortable. I'm not saying it isn't better to say "copulate" and "pneumatic" than the other words that could be used, and I'm not saying Huxley should be censoring those parts, and I'm not saying we shouldn't read it. I'm just saying that I hope no one ever looks through the history on my computer dashboard's dictionary widget.

The structure gets pretty crazy in this chapter. The perspective/scene changes with every paragraph, most of the time, and there are these little encircled lightning bolts randomly placed within the text, and I can't decipher their purpose. Maybe there isn't one. Also, at the end of chapter three, we see the start of chapter four, which is headed with a nice bold "Part One." What have I been reading, then? Part Zero? Some three-chapter preface?

Furthermore, a metaphor: (rhymes are exciting)

"Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier." - p. 43, BNW

flood=feeling=passion=madness

This reminds me of some sort of mathematical property. Stupid equals sign shortcuts. Is it the commutative one? I don't actually care; math hates me.

This chapter also introduced the idea of the instability of feeling strongly; it was on page 41 or so. I sense that that will show up a lot in this novel because dystopia novels seem to, in my experience, stress--in their dearth of feelings we societally consider to be "normal"-- the importance of those feelings. On a side note, I really dislike the word "feelings." Anyway, I do understand their point. We can get awfully sidetracked if we let "feelings" grip our minds too firmly, but they're pretty important to meaningful existence. That's a vague explanation, but in our society, at least, I think it's relatively axiomatic.

A few last side notes:

1) "History is bunk." That's weird. I don't know what it means yet.

2) I think Bernard Marx is going to be our trusty nonconformist.

3) I think freemartins might be the ones in charge of keeping the world populated, since they apparently are unlikely to be seen with contraceptives.

4) A.F. started with the release of Ford's first T-Model.