"You might find me, if you like, around Fleet Street, I wouldn't wonder."

"The various Bureaux of Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering were housed in a single sixty-story building in Fleet Street." - p. 65

So as it turns out, the structure of this book is even more convoluted than I thought, and from this point forth, Huxley's got his chapters divided into parts, so that's weird.

Furthermore, this relationship between Helmholtz Watson and Bernard Marx seems sort of unexpected. Helmholtz is the cool kid on the block with the rumored six hundred forty girls in four years-- which is about a hundred sixty per year, which ends up being about one every other day, which is pretty crazy. Bernard is the scrawny one of whom people are allegedly suspicious, although I don't understand why yet, and I hope I haven't missed something there. Anyway, I don't trust it. It calls to mind the Marauders and Peter Pettigrew, which is a Harry Potter reference for anybody who doesn't get it, and in that case, read this.

"A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism." - p. 69

That sort of paragraph makes me feel inadequate on dual levels, the first being that I can't in all honesty say I know what the latter half of it really means, and the second being that it just sounds so nice, and I wish I could do that. Both of these reasons make me want to... well... harbor resentment toward this Huxley guy. That's not very exciting at all, but I don't think it would be terribly productive to exaggerate, in this situation. On a side note, "asceticism" makes me think of Siddhartha, and because of Siddhartha, I did remember vaguely that ascetics seem to try to rid their lives of the ability to feel, although my dictionary widget says it's mostly about self-discipline. I thought "impotence" was the same as infertility. Anyway, the general idea (*salute* "General Idea.") seems to be that they're both isolated because they're different, so... I guess they can relate to each other, but I'm still not really sure they're friends.

Aaaaand I almost forgot, a simile:

"Besides, can you make words really piercing--you know, like the very hardest X-rays--when you're writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?" - p. 70