"Can we panic nooooow?"

"He lay for a moment, blinking in owlish incomprehension at the light; then suddenly remembered--everything.

"'Oh, my God, my God!' He covered his eyes with his hand." - p. 259

Sooooo....

....

Did he kill Lenina? Bryan, you can't answer because... I already know. What you think. Is a fragment. But still. It would explain his otherwise rather overreaction-y dismay at remembering "everything." Otherwise, "everything" is just... soma. And stuff. There you go. There's a theme: Everything is just soma and stuff. That's what the civilized people think.

I just became surprised and kind of sad about the Lenina business. But I have to go watch Chamber of Secrets some more. Harry doesn't die, and I knooow it because... straightforward is good.

*breathing heavily*

"From time to time he stretched out his arms as though he were on the Cross, and held them thus through long minutes of an ache that gradually increased till it became a tremulous and excruciating agony; held them, in voluntary crucifixion, while he repeated, through clenched teeth (the sweat, meanwhile, pouring down his face), 'Oh, forgive me! Oh, make me pure! Oh, help me to be good!' again and again, till he was on the point of fainting from the pain." - p. 244

He's just like Dobby. Just like Dobby! He's aaaaaall content with his lighthouse, and then he realizes he never set out to be haaaappy, and then... masochism. Yep. Seriously I have to watch Harry Potter now.

Ummm...

Oh yeah, so I decided to blog about the first half of chapter eighteen and then a second post about the second half of chapter eighteen. But... I read the second half already. So this is hard. And I am cheating. Empty sentences. Aaaaand go.

It's my nephew; he's very disturbed. Meeting strangers upsets him. That's why I kept him upstairs.

"'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'" - p. 240

Wow. Wowowow. I wish I... knew how to say profound things right after somebody makes an argument against me. I have to rehearse thoughts for hours in order to make them sound like that. That was awesome.

His certainty about that baffles me, also. I am very ambivalent about everything. It takes a while to deciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide how to feel about sssstuff, y'know? Okay. I'm watching Chamber of Secrets right now; not gonna lie. These sentences are about eighty percent empty. Or twenty percent full. It's a shame because this is one of the best chapters in the book! But you know, I'm not getting a grade for this, and... priorities. So here's a picture of what's really on my mind:

"Writing is making sense of life." - Nadine Gordimer

"'I should like a thoroughly bad climate,' he answered. 'I believe one would write better if the climate were bad.'" - p. 229

It's true, I think. I find that terribly worrisome, considering my career objectives. Let's look at some examples.

J.K. Rowling is the richest woman in the world. She's got more money than the Queen of England. Everyone loves her, with the exception of people who think that Harry Potter is either annoying or evil.

Emily Dickinson, about whom I wrote my Famous American report in third grade (and also one in seventh), is, for all her confusing capitalization, one of the most-read poets of all time.

Charles Dickens... well, we've all read some Dickens at some point in our lives, haven't we?

You know what they all have in common? They're all varying degrees of miserable.

J.K. Rowling, after moving back to England from Portugal with her daughter as a single mother, wrote the beginning chapters of Harry Potter on napkins in pubs while her baby daughter napped.

Emily Dickinson was a hermit. She was also depressed.

Charles Dickens described himself as a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy."

For the sake of avoiding unnecessary mental crises, I am going to stop there.

I have this autographed picture on my desk in my room. Sometimes people think it's a new frame that still has the random picture in it.

Smashing!

"And suddenly it was luminously clear to the Savage what he must do; it was as though a shutter had been opened, a curtain drawn back." - p. 210

That's an epiphany if ever I've seen one.

John knew all along, I think, that he hated this soma stuff, and that something had to be done about it. He just didn't feel like being proactive. He didn't feel a personal responsibility for any of them. He had been too busy mooning over Lenina. The realization that Lenina wasn't really his type and the death of his mother--these in rapid succession-- provided the impetus/incentive for him to make his move. That soma-smashing session reminded me first of the Boston Tea Party and then of the scene in Order of the Phoenix in which the prophecies all get smashed. The Boston Tea Party is the better parallel in terms of intent, but the Order of the Phoenix parallel works better for me because I saw that one happen, and it sounds smash-y-er in my mind.

He doesn't know what a Moogle is!

"Her lips moved. 'Popé!' she whispered again, and it was as though he had had a pailful of ordure thrown in his face." - p. 204

Thaaat reminded me of a scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the movie, not the book, and it made a lot of people--not me-- mad).

Also, this one reminded me of the same movie D=!

"'Is she dead?' he asked.

"The Savage stared at them for a moment in silence. Then in silence he rose to his feet, in silence slowly walked towards the door.

"'Is she dead?' repeated the inquisitive twin trotting at his side." - p. 207

1:50-2:20 of this scene, to be precise. The difference is that the creepy twins don't mean any harm; it's all in their conditioning. Dudley is just a jerk-face who's been conditioned to be a jerk-face by his jerk-face parents. Ahem. Sorry. It is Harry Potter Week.

Also, maybe this is just juxtaposition of the two different cultures, but John seems almost excessively attached to his mother. They told him this was coming, and I'm perfectly aware that knowledge of terminal illness doesn't make the imminent end any prettier or less traumatic, but his denial seems... off. Preposition. I'm going to label it the Oedipus complex because I like to put intelligent-sounding things in my tags... but also because I think he might have a touch of an Oedipus complex.

1-2-3-4

"There was a moment's silence; then, in a very low voice, 'I love you more than anything in the world,' he said." - p. 192

0:45-1:00

Only sometimes. Unfortunately for John, this is one of those times. Kind of.

The problem with this scenario is that John and Lenina have very different (and extreme) definitions of the word "love." John believes it's the Romeo and Juliet, I-have-to-kill-myself-immediately-if-my-loved-one-is-dead definition. Lenina thinks it's the wow-that-guy-is-physically-attractive-and-positively-interesting kind. That's... not a very sturdy foundation. Bad things are bound to happen, and as we've seen, they did.

I believe the half of the phone conversation at the end of the chapter was an alert to John that Linda's not doing so well. Soma overdose, probably. Maaaaaybe Lenina will come back after that? Probably not. They're all conditioned to be all right with death. Maybe that would be good for people. Hmph.

Misfits

"It was the Helmholtz of daily life who forgot and forgave, not the Helmholtz of a half-gramme holiday." - p. 180

I picked that quote initially because it sounded really, really nice. Then, when I was writing it, I realized that it sounded nice because of the consonance, mostly. Helmholtz half-gramme holiday. The niceness of that quote fits well with this chapter that so emphasizes the impact of language, which Helmholtz and John mutually appreciate. I thought Bernard was a fan of it as well, but he seems to have grown rather bitter. I can understand that, I guess. It's not a shining personality trait to get jealous like that; envying the friendship of two people you've brought together is certainly not going to make them like you more. I'm not supposed to use "you" like that.

Helmholtz's reaction to Romeo and Juliet was a bit disappointing but altogether to be expected, really. The three of them--Helmholtz, Bernard and John-- they've been drawn together through the mutual characteristic of being misfits. They're not that much alike, but who else have they got? Aaaand because I can:

Hagrid: I remember when I first met you all. Biggest bunch of misfits I ever set eyes on!

You reminded me of myself a little. And here we all are, four years later.

Ron: We're still a bunch of misfits.

Hagrid: Well, maybe. But you've all got each other. And Harry, o'course, soon to be the

YOUNGEST TRI-WIZARD CHAMPION THERE'S EVER BEEEEN! HOORAY!

-Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Skipping This Town

"'Twelve hundred and fifty kilometres an hour,' said the Station Master impressively. 'What do you think of that, Mr. Savage?'

"John thought it very nice. 'Still,' he said, 'Ariel could put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.'" - p. 158

Mister Savage! My brain can hardly comprehend! Such juxtaposition is at work! The audience reads "Mr. Savage" and better grasps the drastic change that has taken place in John's life. (Savage isn't on his birth certificate or something, is it? Surely not. They must have given him that for... kicks. Also it is pretty appropriate, considering.)

Ah! Harry Potter reference time. Good. I've been slacking in that regard.

Just as Harry Potter came from being the outcast (as the despised only magical member of his household) to being a different kind of outcast (as the beloved Boy Who Lived), John has gone from being the weird half-civilized kid who can read to being the weird but fascinating half-civilized kid who won't take soma.

Watch live coverage of the red carpet event for the Harry Potter premiere now. D=

"My father! The laughter, which had shown signs of dying away, broke out again more loudly than ever. He put his hands over his ears and rushed out of the room." - p. 152

They really are all like children. It's like a bizarre parody of a scene from a movie about third graders bullying each other.

I really had no idea how fitting that would be; I've never seen/read it, but it's a hit at the library. Especially the purple one.

I'm not sure how this proffering of the LindaJohn is going to help save Bernard from being excommunicated (?) to Iceland. The director was pretty furious... slash humiliated slash in serious denial. Parallelism is hard. Also, it was weird of Huxley to skip over the moment in which Bernard arrives back in New Mexico to find that John has smashed the window?door? to the place where he's staying with Lenina. He just overlooked that, did he? Is Lenina still sleeping, then? Er, sorry, soma-vacationing? That's really messed up, by the way.

Ooh, Doug, you're sooo dance-plannery!

"Her green slippers were the most beautiful things he had ever seen." - p. 143

Chapter nine has been my favorite chapter thus far. What a ridiculously hyperbolic statement. I mean, who am I to judge that her slippers aren't the most beautiful things he's ever seen? But... they're slippers... so....

House slippers, even, I think. Not ruby, not glass, but house. I chose that quote because it was lit-termy, but this one is my favorite, I think:

"Zip, and then zip; zip, and then zip; he was enchanted." - p. 143

It's a little bit adorable. He reminds me of Herman Melville, the lake monster from Doug's 1st Movie. Anyone? Anyone. No? That's all right.

Awkwardly working in... the [book] title.

"'O brave new world,' he repeated. 'O brave new world that has such people in it. Let's start at once.'" - p. 139

Chapter eight contains a flashback! It's not very well-marked. I was initially convinced that Bernard was getting seriously cozy with Linda =|. But it's okay if it's little-kid John, I guess. Poor kid. The function of all that is that Bernard learns, along with the rest of us, "All [John's] life." That apparently drives Bernard to invite him and Linda to come on a trip back to "civilization" with him.

Predictions:

- Bernard will get in trouble for this. But, you know... Iceland.

- Linda will not want to go back.

- John won't like it as much as he thinks he will.

- John will do something dramatic that will terrify commitment-phobic Lenina.

I'll leave it at that because one hundred is easily divisible by four, so I can give myself a grade later, and everyone will be very excited.

DHC. Deathly Hallows... Character.

"(Yes, 'Thomas' was the D.H.C.'s name.)" - p. 118

Unfortunately, I still have no idea what Bernard and Lenina are doing on this Reservation. However, I did catch on to the fact that Linda is the DHC's long-lost-ladyfriend. Hey, alliteration.

I didn't write myself any helpful notes while I read this chapter because I was too focused on reading it, which I perceived would take Herculean effort, but it wasn't so bad, in spite of the dinosaur paragraphs.

I have actually never seen Hercules.

Anyway, the only thing I can think to do is speculate where this interesting plot development will take us. John seemed a little smitten with Lenina, there. Maybe he'll teach her the importance of monogamy... or something. And Linda will maybe offer interesting insights into the brainwashing effects of the outside world. One would expect her surroundings to have split her infinitives or rubbed off preposition on her more by now. Instead, she's so overwhelmed with relief at the sight of someone "civilized" that she starts crying and hugging.

Imaginaaaaation

"'Five hundred repetitions once a week from thirteen to seventeen,' said Bernard wearily, as though to himself.

"'What did you say?'

"'I said that progress was lovely.'" - p. 100

That was irony, right? Let me consult the list to figure out what kind.

Oops. That's not the list; that is Facebook. Let me try again.

I think it's dramatic. Bernard and the audience both understand that Bernard is expressing exasperation with his society, but Lenina is in her somacoma thing, so she... goes with it. I suppose the effect of that on the work is that we understand that the system is indeed flawed. It's generally dangerous when the masses go about their lives without ever questioning the state of things. In a broader sense, I guess that's why Sci-Fi is valuable. It proves to us that it's important not to be apathetic about things, even though that's generally the easier route. It makes us understand the value of paying attention and caring and saves us the trouble of learning the lesson the hard way. It's the same reason we have to learn about history, except it's more exciting because we get to make stuff up. <--preposition

Furthermore, I read this chapter right before I went to bed last night, and my last note in my reading journal reads, "106 - Iceland? uncivilized world?" Bernard is for real getting sent to Iceland because he upset the D.H.C. guy? And I forget what was going on with the uncivilized world business. It seemed like there was some isolated region in which things had remained the same as they were before the time of Ford, but I don't remember why it was being mentioned, so I'm hoping for clarification in chapter seven.

I corrected the spelling of "marvelous" for them.

"As they flew over the Crematorium, the plane shot upwards on the column of hot air rising from the chimneys, only to fall as suddenly when it passed into the descending chill beyond.

"'What a marvelous switchback!' Lenina laughed delightedly.

"But Henry's tone was almost, for a moment, melancholy. 'Do you know what that switchback was?' he said. 'It was some human being finally and definitely disappearing. Going up in a squirt of hot gas. It would be curious to know who it was--a man or a woman, an Alpha or an Epsilon. . . .' He sighed. Then, in a resolutely cheerful voice, 'Anyhow,' he concluded, 'there's one thing we can be certain of; whoever he may have been, he was happy when he was alive. Everybody's happy now.'" - p. 75

My first comment about that quote is that "switchback" is a euphemism for death, I'm pretty sure. Somebody's getting cremated, I guess? It sounds sinister to me, but cremation seems sinister to me too, and that's socially accepted in most circles, I think.

It also seems to imply, in that quote, that people are happier in the time of Ford than they were previously, which I don't think Bernard believes to be the case.

I'm still exceptionally confused by a lot of things, and I'm more or less afraid to speculate. That aside, "The Greater Being" usually refers to God, but these people are crazy and possibly not even considering themselves "human beings," what with how they refer to human beings as almost something other than themselves. I do that sometimes, but that's because I am weird, and I know this. Separateness. When they drink to "[their] annihilation," "the Greater Being," and "the imminence of His Coming," it seems like they're drinking to the apocalypse, and that is weird to me. Maybe they're wanting to be raptured.

The songs they sing are really bizarre. That "Bottle of Mine" song reminded me of this, which bothers me, but I'm embedding it anyway because my post lacks pop culture references so far:

"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

"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.

Frenchy McVowels

. . . wrote a lovely little foreword thing in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which I began reading at 3:49 AM on Tuesday, June 14, 2011 after waking completely, abruptly and inexplicably. It's in french, though, which I don't speak, so I'm going to use Google Translate because Google is alive, so he'll probably do a good job, right?

So Mr. Nicolas Berdiaeff said this:

"Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus réalisables qu'on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: Comment éviter leur realisation définitive? . . . Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-étre un siécle nouveau commence-t-il, un siécle oú les intellectuels et la classe cultivée réveront aux moyens d'éviter les utopies et de retourner á une société non utopique, moins "parfaite" et plus libre."

I can't unquote. Why can I not unquote? Blast.

Anyway:

"Utopias appear to be much more feasible than was previously thought. And we are now at a far more frightening question: How to avoid their final completion?... Utopiasare realizable. Life march towards utopias. And perhaps a new century begins there,a century in which intellectuals and the educated class will dream how to avoid utopias and return to a non-utopian, less "perfect" and more free. "

I guess his point is that anytime there is a "utopia," it is actually a dystopia, and that's never good, so we should avoid them, even though they seem tempting in theory.