"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.