—from Brave New World(Chapter 1)
Aldous Huxley
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, hedesperately 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 intelligently though 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 but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.