Wednesday, 13 March 2019

Brave New World Chapter 5

"Phosphorus recovery," explained Henry telegraphically."
- Henry's telling Lenina that the dead are all cremated so the new world can recover the phosphorus from their bodies.

“Soma was served with the coffee. Lenina took two half-gramme tablets and Henry three.”
Both of them got high on soma and go up to Henry's room for a night of sex.

“Lenina did not forget to take all the contraceptive precautions prescribed by the regulations.”
- Lenina takes all the contraceptive precautions she learned in the Malthusian drill she performed three times a week, every week for six years of her teens because they though pregnancy is a crime.

“ALTERNATE Thursdays were Bernard's Solidarity Service days. After an early dinner at the Aphroditzeum (to which Helrnholtz had recently been elected under Rule Two) he took leave of his friend and, hailing a taxi on the roof told the man to fly to the Fordson Community Singery.”
- Bernard is in the military and he decides to go to church at Community Singery.

“The group was now complete, the solidarity circle perfect and without flaw. Man, woman, man, in a ring of endless alternation round the table. Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being.”
- Every solidarity service takes place in a group of twelve people, six men and six women who sit in a circle, sing twelve-stanza hymns, and take a communion of solid and liquid soma instead of wafers and wine. The participants all go into a religious frenzy- except for Bernard, who doesn't really feel the ecstasy, but pretends to.

“Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, 
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at one with girls at peace; 
Orgy-porgy gives release.”
- The group then does indeed fall "in partial disintegration" into a real orgy, though it seems to be by couples rather than group sex.

“She looked at Bernard with an expression of rapture, but of rapture in which there was no trace of agitation or excitement–for to be excited is still to be unsatisfied."
- Even that doesn't give Bernard the experience of true rapture that his partners seem to feel. Huxley underlines that this rapture is not the same as excitement, because if you're excited, you're still not satisfied. This feeling is satisfying. Bernard is miserable that he has not achieved it, and thinks the failure must have been his own fault. This scene, Huxley satirizes both religion and sex, but still shows how both serve one of the goals of the brave new world, Community.

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