And he in turn brings back from an expedition to the New Mexico Reservation a young man born and reared in a primitive and pre-Fordian manner. And one of them, Bernard Marx, through some error in his "conditioning", has an unhealthy and unsocial desire to be not somebody else but himself. Huxley manages very skilfully, however, to discover in this world characters who are both automata within the prescribed limits and appreciably human. And if the delusion of happiness momentarily fades, there is "soma", a drug which transports whoever takes it into a holiday world of absolute conviction. ![]() ![]() The result of this application of mass-production of biology is to produce an entirely stable and sterile civilisation, a world in which people are happy because they have no individuality to be unsatisfied. Huxley's description of the fertilising, the bottling and the social predestination rooms is a really brilliant tour de force. He transports us into a world in which every human being is manufactured according to plan in a laboratory. ![]() And the death which he portrays here with an extraordinary fertility of invention and an almost diabolical wit is not the death of morbid introversion but of indistinguishable superficiality, and sameness. In "Brave New World" he projects his death-consciousness into all our to-morrows.
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