阅读笔记2023

解析kindle clipping脚本是自己写的，适配stellar主题

存在豆瓣上的读书笔记

以下内容为2020-2023的kindle 截图和摘要

She was still standing there quietly, close to me, slim and tall in a white dress of some sort. The light from the open door touched the fringe of her hair and made it glow softly.

I opened the windows wide to let out the smell of dust and dinginess that collected in the night and hung in the still air, in the corners of the room, in the slats of the venetian blinds.

She hesitated, but not for long. She gathered up a pair of black gloves and a black suede bag with a gold frame and clasp and walked across into a corner booth and sat down without a word. I sat down across the small table.

Like when Midori first appeared .I LIKE LInda

superhighways. I caught a glimpse of a bright scarf

“I don’t drink, Mr. Wade. As you very well know. I am here for one purpose and I have expressed that purpose.”

“Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.” She opened her eyes, grabbed her glass, and winked at me. “You were pretty good in there, chum. Been writing any poetry lately?” “Not very much.” “You can kiss me if you like,” she said coyly.

The house was leaking guests out into the evening air now. Voices were fading, cars were starting, goodbyes were bouncing around like rubber balls. I went to the french windows and out onto a flagged terrace. The ground sloped towards the lake which was as motionless as a sleeping cat. There was a short wooden pier down there with a rowboat tied to it by a white

painter. Towards the far shore, which wasn’t very far, a black waterhen was doing lazy curves, like a skater. They didn’t seem to cause as much as a shallow ripple.

“Sometimes-not often, of course-when I go into a quiet cocktail lounge or the lobby of a good hotel at a dead hour, or along the deck of a liner early in the morning or very late at night, I think I may see him waiting for me in some shadowy corner.” She paused and dropped her eyes. “It’s very silly. I’m ashamed of it. We were very much in love-the wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once.”

Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.

That’s the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capitaL Sometimes I think it’s the only difference.”

snapped. “And don’t call me a cholo. I’m no wetback.

“Keep your voice down,” I said. “He’s gone back to sleep.” “I always knew you would come back,” she said softly. “Even after ten years.” I peered at her. One of us was goofy. “Shut the door,” she said in the same caressing voice. “All these years I have kept myself for you.” I turned and shut the door. It seemed like a good idea at the moment. When I faced her she was already falling towards me. So I caught her. I damn well had to. She pressed herself hard against me and her hair brushed my face. Her mouth came up to be kissed. She was trembling. Her lips opened and her teeth opened and her tongue darted. Then her hands dropped and jerked at something and the robe she was wearing came open and underneath it she was as naked as September Morn but a darn sight less coy.

I got up on my feet and it took character. It took will power. It took a lot out of me, and there wasn’t as much to spare as there once had been. The hard heavy years had worked me over.

“Don’t you even have a secretary?” “It’s a sordid

In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now.

The stretch of broken-paved road from the highway to the curve of the hill was dancing in the noon heat and the scrub that dotted the parched land on both sides of it was flour-white with granite dust by this time. The weedy smell was almost nauseating. A thin hot acrid breeze was blowing. I had my coat off and my sleeves rolled up, but the door was too hot to rest an arm on. A tethered horse dozed wearily under a dump of live oaks. A brown Mexican sat on the ground and ate something out of a newspaper. A tumbleweed rolled lazily across the road and came to rest against a piece of granite outcrop, and a lizard that had been there an instant before disappeared without seeming to move at all.

The glass of coke fizzed unnoticed on the desk in front of him. He read slowly, frowning. When he came to the end he refolded the sheets and ran a finger along the edge.

are eight feet tall and my heroines have callouses

There was plenty of noise. Why that should have

No feelings at all was exactly right. I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars. When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent Twenty.four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled,

raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you Sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care. I finished the drink and went to bed.

She almost passed me without a glance on the way out, then at the last moment turned her head a couple of inches and nodded very slightly, as if I was somebody she must have met somewhere a long time ago, but couldn’t quite place in her memory.

“My God, I thought Southern California had a dimate,”

of her face hid her expression if she had any. And when she spoke her voice had the lucid emptiness of that mechanical voice on the telephone that tells you the time and if you keep on listening, which people don’t because they have no reason to, it will keep on telling you the passing seconds forever, without the slightest change of inflection.

She lifted her eyes and looked at me vaguely and dropped them again.

The jangle of the telephone dragged me up out of a black well of sleep.

Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled.

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking

He drifted out of the office like something blown by the wind.

“Getting so I don’t care for the stuff,” he said. “Maybe it’s the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that -makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make a note never to buy any.

Let us leave it at that. Like Ophelia in that great dramatic masterpiece called Hamlet, by the immortal William Shakespeare, Eileen Wade wore her rue with a difference.

A man was sitting across the room with his legs

crossed and a gun resting sideways on his thigh. He looked rangy and tough and his skin had that dried-out look of people who live in sun-bleached cilmates. He was wearing a dark brown gabardine-type windbreaker and the zipper was open almost to his waist. He was looking at me and neither his eyes nor the gun moved. He was as calm as an adobe wall in the moonlight.

“Touch me with one finger and I’ll kill you,” Ohls said. “One finger.” Then he dropped his hands.

He shoved his taut face at me. “I hate gamblers,” he said in a rough voice. “I hate them the way I hate dope pushers. They pander to a disease that is every bit as corrupting as. dope. You think those palaces in Reno and Vegas are just for harmless fun? Nuts, they’re there for the little guy, the something-for-nothing sucker, the lad that stops off with his pay envelope in his pocket

and loses the week-end grocery money. The rich gambler loses forty grand and laughs it off and comes back for more. But the rich gambler don’t make the big racket, pal. The big steal is in dimes and quarters and half dollars and once in a while a buck or even a five-spot. The big racket money comes in like water from the pipe in your bathroom, a steady stream that never stops flowing. Any time anybody wants to knock off a professional gambler, that’s for me. I like it. And any time a state government takes money from gambling and calls it taxes, that government is helping to keep the mobs in business. The barber or the beauty parlor girl puts two bucks on the nose. That’s for the Syndicate, that’s what really makes the profits. The people want an honest police force, do they? What for? To protect the guys with courtesy cards? We got legal horse tracks in this state, we got them all year round. They operate honest and the state gets its cut, and

for every dollar laid at the track there’s fifty laid with the bookies. There’s eight or nine races on a card and in half of them, the little ones nobody notices, the fix can be in any time somebody says so. There’s only one way a jock can win a race, but there’s twenty ways he can lose one, with a steward at every eighth pole watching, and not able to do a damn thing about it if the jock knows his stuff. That’s legal gambling, pal, clean honest business, state approved. So it’s right, is it? Not by my book, it ain’t. Because it’s gambling and it breeds gamblers and when you add it up there’s one kind of gambling-the wrong kind.”

I told her and she hung up and I put the porch light on and then stood in the open door inhaling the night. It had got much cooler.

To say goodbye is to die a little.

That is, honor does not move sidewise like a crab, seсor.”

He reached up and took the dark glasses off. Nobody can change the color of a man’s eyes. “I suppose it’s a bit too early for a gimlet,” he said.

reminds us of a Hobbesian verity: that for the sake of our own preservation, we are all natural cowards—it is only necessity and social pressure that make us brave.

And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon.

He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk, whisk – and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk – and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom – all were gone. Whisk – the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk . . .

‘Extremes,’ said the Controller, ‘meet. For the good reason that they were made to meet.’

No wonder those poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty – they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?

everyone belongs to everyone else.’

Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.

Ending is better than mending,

or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a weekend, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily

Bernard stood watching the retreating twinkle of the white stockings, the sunburnt knees vivaciously bending and unbending, again, again, and the softer rolling of those

well-fitted corduroy shorts beneath the bottle-green jacket.

He remembered those weeks of timid indecision, during which he had looked and longed and despaired of ever having the courage to ask her.

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.

What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one’s expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. That’s

one of the things I try to teach my students – how to write piercingly. But what on earth’s the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? 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? That’s what it finally boils down to. I try and I try . . .’

He was justifying himself. ‘If you knew what I’d had to put up with recently,’ he said almost tearfully – and the uprush of his self-pity was like a fountain suddenly released. ‘If you only knew!’

‘Poor little Bernard!’ he said to himself. But at the same time he felt rather ashamed for his friend. He wished Bernard would show a little more pride.

BY EIGHT O’CLOCK the light was failing.

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.’

The sexophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them. Rich with a wealth of harmonics, their tremulous chorus mounted towards a climax, louder and ever louder – until at last, with a wave of his hand, the conductor let loose the final shattering note of ether-music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence. Thunder in A flat major. And then, in all but silence, in all but darkness, there followed a gradual deturgescence, a diminuendo sliding gradually, through quarter tones, down, down to a faintly whispered dominant chord that lingered on (while the

flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence

The loving cup had made its circuit. Lifting his hand, the President gave a signal; the chorus broke out into the Third Solidarity Hymn. Feel how the Greater Being comes! Rejoice and, in rejoicing, die! Melt in the music of the drums! For I am you and you are I.

for to be excited is still to be unsatisfied.

alone even in Morgana’s embrace

‘I’d rather be myself,’ he said. ‘Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.’

She was appalled by the rushing emptiness of the night, by the black foam-flecked water heaving beneath them, by the pale face of the moon, so haggard and distracted among the hastening clouds. ‘Let’s turn on the radio. Quick!’

Looooooooooool,such is man

For answer, he lifted one hand from the controls and, slipping his arm round her, began to fondle her breasts. ‘Thank Ford,’ she said to herself, ‘he’s all right again.’

She looked up with a certain anxiety. ‘But you don’t think I’m too plump, do you?’ He shook his head. Like so much meat. ‘You think I’m all right.’ Another nod. ‘In every way?’ ‘Perfect,’ he said aloud. And inwardly, ‘She thinks of herself that way. She doesn’t mind being meat.’

‘Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today,’ she

‘When the individual feels, the community reels,’ Lenina pronounced.

as the Director – and to commit so gross a solecism!

Lenina was quite offended. ‘Of course I can

Uphill and down, across the deserts of salt or sand, through forests, into the violet depth of canyons, over crag and peak and table-topped mesa, the fence marched on and on, irresistibly the straight line, the geometrical symbol of triumphant human purpose. And

The toothless mouth had fallen in.

with a ladder emerging from the lower darkness.

Shutting her eyes she abandoned herself to their soft repeated thunder, allowed it to invade her consciousness more and more completely, till at last there was nothing left in the world but the one deep pulse of sound. It reminded her reassuringly of the synthetic noises made at Solidarity Services and Ford’s Day celebrations.

contemplated the bright remembered image. ‘And

The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

She flung the obscenity like a challenge into the outraged silence;

Her high spirits overflowed in song. ‘Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma: Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny; Love’s as good as soma.’’

The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio – rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon;

the last stereoscopic kiss faded into darkness, the last electric titillation died on the lips like a dying moth that quivers, quivers ever more feebly, ever more faintly, and at last is quite, quite still.

crowd towards the lifts, its ghost still fluttered against her lips, still traced fine shuddering roads of anxiety and pleasure across her skin. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes dewily bright, her breath came deeply. She caught hold of the Savage’s arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire.

But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose – well, you didn’t know what the result might be. In was the sort of idea that might easily recondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes – make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human

sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstances, admissible.

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

Henry detected the weariness in those purple eyes, the pallor beneath that glaze of lupus, the sadness at the corners of the unsmiling crimson mouth.

‘A doctor a day keeps the jim-jams away,’

Her eyes were tenderly reproachful.

one hairless and freckled moon haloed in orange, the other a thin, beaked bird-mask, stubbly with two days’ beard, turned angrily towards him.

‘Ford helps those who help themselves.’

‘But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.

‘They mean themselves, they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience.’

But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You’re making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel – works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation.’

‘Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.’

‘goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous.

‘The optimum population,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘is modelled on the iceberg – eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.’ ‘And they’re happy below the water line?’

‘Awful? They don’t find it so. On the contrary, they like it. It’s light, it’s childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True,’ he added, ‘they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn’t. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with

plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them,’ Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. ‘And why don’t we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure. It’s the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don’t. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes – because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That’s another reason why we’re so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science.’

‘Yes; but what sort of science?’ asked Mustapha Mond sarcastically. ‘You’ve had no scientific training, so you can’t judge. I was a

pretty good physicist in my time. Too good – good enough to realize that all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn’t be added to except by special permission from the head cook. I’m the head cook now. But I was an inquisitive young scullion once. I started doing a bit of cooking on my own. Unorthodox cooking, illicit cooking. A bit of real science, in fact.’

he’d understand that his punishment is really a reward. He’s being sent to an island. That’s to say, he’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Everyone, in a word, who’s anyone. I almost envy you, Mr Watson.’

‘Well, duty’s duty. One can’t consult one’s own preferences. I’m interested in truth, I like science. But truth’s a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it’s been beneficent. It has given us the stablest equilibrium in history. China’s was hopelessly insecure by comparison; even the primitive matriarchies weren’t steadier than we are. Thanks, I repeat, to science. But we can’t allow science to undo its own good work. That’s why we so carefully limit the scope of its researches – that’s why I almost got sent to an island. We don’t allow it to deal with any but the most immediate problems of the moment. All other enquiries are most sedulously discouraged. It’s curious,’

‘to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to have

imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific research was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years’ War. That made them change their tune all right. What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled – after the

Nine Years’ War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since. It hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. But it’s been very good for happiness. One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr Watson – paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.’

These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way – to depend on no one – to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual

acknowledgement, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man – that it is an unnatural state – will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …”‘

People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to believe in God.’

As a happy, hardworking, goods-consuming citizen he’s perfect.

‘civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency.

you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist.

hitting himself with a whip of knotted cords. His back was horizontally streaked with crimson, and from weal to weal ran thin trickles of blood.

Three days later, like turkey buzzards settling on a corpse, the reporters came.

But oh, oh, her arms round his neck, the lifting of her breasts, her mouth! Eternity was in our lips and eyes. Lenina . . . No, no, no, no!

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

like swine about the trough.

The Communist regime in Russia and the Nazi takeover of Germany both began as Utopian visions.

It is a pretty safe bet that, twenty years from now, all the world’s over-populated and underdeveloped countries will be under some form of totalitarian rule-probably by the Communist party.

And along with a decline of average healthiness there may well go a decline in average intelligence.

Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country’s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody.

To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

Here is the answer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr. Erich Fromm: Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.

It seeks to explain the endlessly diverse phenomena of nature by ignoring the uniqueness of particular events, concentrating on what they have in common

and finally abstracting some kind of “law,” in terms of which they make sense and can be effectively dealt with.

For the moment, however, the wish to resist does not seem to be very strong or very widespread. As Mr. William Whyte has shown in his remarkable book, The Organization Man, a new Social Ethic is replacing our traditional ethical system-the system in which the individual is primary. The key words in this Social Ethic are “adjustment,” “adaptation,” “socially orientated behavior,” “belongingness,” “acquisition of social skills,” “team work,” “group living,” “group loyalty,” “group dynamics,” “group thinking,” “group creativity.” Its basic assumption is that the social whole has greater worth and significance than its individual parts, that inborn biological differences should be sacrificed to cultural uniformity, that the rights of the collectivity take precedence over what the eighteenth century called the Rights of Man. According to the Social Ethic, Jesus was completely wrong in asserting that the Sabbath was made for man. On the contrary, man was made for the Sabbath, and must

sacrifice his inherited idiosyncrasies and pretend to be the kind of standardized good mixer that organizers of group activity regard as ideal for their purposes. This ideal man is the man who displays “dynamic conformity” (delicious phrase!) and an intense loyalty to the group, an unflagging desire to subordinate himself, to belong. And the ideal man must have an ideal wife, highly gregarious, infinitely adaptable and not merely resigned to the fact that her husband’s first loyalty is to the Corporation, but actively loyal on her own account. “He for God only,” as Milton said of Adam and Eve, “she for God in him.” And in one important respect the wife of the ideal organization man is a good deal worse off than our First Mother. She and Adam were permitted by the Lord to be completely uninhibited in the matter of “youthful dalliance.” Nor turned, I ween, Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites Mysterious

Today, according to a writer in the Harvard Business Review, the wife of the man who is trying to live up to the ideal proposed by the Social Ethic, “must not demand too much of her husband’s time and interest. Because of his single-minded concentration on his job, even his sexual activity must be relegated to a secondary place.” The monk makes vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. The organization man is allowed to be rich, but promises obedience (“he accepts authority without resentment, he looks up to his superiors” — Mussolini ha sempre ragione) and he must be prepared, for the greater glory of the organization that employs him, to forswear even conjugal love. It is worth remarking that, in 1984, the members of the Party are compelled to conform to a sexual ethic of more than Puritan severity. In Brave New World, on the other hand, all are permitted to indulge their sexual impulses without let or hindrance. The

But in the immediate future there is some reason to believe that the punitive methods of 1984 will give place to the reinforcements and manipulations of Brave New World.

He knew by bitter experience that the freedom of the press can be shamefully abused. “Nothing,” he declared, “can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.”

Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill.

In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization — the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be

ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.

the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations which are the propagandist’s stock in trade. “All effective propaganda,”

These stereotyped formulas must be constantly repeated, for “only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a

“systems of dogma without empirical foundations, such as scholasticism, Marxism and fascism, have the advantage of producing a great deal of social coherence among their disciples.”

There are no grays in his picture of the world; everything is either diabolically black or celestially white. In

In all the world’s higher religions, salvation and enlightenment are for individuals. The kingdom of heaven is within the mind of a person, not within the collective mindlessness of a crowd. Christ promised to be present where two or three are gathered together.

Marching is the indispensable magic stroke performed in order to accustom the people to a mechanical, quasi-ritualistic activity until it becomes second nature.”

On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if beauty were incompatible with nonsense and tyranny, there would be precious little art in the world. The masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political propaganda, for the greater glory of a

Under the new dispensation, political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really matter.

Turning once again to Pavlov, he learns that, on their way to the point of final breakdown, dogs become more than normally suggestible. New behavior patterns can easily be installed while the dog is at or near the limit of its cerebral endurance, and these new behavior patterns seem to be ineradicable.

During the day, he wrote, “man’s will power revolts with highest energy against any attempt at being forced under another’s will and another’s opinion. In the evening, however, they succumb more easily to the dominating force of a stronger will.”

expulsion to a term in a forced labor camp or even liquidation.

Religion, Karl Marx declared, is the opium of the people.

For what is now merely science fiction will have become everyday political fact.

“History is not yet a science, and can only be made to seem scientific by falsifications and omissions.”

inaugurated immediately. Indeed it might have

Epi oinopa ponton. Ah,

—You said, Stephen answered, O, it’s only Dedalus

—And what is death, he asked, your mother’s or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It’s a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t kneel down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why? Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way. To me it’s all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She calls the doctor sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it’s over. You crossed her last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don’t whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette’s. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I didn’t mean to offend the memory of your mother.

‘she saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the

arches of a cathedral’

roaming and you never keep them still like

and even now when I looked at a clock the arms would still sometimes turn into the earthworms we dug out of the ground behind the cowshed with a fork to use as fishing bait. They wriggled every which way when you held them between forefinger and thumb and didn’t calm down until you gave them a couple of taps, and then they’d lie in your hand and look just like those sweet, red strawberry shoelaces from Van Luik’s sweet-shop.

Obbe had once joked that Jesus’ body was made of cheese, too, and that was why we were only allowed two slices on our bread each day, otherwise we’d run out of Him too quickly.

of the road, wrapped in an orange tarpaulin.

were covered in a thin layer of dried manure.

The warm ammonia smell of the rabbits seeps

covered by a lampshade. With or without floral

the slogan ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’

‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. God’s plans are your plans.’

I don’t want to go to God but to myself.

The bench creaks beneath my belly like black ice. I don’t want to be rescued now, I want to sink. Deeper and deeper until breathing starts to become difficult. In the meantime I chew the frog sweets into tiny bits, taste the gelatine, the reassurance of sweetness. Hanna’s right: we have to get away from this village, away from the cows, away from death, away from life in its original form.

hair still damp from the swimming pool. No one asks how anything went; they just announce – when they think of them – the things we have to do, and forget to find out what happens next. They don’t want to know if and how I got out of the hole. I’m still alive, and that’s the only thing they pay attention to. That we get up every day, however slowly, is enough proof for them that we’re doing all right. The three kings continue to heave themselves onto our camels, even though the saddles disappeared long ago and

Everything here is a maths sum: respect equals four sugar lumps and a shot of condensed milk.

I lie on my back in the lavender. Please let the day wait so that I don’t have to go to school, long enough for the grass in the fields to be dry enough to make hay, long enough for the dampness in me to slowly subside.

says, ‘as long as she doesn’t start blubbering.’

Everything that requires secrecy here is accepted in silence.

before pulling our heads into our pyjama tops like snails in search of protection.

Then we’ll float away together on a lily-pad, and maybe, only maybe, I’ll even dare to take off my coat. Even though it will feel uncomfortable for a while, but according to the pastor, discomfort is good. In discomfort we are real.’

I squatted down next to the hedgehog sadly and whispered, ‘Lord have mercy on us and be near. We are united in this place to say

farewell to Hedgehog, who was so mercilessly taken from us. We return this broken life and lay it in Thy hands. Receive Hedgehog and grant him the peace he could not find. Be to all of us a merciful and loving God so that we may live with death. Amen.’ After that, I picked a few handfuls of grass and laid them over the hedgehog. I didn’t look back as I cycled away.

think she’s worried the milk customer would go off without any milk but with Dad instead.

Better to give temptation free rein, I decide.

‘What’s a whore?’ I ask. ‘A woman farmer.’

mustn’t forget. There’s a stethoscope

I watch Obbe take a can of Coke and begin to shake it around wildly. Then he holds the can to her slit and forces her legs as wide open as possible, affording me a view of the pinkish flesh. He shakes the can a few more times then holds it as close as possible to the opening. Suddenly he opens the ring pull and the Coke squirts in a straight line into her flesh. Hanna’s hips jerk, she cries out. But what I see in her eyes when I take away my hand in shock is not something I know. Not pain but more like peace. She giggles. Obbe shakes a second can and repeats the procedure. Hanna’s eyes grow bigger, her lips press damply against my palm, she moans quietly. ‘Does it hurt?’ ‘No, it feels nice.’

want to run away and stay at the same time. I want to sink and I want to stay afloat. A snowy landscape appears around me.

It was strange to see Henry out on such a night: he liked his comfort and after all—or

To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time:

brave love, dream not of staunching such strict flame, but come, lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

My head on the pillow (Piano, pianissimo)

Fisted to a foetus head, ravined,

“I’m not crazy about yours,” I said. I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.”

something told me to wait. Another army of sluggish

Another army of sluggish minutes dragged by.

A bell rang faintly, light through the rain, a closing door, silence.

She had a beautiful body, small, lithe, compact,

over there? The restaurant buzzes.

“But unless you ignore that suggestion now and then, won’t your whole life become a set of predictable responses?”

But on one occasion, for one reason or another, you were persuaded to choose white – against the judgement of the AM – and it was wonderful. Everything came together magically: the company, the conversation, the late afternoon ambience, the splendid view, the euphoric rush of being slightly drunk. A perfect afternoon turned into a perfect evening.”

“No. It would latch on to that one exception and attach undue significance to it. It would amplify the attractive parts of the memory of that afternoon and suppress the less pleasant parts: the fly that kept buzzing in your face, your anxiety about catching the boat home and the birthday present you knew you had to buy in the morning. All you’d remember was that golden glow of well-being. The next time, you might well choose white, and the time after. An entire pattern of behaviour would have been altered by one instance of deviation. The AM would never tolerate that. You’d have to go against its advice many, many times before it grudgingly updated its model and started suggesting white rather than red.”

Zima was right: I’d allowed my life to become scripted, laid out like a blueprint. It was always red wine with sunsets, never the white. Aboard the outbound lightbreaker a clinic installed a set of neural memory extensions that should serve me well for the next four or five hundred years. One day I’ll need another solution, but I’ll cross that particular mnemonic bridge

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