How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Part.Paragraph)
Quote #21
"Then why on earth didn't you say so?" she cried, and so intense was her exasperation that she drove her sharp nails into the skin of his wrist. "Instead of drivelling away about knots and vacuum cleaners and lions, and making me miserable for weeks and weeks." (13.66)
This is a key moment in the sex-violence connection in Brave New World. Lenina, in her passion for John, hurts him physically—a lot like the scene at the end of the novel. Check out "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory" for more.
Quote #22
Sitting beside her, the Savage tried hard to recapture his mood of a few minutes before. "A, B, C, vitamin D," he repeated to himself, as though the words were a spell that would restore the dead past to life. But the spell was ineffective. Obstinately the beautiful memories refused to rise; there was only a hateful resurrection of jealousies and uglinesses and miseries. Popé with the blood trickling down from his cut shoulder; and Linda hideously asleep, and the flies buzzing round the spilt mescal on the floor beside the bed; and the boys calling those names as she passed.… Ah, no, no! He shut his eyes, he shook his head in strenuous denial of these memories. "A, B, C, vitamin D…" He tried to think of those times when he sat on her knees and she put her arms about him and sang, over and over again, rocking him, rocking him to sleep. "A, B, C, vitamin D, vitamin D, vitamin D…" (14.33)
By forcing himself to think about his fond memories of Linda, John is actually trying to make himself suffer. He wants to feel sad at her death because it's the only way he knows to give it meaning.
Quote #23
"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." (16.51)
Suffering in the "civilized" world means something very different from that of John's world (or ours). No wonder the citizens of the World State can see no benefit in forcing oneself to undergo pain.
Quote #24
"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 the 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." (16.65)
Sacrifice is an important test of values in Brave New World. We can be certain, at the end of the day, that Helmholtz is serious about writing because of what he is willing to sacrifice for it. John validates his own principles in his willingness to die for them. Mustapha, on the other hand, defends a different value altogether—that of happiness. Bernard, it would seem, is willing to sacrifice nothing, and so he remains unsatisfied in the civilized world.
Quote #25
Helmholtz rose from his pneumatic chair. "I should like a thoroughly bad climate," he answered. "I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms, for example…" (16.68)
This passage makes it clear that Helmholtz has learned the value of sacrifice, of intentional suffering—and he is willing to pursue his passion anyway. It is also the first step in his claim that he wants to write about some sort of passion that he can understand. Since he can't grapple with love or unfulfilled lust or jealousy, he plans to try to experience physical suffering (in this case, through a bad climate) instead. (FYI, this fits into our "weather is super important" argument in "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory.")
Quote #26
"What about self-denial, then? If you had a God, you'd have a reason for self-denial."
"But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning." (17.42-3)
"Self-denial" is the process of forcing suffering on yourself—denying yourself what you want and need. When John says that God is a reason for self-denial, we can go back to his explanation in Chapter 7, where he says he wants to get hit with the whip "to please Pookong and Jesus." Religion makes suffering necessary because it's built on the notion of an afterlife. Indulgence in this life means suffering later, whereas piety and self-denial means a happy time later. Christianity in particular encourages man to strive to be like Jesus. Since Jesus suffered, man has to as well. (John pretty much says this—see Chapter 8.)
Quote #27
"But the tears are necessary. Don't you remember what Othello said? 'If after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death.' There's a story one of the old Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of Mátaski. The young men who wanted to marry her had to do a morning's hoeing in her garden. It seemed easy; but there were flies and mosquitoes, magic ones. Most of the young men simply couldn't stand the biting and stinging. But the one that could—he got the girl."
"Charming! But in civilized countries," said the Controller, "you can have girls without hoeing for them, and there aren't any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got rid of them all centuries ago." (17.48-9)
John makes another apt point with his quote from Othello: we suffer not only for the sake of suffering, but also for the rewards that come after. Mustapha misses the point in his reply; he says you can have the reward without suffering. But the idea behind John's philosophy is that sweet isn't as sweet without the bitter.
Quote #28
The Savage nodded, frowning. "You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy." (17.50)
John recognizes that he's operating in a very different world than the one in which he was raised. This realization is what ultimately drives him to leave the World State and live in solitude. It is at this moment that he realizes a man like himself cannot function in a world like this—a world without slings or arrows.
Quote #29
"What you need," the Savage went on, "is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here."
("Twelve and a half million dollars," Henry Foster had protested when the Savage told him that. "Twelve and a half million—that's what the new Conditioning Centre cost. Not a cent less.") (17.52-3)
Again there is the problem of failed communication. The closest Henry Foster can come to understanding John's notion of cost (sacrifice) is through a sterile, dehumanized commodity (money).
Quote #30
His first night in the hermitage was, deliberately, a sleepless one. He spent the hours on his knees praying, now to that Heaven from which the guilty Claudius had begged forgiveness, now in Zuñi to Awonawilona, now to Jesus and Pookong, now to his own guardian animal, the eagle. From time to time he stretched out his arms as though he were on the Cross, and held them thus through long minutes of an ache that gradually increased till it became a tremulous and excruciating agony; held them, in voluntary crucifixion, while he repeated, through clenched teeth (the sweat, meanwhile, pouring down his face), "Oh, forgive me! Oh, make me pure! Oh, help me to be good!" again and again, till he was on the point of fainting from the pain. (18.31)
Passages like this one make it clear that John's need to punish himself stems from both his religious sentiments and from his investment in the Shakespeare texts of his childhood. Both extol the virtue of suffering, which helps to explain why John confuses the two in his mind.
Quote #31
He had almost finished whittling the stave into shape, when he realized with a start that he was singing-singing! […] Guiltily he blushed. After all, it was not to sing and enjoy himself that he had come here. It was to escape further contamination by the filth of civilized life; it was to be purified and made good; it was actively to make amends. He realized to his dismay that, absorbed in the whittling of his bow, he had forgotten what he had sworn to himself he would constantly remember—poor Linda, and his own murderous unkindness to her, and those loathsome twins, swarming like lice across the mystery of her death, insulting, with their presence, not merely his own grief and repentance, but the very gods themselves. He had sworn to remember, he had sworn unceasingly to make amends. And there was he, sitting happily over his bow-stave, singing, actually singing.…
He went indoors, opened the box of mustard, and put some water to boil on the fire. (18.38-9)
John punishes himself for both mental and physical transgressions. His goals for self-discipline are unbelievably lofty—we have to wonder if he wants to fail so that he will be justified in hurting himself.
Quote #32
"Splendid," he said to himself, as the Savage started his astonishing performance. "Splendid!" He kept his telescopic cameras carefully aimed—glued to their moving objective; clapped on a higher power to get a close-up of the frantic and distorted face (admirable!); switched over, for half a minute, to slow motion (an exquisitely comical effect, he promised himself); listened in, meanwhile, to the blows, the groans, the wild and raving words that were being recorded on the sound-track at the edge of his film, tried the effect of a little amplification (yes, that was decidedly better); was delighted to hear, in a momentary lull, the shrill singing of a lark; wished the Savage would turn round so that he could get a good close-up of the blood on his back—and almost instantly (what astonishing luck!) the accommodating fellow did turn round, and he was able to take a perfect close-up. (18.65)
We know from earlier scenes that the citizens of the World State are desensitized to human suffering, but this takes it to a whole new level. It is fitting that in this chapter—the climax of many threads, themes, and emotions in the novel—the reader's horrified reaction to this mockery of humanity peaks as well.