Not philosophers but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness generalities are intellectually necessary evils. 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. “Just to give you a general idea,” he would explain to them. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director’s heels. “And this,” said the Director opening the door, “is the Fertilizing Room.”īent 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.
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.
The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. 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. The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four storeys.
0 kommentar(er)
