Some light reading before heavy exam time. …I must motivate myself to learn science, true science, which is deep and realistic, and not the superficial stuff science fiction is based on. Revisiting passages from Brave New World. This is fiction, and dystopian at that, but it’s well written. Makes one want to study and feel that one’s work is important. So divided on opinions on Aldous Huxley, (love his intelligence, but hate his convictions) but not enough time to explore that now. What I need now is motivation. I have it. Time to get to work.
“Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder these 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?”
“Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. (The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.”
--Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, chp 3
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