Page 46 - BraveNewWorld

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did, and with as little trouble. He was seized with a sudden urgent need to
boast. “I’m taking Lenina Crowne to New Mexico with me,” he said in a tone
as casual as he could make it.
“Are you?” said Helmholtz, with a total absence of interest. Then after a little
pause, “This last week or two,” he went on, “I’ve been cutting all my commit-
tees and all my girls. You can’t imagine what a hullabaloo they’ve been making
about it at the College. Still, it’s been worth it, I think. The effects .” He hesita-
ted. “Well, they’re odd, they’re very odd.”
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.
The rest of the short flight was accomplished in silence. When they had arrived
and were comfortably stretched out on the pneumatic sofas in Bernard’s room,
Helmholtz began again.
Speaking very slowly, “Did you ever feel,” he asked, “as though you had so-
mething inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come
out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using-you know, like all the water
that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?” He looked at Bernard
questioningly.

“You mean all the emotions one might be feeling if things were different?”
Helmholtz shook his head. “Not quite. I’m thinking of a queer feeling I someti-
mes get, a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say
it-only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power. If there
was some different way of writing. Or else something else to write about .” He
was silent; then, “You see,” he went on at last, “I’m pretty good at inventing
phrases-you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as
though you’d sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they’re
about something hypnopædically obvious. But that doesn’t seem enough. It’s
not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be
good too.”

“But your things are good, Helmholtz.”
“Oh, as far as they go.” Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. “But they go such a
little way. They aren’t important enough, somehow. I feel I could do something
much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? 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

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