I shall be entirely frank: even we have not yet found an absolute, precise solution to the problem of happiness. Twice a day, from sixteen to seventeen, and from twenty-one to twenty-two, the single mighty organism breaks up into separate cells; these are the Personal Hours designated by the Table. In these hours you will see modestly lowered shades in the rooms of some; others will walk with measured tread along the avenue, as though climbing the brass stairs of the March; still others, like myself now, are at their desks. But I am confident – and you may call me an idealist and dreamer – I am confident that sooner or later we shall fit these Personal Hours as well into the general formula. Some day these 86,400 seconds will also be entered in the Table of Hours.
I have read and heard many incredible things about those times when people still lived in a free, i.e., unorganized, savage condition. But most incredible of all, it seems to me, is that the state authority of that time – no matter how rudimentary – could allow men to live without anything like our Table, without obligatory walks, without exact regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever they felt like it Some historians even say that in those times the street lights burned all night, and people walked and drove around in the streets at all hours of the night.
Try as I may, I cannot understand it. After all, no matter how limited their intelligence, they should have understood that such a way of life was truly mass murder – even if slow murder. The state (humaneness) forbade the killing of a single individual, but not the partial killing of millions day by day. To kill one individual, that is, to diminish the total sum of human lives by fifty years, was criminal. But to diminish the sum of human lives by fifty million years was not considered criminal. Isn’t that absurd? Today, any ten-year-old will solve this mathematical-moral problem in half a minute. They, with all their Kants taken together, could not solve it (because it never occurred to any of the Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, i.e., ethics based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).
And wasn’t it absurd that the state (it dared to call itself a state!) could leave sexual life without any semblance of control? As often and as much as anyone might wish… Totally unscientific, like animals. And blindly, like animals, they bore their young. Isn’t it ridiculous: to know agriculture, poultry-breeding, fish-breeding (we have exact information that they knew all this), yet fail to go on to the ultimate step of this logical ladder – is child-breeding; fail to establish such a thing as our Maternal and Paternal Norms.
It is so absurd, so unbelievable, that I am afraid, as I write this, that you, my unknown readers, will think me a malicious joker. I am afraid you may decide that I am merely trying to mock you, telling you utter nonsense with a straight face.
But, to begin with, I am incapable of jokes, for every joke contains a lie as an implicit function. Secondly, our One State Science asserts that this was how the ancients lived, and our State Science never errs. Besides, where would state logic have come from at a time when men were living in the condition of freedom – the condition of animals, apes, the herd? What could be expected of them, when even in our time the wild, apelike echo still occasionally rises from somewhere below, from some shaggy depth?
Fortunately, only on rare occasions. Fortunately, they are only breakdowns of minor parts which can easily be repaired without halting the eternal, grandiose movement of the entire Machine. And to expel the warped bolt, we have the skilled, heavy hand of the Benefactor and the experienced eyes of the Guardians.
And, by the way, I’ve just remembered. That number I saw yesterday, bent like an S – I think I’ve seen him coming out of the Office of the Guardians. Now I understand that instinctive feeling of respect I had for him, and the sense of awkwardness when the strange I-330 spoke before him… I must confess that this I-330…
The bell for bedtime: it is past twenty-two. Until tomorrow.
Fourth Entry
Topics: A Savage with a Barometer. Epilepsy. If
Until now, everything in life was clear to me (no wonder I seem to have a predilection for the very word “clear”). Yet today… I cannot understand it.
First: I was, indeed, assigned to auditorium 112, as she had told me. Although the probability was
(1500 being the number of auditoriums; 10,000,000, the number of numbers).
And, second… But let me tell it in order, as it happened.
The auditorium – an enormous, sun-drenched hemisphere of massive glass. Circular rows of nobly spherical, smooth-shaven heads. With a slightly palpitating heart I looked around me. I think I was searching for the sight of a rosy crescent – O’s sweet lips – over the blue waves of unifs. A flash of someone’s extraordinarily white, sharp teeth, like… No, but it wasn’t that. O was to come to me at twenty-one that evening. It was entirely natural for me to wish to see her there.
The bell rang. We stood up and sang the Hymn of the One State. And then, from the stage, the voice of the phono-lecturer, glittering with its golden loud-speakers and wit.
“Respected numbers! Our archeologists have recently dug up a certain twentieth-century book in which the ironic author tells the story of a savage and a barometer. The savage noticed that every time the barometer indicated ‘rain’ it actually rained. And since he wanted it to rain, he picked out exactly enough mercury from the column to leave it at ‘rain.’ ” (On the screen – a savage, dressed in feathers, picking out the mercury. Laughter.) “You are laughing. But does it not seem to you that the European of that period was even more ridiculous? Like the savage, the European wanted ‘rain’ – rain with a capital letter, algebraic rain. But all he did was stand before the barometer like a limp wet hen. The savage, at least, had more courage and energy and logic, if only primitive logic He had been able to discover that there was a connection between effect and cause. Picking out the mercury, he was able to take the first step on that great road along which…”
At this point (I repeat, I write these notes without concealing anything) – at this point I became as though impermeable to the vitalizing stream that flowed from the loud-speakers. I was suddenly overcome by the feeling that I had come there for nothing (why “for nothing,” and how could I not have come, since I had been assigned there?). Everything seemed empty to me, nothing but mere husks. And when, by dint of a considerable effort, I managed to switch on my attention again, the phono-lecturer had already gone on to his main topic: our music, mathematical composition. (The mathematician as the cause, music as the effect.) He was describing the recently devised musicometer.
“Simply by turning this handle, any of you can produce up to three sonatas an hour. Yet think how much effort this had cost your forebears! They were able to create only by whipping themselves up to fits of ‘inspiration’ – an unknown form of epilepsy. And here you have a most amusing illustration of what they produced: Scriabin, the twentieth century. They called this black box” (a curtain parted on the stage, revealing their most ancient instrument) “a ‘grand,’ a ‘royal’ instrument, which only shows once more to what extent their entire music…”
And then I lost the thread again, perhaps because… Yes, I will be frank, because she, I-330, came out to the “royal” box. I suppose I was simply startled by her sudden appearance on the stage.
She wore the fantastic costume of the ancient epoch: a closely fitting black dress, which sharply emphasized the whiteness of her bare shoulders and breast, with that warm shadow, stirring with her breath, between… and the dazzling, almost angry teeth…