Sunday, May 6

Creeping Goose-Flesh

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north.  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.  Wintriness responded to wintriness.  The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber.  The light was frozen, dead, a ghost.  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.
Brave New World, Chapter One, Aldous Huxley.

 The imagery of this passage was so vivid for me that I felt it just had to be shared.  This is the second paragraph of the book, and by this time I was already excited by hideous success of Huxley's writing.  It gives me creeping flesh.

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