"And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virture-- liking what you've got to do. All condtioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes. . . . it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it.

Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

"Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual-- and after all, wha is an individual? ". . . ." We can make a new one with the greatest of ease-- as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself."

"I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. WHy was that old fellow such a marvellous propaganda technician? Becuase he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't htink of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases."

"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead."

"An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-moron work-- go mad or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized-- but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, fo rth egood reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting he's still inside a bottle-- an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course," the Controller meditatively continued, goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined to a narrower space."

Unless one has been caught up in a war and experienced the terror that comes of knowing that thousands of heavily armed individuals are bent on one's annihilation, it is hard to realize that most violence is not primarily motivated by evil, greed, lust, ideology, or agresssion. Stranges as it may seem, most violence is defensive. it is notivated by the fear that if one does not kill one ill be killed. Either by the enemy or by one's own superiors. Against this constant anxiety, and the acute sense of fear and vulnerabilty that accompanies it, one conjures an illusion of power-- torching buildings, shooting unarmed civilians, firing rocket grentades, smoking cannabis, shouting ordrs, changing slogans, seeing oneself as Rambo, taunting, torturing, and abusing the individuals one has taken captive. But all this display of might-- this weaponry, thse medicines and amulets, this noise, these incantations, both political and magical, these Hollywood images, these drug-induced fuges, these rituals of brotherhood and solidarity -- simply reveal the depth of oen's own impotence and fear. This is Hannah Arendt's great insight-- that while military power consolidates itself in numbers, and in coordinated, automatic forms of mass movement, terrorism seeks power in implements, and is driven not by might but by its absence. And so it is that in the auto-da-fe, with explosions and bomb blasts, fire, noise, and mayhem, that the terrorist, like a child, finds his apotheosis, achieving the recognition, presence, voice and potency he has been denied in the real world.

LIke any other animal, human beings will fight to the death when threatened or cornered, but as a species we are perhaps alone in imagining that our survival depends on such elusive properties as recognition, love, identity, honor, prestige, and wealth. Only we will feel that our very existence is endangered when our name is taken in vain, our pride is hurt, our nation threatned, our reputation impugned, our voice ignored, our loyalty betrayed. No other animal will figh t tooth and nail, not only to see that such symbolic losses are made good, but that those hwo have allegedly taken these things fro us are themselves subject to all the torment, degradation, and loss that we have suffered at their hands. This is why violators seldom admit to guilt. For they believe they were fully justified in their excesses; they were only taking back what was rightfully theirs, preserving their civilization, defending their rights, upholding their honor, and, of course, obeying orders from above.

I spent a lot of time mulling over what S. B. had told me about his thirteen months in solitary confinement, surrounded by death, and the "wild thinking" that drew him back to his beginnings. It seemed to me that this urge to retrace one's steps nto the past arises neither from nostalgia nor from a need to tell one's story to the world. It is a way of cheating death. An instinct for life in the face of oblivion. For to recollect the innocence of childhood o the viogr of youth in a moment of peril is to retrieve a sense of leife's infinite possiblitiy, ot conjure a period in our life when the wold seemed ours for the taking, and we thought we would never die. It is, in essence, to recapture a sense of our capacity to act and initiate someothing new, for, as Hannah Arendt notes, action is synonymous with our capacity to bring new life into the wold. Mortality is thus conuntermandded by natality, ai ti si this unquenchable desire for renewal, this refusal to go gently into that good night, that explains why we go back, tumbling through the darkness, in search of the light that flooded and filled our first conscious years. The days of wine and roses. When our livesstretched before us liek a field of dreams. But if our imagniation springs to our rescue in such dark times, holding out the promise of rebirth, how do we fare when we are released from darkness, and are returned to our everyday lives? How do we address the injustices we have endured, the life we have wasted, the pain we have so needlessly suffered? This question was much on my mind the day I wen to see Fina Kamara in the Murraytown Amputee Camp.