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At eight o'clock, Lenina and Henry are finished with their evening game of Obstacle Golf. They pause in Henry's machine at eight hundred feet over the fading landscape, which reveals the various lower-caste barracks of the Golf Club and the smaller Alpha and Beta houses on the other side of the dividing wall. Further southeast are the majestic buildings of the Slough Crematorium. Henry remarks how fine it is to think that people can go on being socially useful even after death; more than a kilo and a half of phosphorus is recovered from every corpse, which is used to make plants grow. But Lenina thinks it's queer that Alphas and Betas won't make any more plants grow than Gammas and Deltas and Epsilons. Henry says everyone is physico-chemically equal, and even Epsilons perform indispensable services. This reminds Lenina of a time when she was a child and woke up one night to hear the voices whispering under her pillow. At first, she was shocked and afraid, but eventually the soothing voice put her back to sleep. She says she supposes Epsilons don't mind being Epsilons, but she's still glad she isn't one. Henry says everyone is happy now. They land on the roof of Henry's forty-story apartment building, and go down to the dining hall, where they eat with a large, cheerful crowd. Soma is served with the coffee. After dinner, they go to the Westminster Abbey Cabaret, where sexophonists wail and moan like cats under the moon. Five-stepping with four hundred other couples around Westminster Abbey, Lenina and Henry dance in the kind, beautiful world of soma-holiday. Meanwhile, Bernard is late for his Solidarity Service, which he has on alternate Thursdays. He slips into the room in the Fordson Community Singery and takes a seat in the circle of chairs, an alternating arrangement of man-woman. The service begins with a Solidarity Hymn, played synthetically to drum beats and a choir of near-wind and super-string instruments. Dedicated soma tablets are placed in the center of the table, and a cup of strawberry ice-cream soma is passed from hand to hand with the phrase, "I drink to my annihilation." The members sing the First Solidarity Hymn, passing the ice cream around and around, and then the Second Solidarity Hymn, and then the Third. With each song, they invite the Greater Being to annihilate them, at which time their larger life begins. Although the soma has begun to take effect, Bernard has a hard time melting with the others; he still feels isolated. He goes through the motions, and when the imminence of the Coming fills the group with excitement, each member in turn springing up to cry, "Ford!" Bernard follows suit. All at once, a great synthetic bass booms out the words announcing the approaching atonement and final consummation of solidarity, "the coming of the Twelve-in-one, the incarnation of the Greater Being." The group dances around the circle, slapping each other's bottoms as they feverishly chant the liturgical refrain: "Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, kiss the girls…" until the light begins to fade and grow redder, and finally the circle breaks and the members fall back on the ring of couches at the edge of the room. Afterward, Bernard stands on the roof, miserably alone and isolated. The others look calm and rapturous, not with excitement, which would still be a type of dissatisfaction, but with the peace of consummation, with the energies at rest and in equilibrium. Bernard himself feels emptier than ever, more hopelessly himself than he's ever been in his life. By the end of Chapter 5, it's become clear that recreation has replaced the pursuit of knowledge. Leisure time is filled with sex and soma—a hallucinogenic drug that provides a vacation from the unpleasant facts of reality. Instead of God and Church, people consume soma and celebrate the incarnation of the Community, which is represented by the twelve people attending each Solidarity Service. Here, the traditional elements of Christian services—wine, wafers, hymns, and prayers—have been replaced by soma, Solidarity Hymns, and frenzied dances that dissolve into communal sex. The worship of pleasure, regulated by the State, encourages happiness derived from immediate, tactile pleasure and discourages individual thought and emotion. Yet, the familiarity of the ritual and the call for a Greater Being, regardless of its meaning or source, reflects what may be an instinctive human need to believe in a divine being, regardless of conditioning. This question arises again later in the book. All members of Huxley's New World are divided by strict class lines, which are evident in the wall dividing the Golf Club barracks, the color-coded uniforms, the types of tasks each group performs, and the identical appearance of the lower-caste Bokanovsky groups, who were mass produced for labor. But no one questions these lines; rather, everyone accepts that they function to serve the greater good. And because of conditioning and soma, everyone is happy, regardless of his or her class. The fear of social uprising has been eliminated along with strong emotion. Even death fails to provoke a reaction; the body is harvested in another kind of factory, its chemical components broken down and reused for the good of the community. The characters in Brave New World are not complex; they're defined by only a few qualities, many of them the result of the State's conditioning. Instead, the novel is one of conflicting ideas, which are represented by the characters that ultimately come into conflict. Lenina is vaguely aware of her own conditioning, but embraces it. Bernard, unable to conform at all, is more isolated and miserable than ever. The tension that begins building in this chapter will come to a climax when one set of ideas destroys another.
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