Quote 13
Sitting beside her, the Savage tried hard to recapture his mood of a few minutes before. "A, B, C, vitamin D," he repeated to himself, as though the words were a spell that would restore the dead past to life. But the spell was ineffective. Obstinately the beautiful memories refused to rise; there was only a hateful resurrection of jealousies and uglinesses and miseries. Popé with the blood trickling down from his cut shoulder; and Linda hideously asleep, and the flies buzzing round the spilt mescal on the floor beside the bed; and the boys calling those names as she passed.… Ah, no, no! He shut his eyes, he shook his head in strenuous denial of these memories. "A, B, C, vitamin D…" He tried to think of those times when he sat on her knees and she put her arms about him and sang, over and over again, rocking him, rocking him to sleep. "A, B, C, vitamin D, vitamin D, vitamin D…" (14.33)
By forcing himself to think about his fond memories of Linda, John is actually trying to make himself suffer. He wants to feel sad at her death because it's the only way he knows to give it meaning.
Quote 14
"True," he added, "they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them." Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. "And why don't we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure." (16.51)
Suffering in the "civilized" world means something very different from that of John's world (or ours). No wonder the citizens of the World State can see no benefit in forcing oneself to undergo pain.
Quote 15
"What about self-denial, then? If you had a God, you'd have a reason for self-denial."
"But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning." (17.42-3)
"Self-denial" is the process of forcing suffering on yourself—denying yourself what you want and need. When John says that God is a reason for self-denial, we can go back to his explanation in Chapter 7, where he says he wants to get hit with the whip "to please Pookong and Jesus." Religion makes suffering necessary because it's built on the notion of an afterlife. Indulgence in this life means suffering later, whereas piety and self-denial means a happy time later. Christianity in particular encourages man to strive to be like Jesus. Since Jesus suffered, man has to as well. (John pretty much says this—see Chapter 8.)