Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. 'Strange,' mused the Director, as they turned away, 'strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting.

A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.

Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. Outiside, in the garden, it was playtime.

Brave new world book annotations