| The nearest approach to such a new
drug - and how immeasurably remote it is from the ideal intoxicant! - is
the drug of speed. Speed, it seems to me, provides
the one genuinely modern pleasure. True, men have always enjoyed speed;
but their enjoyment has been limited, until very recent times, by the capacities
of the horse, whose maximum velocity is not much more than thirty miles
an hour. Now thirty miles an hour on a horse feels very much faster than
sixty miles an hour in a train or a hundred in an aeroplane. The train
is too large and steady, the aeroplane too remote from stationary surroundings,
to give the passengers a very intense sensation of speed. The automobile
is sufficiently small and sufficiently near the ground to be able to compete,
as an intoxicating speed-purveyor, with the galloping horse. The inebriating
effects of speed are noticeable, on horseback, at about twenty miles an
hour, in a car at about sixty. When the car has passed seventy-two, or
thereabouts, one begins to feel an unprecedented sensation - a sensation
which no man in the days of horses ever felt. It grows intenser with every
increase of velocity. I myself have never travelled at much more than eighty
miles an hour in a car; but those who have drunk a stronger brewage of
this strange intoxicant tell me that new marvels await anyone who has the
opportunity of passing the hundred mark. At what point the pleasure turns
into pain, I do not know. Long before the fantastic Daytona figures are
reached, at any rate. Two hundred miles an hour must be absolute torture.
Aldous Huxley (1931), p.32 |