Quote 7
Helmholtz rose from his pneumatic chair. "I should like a thoroughly bad climate," he answered. "I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms, for example…" (16.68)
Notice that Helmholtz rises from his "pneumatic chair." We've seen the word "pneumatic" used over and over in Brave New World (fifteen times, actually, and you can read our in-depth discussion of it in Lenina's "Character Analysis"), but regardless of your interpretation we can all agree that it has much to do with the World State. When Helmholtz rises from his pneumatic chair, he's also rising away from Mustapha's world. Nifty, isn't it?
Quote 8
"This time I thought I'd give them one I'd just written myself. Pure madness, of course; but I couldn't resist it." He laughed. "I was curious to see what their reactions would be. Besides," he added more gravely, "I wanted to do a bit of propaganda; I was trying to engineer them into feeling as I'd felt when I wrote the rhymes. Ford!" He laughed again. "What an outcry there was! The Principal had me up and threatened to hand me the immediate sack. l'm a marked man." (12.51)
Helmholtz seems rather unperturbed at his predicament. This contrasts with Bernard, who flipped out when he learned he was going to get deported. Helmholtz's freedom, then, is a state of mind.
Quote 9
"Are you?" said Helmholtz, with a total absence of interest. Then after a little pause, "This last week or two," he went on, "I've been cutting all my committees and all my girls. You can't imagine what a hullabaloo they've been making about it at the College. Still, it's been worth it, I think. The effects…" He hesitated. "Well, they're odd, they're very odd."
A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism. (4.2.22-3)
Helmholtz is just like Bernard, except more attractive and less insecure. The second paragraph makes that pretty clear. The first one is interesting, though—it provides some insight into just how tight a leash the World State has on its citizens.