One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill, I’m finished with this notion of getting back into the past. What’s the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don’t exist. Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches up to the stratosphere.
Alfred Simmonds, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler, Willingdon. Dealer in Hides and Bone-Meal. Kennels Supplied.
Isn’t it queer how we go through life, always thinking that the things we want to do are the things that can’t be done?
There’s always a fascination in watching anybody do a job which he really understands. Watch a woman – a woman who really knows how to cook, I mean – rolling dough. She’s got a peculiar, solemn, indrawn air, a satisfied kind of air, like a priestess celebrating a sacred rite.
This war is a racket the same as any other.
Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.
Everything other than working was forbidden: walking in the streets, having fun, singing, dancing, getting together, everything was forbidden.
I wasn’t a highbrow any longer. I was down among the realities of modern life. And what are the realities of modern life? Well, the chief one is an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things. With most people it takes the form of selling themselves.
Gordon wished he would come in. Sell him a copy of Women in Love. How it would disappoint him! But no! The Welsh solicitor had funked it. He tucked his umbrella under his arm and moved off with righteously turned backside. But doubtless tonight, when darkness hid his blushes, he’d slink into one of the rubber–shops and buy High Jinks in a Parisian Convent, by Sadie Blackeyes. Gordon turned away from the door and back to the book–shelves.
Between pigs and mans there never was, nor there is a need to be any disharmony in interests.
The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards.
Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings? Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own.
Like all man who have lived much alone, he adjusted himself better to ideas than to people.
There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.
And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.
If you made a list of Hilda’s remarks throughout the day, you’d find three bracketed together at the top – ‘We can’t afford it’, ‘It’s a great saving’, and ‘I don’t know where the money’s to come from’.
See? You can have cartoons about any of the parties, but you mustn’t put anything in favor of Socialism, because the police won’t stand it. Once I did a cartoon of a boa constrictor marked Capital swallowing a rabbit marked Labour. The copper came along and saw it, and he says, ‘You rub that out, and look sharp about it,’ he says. I had to rub it out.
Is it gone for ever? I’m not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong to it. So do you.
What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intel- ligence.
At any rate that year of reading novels was the only real education, in the sense of book–learning, that I’ve ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d gone through life in a normal sensible way.