Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
He had still, he reflected, no learned the ultimate secret. He understood
how; he did not understand why. Chapter I, like Chapter III,
had not actually told him anything that he did not know, it had merely
systematised the knowledge that he possessed already. But after reading it he
knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a
minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth,
and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. A
yellow beam from teh sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell across
the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face and the girl's smooth body
touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy confident feeling. He was safe,
everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,'
with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.
It was only an 'opeless fancy,
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
Theysye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!
As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the
window. The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was not
shining into the yard any longer. The flagstones were wet as though
they had just been washed, and he had the feelingthat the sky had been
washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney pots.
Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking
herself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers, and
more and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a
living, or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren.
Julia had come across to his side; together they gazed down with a
sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he looked at the
woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for
the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for
the first time that she was beautiful. It had never occurred to him
that the body of a woman of fifth, blown up to monstrous dimensions by
childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in
the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so,
and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, coutourless body, like
a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation
to the body of a girl as the rose hip to the rose. Why should the
fruit be held inferior to the flower?
She's beautiful, he murmured.
She's a metre across the hips, easily, said Julia.
That is her style of beauty, said Winston.