Re: Update on Christmas kitties

seemed to stick
into his brain like jagged splinters of glass. He tried to think of
O'Brien, for whom, or to whom, the diary was written, but instead he began
thinking of the things that would happen to him after the Thought Police
took him away. It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed
was what you expected. But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet
everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be
gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the
crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth, and bloody clots of hair.
Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Why
was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobody
ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess. When once you
had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would
be dead. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie
embedded in future time?
He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image
of O'Brien. 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,'
O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The
place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would
never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. But
with the voice from the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not follow
the train of thought further. He put a cigarette in his mouth. Half the
tobacco promptly fell out on to his tongue, a bitter dust which was
difficult to spit out again. The face of Big Brother swam into his mind,
displacing that of O'Brien. J


.

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