1984 - Planet eBook

down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warmheart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many childrenshe had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She hadhad her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rosebeauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilizedfruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her lifehad been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping,polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first forchildren, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbrokenyears. At the end of it she was still singing. The mysticalreverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up withthe aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behindthe chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was curiousto think that the sky was the same for everybody, inEurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people underthe sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all overthe world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people justlike this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, heldapart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly thesame—people who had never learned to think but who werestoring up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the powerthat would one day overturn the world. If there was hope,it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of THEBOOK, he knew that that must be Goldstein’s final message.The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure thatwhen their time came the world they constructed would notbe just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of theParty? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity.Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later