Page 278 - 1984

down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm
heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children
she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had
had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose
beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized
fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life
had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweep-
ing, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for
children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken
years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical
reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with
the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind
the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was curi-
ous to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in
Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under
the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over
the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just
like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held
apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the
same—people who had never learned to think but who were
storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power
that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope,
it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of THE
BOOK, he knew that that must be Goldstein’s final message.
The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that
when their time came the world they constructed would not
be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the
Party? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity.
Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later