Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [1120]

It was not merely a question of losing Central Africa: for the first time in the whole war, the territory of Oceania itself was menaced. … A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated excitement, flared up in him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about the war. In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 1120

Note

The ‘undifferentiated excitement’ that is ‘not fear exactly’ — the broken man can no longer hold even a war to his mind. The narration here does the work of dramatizing the erosion of sustained attention that the regime has engineered.