Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [291]

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible and glittering – a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons – a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting – three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked wastepipe. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 291

Note

The Party ideal and the lived reality are set against each other in a single rhythm—glittering steel and concrete collapsing into leaky shoes and cabbage smells—ending on the absurdly mundane image of Mrs Parsons and a blocked wastepipe. The gap between ideology and material life is the whole argument.