Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [590]

The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gate-leg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 590

Note

The chapter’s closing image fuses room, self, and glass object into a single sealed world — a private eternity at ‘the heart of the crystal.’ The fragility of that enclosure (a paperweight that can shatter) underwrites the whole idyll.