Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [144]

The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 144

Note

A striking inversion: tragedy as a historical luxury now extinct. The claim that suffering itself has been flattened by the regime — ‘no deep or complex sorrows’ — makes the Party’s control reach even into the emotional register of the dead, and gives the mother’s sacrifice a meaning the present is structurally incapable of producing.