Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [21]

For Walt Whitman (‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself’) it was being large and containing multitudes, for Yogi Berra it was coming to a fork in the road and taking it, for Schrödinger’s cat, it was the quantum paradox of being alive and dead at the same time. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 21

Note

An extraordinary rhetorical cascade: cognitive dissonance recast as Whitman’s multitudes, Berra’s fork in the road, and Schrödinger’s paradox — each wildly different register (poet, catcher, cat) doing comic work to deflate doublethink’s novelty while subtly charging it with genius.