Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [249]

And though, of course, it grew worse as one’s body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different? — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 249

Note

The catalogue of small physical grievances — sticky socks, gritty soap, cigarettes that come to pieces — makes an argument out of sensory detail. The rhetorical question plants the dangerous intuition that suffering itself is evidence against the regime.