Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [287]

Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer and, above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 287

Note

The compressed life-cycle sentence—birth, gutter, work, blossoming, marriage, middle-age, death at sixty—delivers a whole anthropology in one breathless enumeration. The ‘cattle’ simile and the ‘ancestral pattern’ phrase render the proles both subhuman and timeless.