Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [39]

In the most beautiful moment of the novel – beauty as Rilke defined it, the onset of terror just able to be borne – Winston and Julia, thinking they are safe, regard from their window the woman in the courtyard singing, and Winston gazing into the sky experiences an almost mystical vision of the millions living beneath it, ‘people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!’ It is the moment just before he and Julia are arrested, and the cold, terrible climax of the book commences. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 39

Note

A critical mise-en-scène: the editor frames the novel’s most hopeful scene by its own imminent doom, invoking Rilke’s definition of beauty as borne terror to hold the ‘If there was hope’ exultation against the arrest that follows on the next beat.