Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [405]

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 405

Note

‘The body swells up until it fills the universe’ — the physiological pathos undercutting every ideology, and the rueful catalogue ending in the bathos of ‘a sour stomach or an aching tooth.’ Orwell’s materialism at its best: the body’s demands are not obstacles to heroism but its only substrate.