Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [478]

A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. … Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had only spoken in low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small, beetle-like man was listening intently – listening to that. But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 478

Note

The pure, purposeless song of the thrush is the one thing that defeats the surveillance mind — even his reflex suspicion that a microphone would ‘pick up the thrush’ yields, so that ‘he stopped thinking and merely felt.’ The beetle-like man listening to birdsong inverts the whole apparatus into absurdity. Orwell’s liquid-music metaphor dissolves the habitual vigilance.