Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [490]

In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 490

Note

The thesis of the book’s erotic-political project, phrased as a lament for lost purity. The famous compression — embrace/battle, climax/victory, blow/political act — turns the most intimate act into a countersign of resistance; three short sentences of escalation with no connective tissue.