Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [791]

The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilised fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. … It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same – everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same – people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 791

Note

The deliberate grammatical slackening — the verbless run ‘laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering’ — makes the prole woman indistinguishable from her work, the sentence winding and winding back on itself like her thirty unbroken years. The second passage stacks parallel list on parallel list, each expansion widening the scale from one yard to planetary, holding ‘ignorant’ and ‘storing up’ in tension inside a single breath.