Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [794]

The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan – everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 794

Note

The three-beat aphorism ‘The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing’ compresses the whole political cosmology into eleven words by turning singing into a test of life. The conditional ‘if’ clause quietly hands its own thesis to the reader at the exact moment the trap springs — planting the mind exactly where the Thought Police can find it.