Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [87]

It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O’Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event in the locked loneliness in which one had to live. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 87

Note

The vertigo of unverifiable experience: an equivocal glance becomes ‘a memorable event’ only because solitude makes any contact monumental. ‘The locked loneliness in which one had to live’ compresses the entire condition of surveillance society.