Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [877]

But that was merely an intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to take it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and the foreknowledge of pain. Besides, was it possible, when you were actually suffering it, to wish for any reason whatever that your own pain should increase? But that question was not answerable yet. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 877

Note

Winston’s realization that his love for Julia has become ‘merely an intellectual decision’ — that the cell has stripped feeling down to ‘pain and the foreknowledge of pain’ — is the internalized panopticon’s deepest conquest: even the moral self is hollowed out. The unanswered final question sets up the chapter’s climactic answer (‘Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain’).