Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [944]

Perhaps the needle was at eighty – ninety. Winston could only intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 944

Note

The dissolution of cognition under sustained torment — the count becoming both impossible and charged with a ‘mysterious identity between five and four’ — renders the mind’s collapse as a perceptual hallucination, showing the precise point where sense-data stops belonging to the subject.