Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [975]

And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment – he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps – of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O’Brien’s had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded out before O’Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some remote period of one’s life when one was in effect a different person. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 975

Note

The glimpse of the converted mind — perception itself replaced, two and two becoming whatever is demanded — rendered as a ‘luminous certainty’ remembered as though from another life; this is the internalized watcher achieving its end, a moment of achieved false perception rather than mere submission.