`At the end of it she was still singing` - George Orwell on Life & Self, 1984

 Coincidentally, one day prior to having the internet remind us all of the death of George Orwell (21st January 1950) and to scrolling through dozens of headlines with words like `Big Brother`, `Room 101`, `unperson`, `thoughtcrime` - that do not mean anything to most people since this is one of the books that people pretend to have read -, I finished reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book took me by surprise. And it didn't. Hence, I shall try to write a few lines about it, first allowing myself a few days to digest it. 

Still, as it happens to well-written books, there are passages, fragments, words, sounds, images, smells that haunt me even years after having read/perceived them. Although I have just read it and haven't allowed my poor memory enough time to select my memories, I believe I have encountered two such passages in Orwell's book. 

I have already shared the first one here on my blog (`When Chocolate Means Survival`), having added no comment that could have lessened the effect of my epiphanic moment. 

And here goes the second one. It is the epitome of womanhood. The epitome of Life. `The obliteration of the Self` - as the protagonist himself put it, but in a different context - OR, on the contrary, the acceptance of the Self with all it comes. 

There is beauty in the mundane. Beauty in chores & supermarket visits. Beauty in sacrifice & in the lack of freedom: 

As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window. The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the yard any longer. The flagstones were wet as though they had just been washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

‘She’s beautiful,’ he murmured.

‘She’s a metre across the hips, easily,’ said Julia.

‘That is her style of beauty,’ said Winston.

He held Julia’s supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.  - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four