[b]Arthur Koestler
Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.[/b]
So what? You’re still dead.
It had a strange resemblance to Kafka’s novel,The Trial–that dream-like allegory of a man who, having received a mysterious convocation to attend his 'trial", strives and struggles in vain to find out where the trial would be held and what it would be about; wherever he inquires he receives non - commital, elusive replies, as if everybody has joined in a secret conspiracy: the closer he gets to his aim, the farther it recedes, like the transparent walls of a dream: and the story ends abruptly, as it began,in tormenting suspense.The High Court which Kafka’s hero is unable to find is his own conscience: but what was the symbolic meaning of all these nut-cracker-faced, nail-biting, pimpled, slimy features, spinning their spider webs of intrigue and sabotage in the bureaux of the French Administration? Perhaps I was really guilty, I and my like:perhaps our guilt was the past, the guilt of having forseen the catastrophe and yet failed to open the eyes of the blind. But if we were guilty–who were they to sit in judgement over us?
The closest some come to that here is when they are banned.
There was a dense fog in my brain, impenetrable to any coherent thought, except the dull obsession of counting the minutes – an aching state of semi concsiousness and numb idiocy.
The closest some come to that here is when they are posting.
That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, much later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: ‘Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process’.
Then they pass around the Bibles. Or the Manifestos.
I have already thought it over, said Rubashov. I reject your proposition. Logically, you may be right. But I have had enough of this kind of logic. I am tired and I don’t want to play this game anymore. Be kind enough to have me taken back to my cell.
Definitional logic no doubt.
For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on the earth. The Party had taught one how to do it. The infinite was a politically suspect quantity, the `I’ a suspect quality. The Party did not recognize its existence. The definition of an individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
The Party. Just one more rendition of “one of us”.