Julia

by Sandra Newman

This part of the ritual was always a release. Everyone relaxed and beamed. Another thought had been correctly thought, another feeling rightly felt. One saw how little the Party asked, after all. You needn’t know all the latest Newspeak words or struggle to believe contradictory things. If you hated the enemy, you could be loved.

She smiled through everything, showing all five of her remaining teeth, and could express almost any idea in the form of Party enthusiasm, like a dog communicating all its needs by barking and wagging its tail.

Later she could sometimes feel bitter that planes had been produced in such abundance while farm machinery rusted away, and horses were eaten in hungry years, and starving men pulled the plows themselves. But at that age, she would have starved the world to make another soaring plane and the gallant crew who manned it. What else would a world be for?

It was grand and quaint and imposing and fussy; all ornamental clocks and narrow arched windows. Its roof bristled with so many spires and gables, new ones seemed to grow with every rain.

Julia had once imagined a language of touch one could use to defeat the telescreens.

She loved him because she was forbidden to do it. She loved him to be fearless.

“In the place of the voluptuousness of plenty, the cowardice of peace, the dependency of love, the empty sanctimony of truth, we place hate. Hate is the highest capacity of mankind. Every other sentiment we share with the animal kingdom—anger, greed, mother love, fear, curiosity. Only hate is human. No lower animal can access its mysteries. A beast can feel transient rage, but never hate. That is why he is morally null; there can be no goodness without hate. One hates when the good within one identifies evil. Hate is goodness in operation. And without operation, without action, goodness is the mere corpse of goodness. “Only hate is good. That is the great revelation of Big Brother Thought. Perhaps future human beings will evolve some still higher faculty, purer and more ruthless. For now, this is the greatest of what is human: to hate and to be led by hate.”

Seeing him flooded her with relief: there was still someone else in the world. In that moment, she felt all her old irritations with him as a species of fondness. One grew close to someone and let him matter, and so one brooded on his shortcomings, counting them over in private moments as if they were a miser’s hoard. It was how she had been with her mother. It was a rage that was a kind of love.

All was false. It was known to be false, but everyone lied about the lies, until no one knew where the lies began and ended. That whole life had been a game of make-believe, everyone pretending together like little children. Even at Love, they had played at torture and murder, knowing it was all pretense.