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'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?'
'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that
we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other
kinds, that's all.'
He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always
contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept
it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she
realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought
Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she
believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which
you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and
boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness,
that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that
from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of
yourself as a corpse.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.
'Not physically. Six months, a year -- five years, conceivably. I am
afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than
I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very
little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are
the same thing.'
'Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton?
Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my
hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?'
She twisted herself round a