It's life Jim....

for solitude, even to go for a walk by
yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in
Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.
But this evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April
air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that
year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring,
exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had
seemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and
wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then
north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in
which direction he was going.
'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in the
proles.' The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth
and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured
slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He
was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered
doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow
curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles of filthy water here
and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either sid