any interest in doing so,
since he was being fed at what appeared to be regular intervals. He was
getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he
wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food was
surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once there was even a
packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but the never-speaking guard who
brought his food would give him a light. The first time he tried to smoke
it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out for a long
time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal.
They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied to the
corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he was awake he was
completely torpid. Often he would lie from one meal to the next almost
without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries in
which it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He had long grown used to
sleeping with a strong light on his face. It seemed to make no difference,
except that one's dreams were more coherent. He dreamed a great deal all
through this time, and they were always happy dreams. He was in the Golden
Country, or he was sitting among enormous glorious, sunlit ruins, with his
mother, with Julia, with O'Brien -- not doing anything, merely sitting in
the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such thoughts as he had when he was
awake were mostly about his dreams. He seemed to have lost the power of
intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was
not bored, he had no desire for conversation or distrac