true. At those moments his secret
loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to
tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against
the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his
helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like
some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking
the structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or
that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which
one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston
succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the
dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed
through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He
would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint
Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.
Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He
hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted
to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple
waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only
the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an
actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a
sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who
seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the
people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in
the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the