's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet
almost exactly the same -- people who had never learned to think but who
were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that
would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!
Without having read to the end of the book, he knew that that must be
Goldstein's final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he
be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be
just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes,
because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is equality
there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change
into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when
you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening
would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years,
they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from
body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.
'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us, that first
day, at the edge of the wood?'
'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to please
himself. Not even that. He was just singing.'
The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the
world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious,
forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Par