was mad? It must be he,
Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had
grown stern again.
'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however
completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever
spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your
life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for
ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from
which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you
could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be
capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you.
Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living,
or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We
shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.'
He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston was aware
of some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into place behind his head.
O'Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face was almost on a level
with Winston's.
'Three thousand,' he said, speaking over Winston's head to the man in
the white coat.
Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against
Winston's temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain.
O'Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.
'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes fixed on mine.'
At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like
an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There
was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only
prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing
h