Sublime

permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: “Proles and animals are free.”

It’s a similar story with the flap copy that Orwell wrote for the first edition of Animal Farm, published in 1945 by Secker & Warburg.40 In clear, measured tones, it tells us: It is the history of a revolution that went wrong – and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for each perversion of the original doctrine.

It was about this time that the pigs suddenly moved into the farmhouse and took up their residence there. Again the animals seemed to remember that a resolution against this had been passed in the early days, and again Squealer was able to convince them that this was not the case. It was absolutely necessary, he said, that the pigs, who were the

documents

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

He tried to make her understand. “This was an exceptional case. It wasn’t just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally

We pigs are brainworkers.