[Mike Marlow]

worse as one's body aged, was
it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart
sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters,
the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water,
the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its
strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one
had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would
still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue
overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small,
curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes
darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought
Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type
set up by the Party as an ideal-tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed
maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree -- existed and even
predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in
Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that
beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing
stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and
fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the ty