1984

Winston yearns for the pain of the past: time before the party. Winston is aware of how desturbing a boy he was. He remembers sacrifice and unconditional love of his mother and he feels the pangs of regret and sadness. Still, this was a time when such feelings still existed. It was a time when the party had not reduced existence to merely party rhetoric.

And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. Proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. ch 2