For Christmas

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 Paris and Berlin,
in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and
Japan -- everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made
monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still
singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day
come. You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that
future if you kept alive the mind