BOOK FIVE

LESBIAN VAMPIRES OF BAVARIA

(1981–1985)

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety.… Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.

—George Orwell, 1984