The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.
The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual.
You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer.
He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice.
Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window--to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him.
He looked round the canteen again.
Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise...
...how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant.
It would not matter if they killed you at once.
To be killed was what you expected.
But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair.
Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same?
Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life?
Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess.
When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead.
Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time?
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