Some of the most striking episodes in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are simple descriptions of Winston Smith’s day. He wakes, coughing and spluttering, to the blaring of the telescreen in his decrepit flat and is immediately forced into an exhausting regime of calisthenics. After an inadequate breakfast and an equally inadequate cigarette, he has to walk down several flights of stairs, thanks to a broken lift. Lunchtime and other breaks in the working day are filled with incessant and loud propaganda. His evenings are a mixture of table tennis and hectoring lectures.
Winston’s life is one of weariness without respite. In it, Orwell captures something fundamental to the use and abuse of power: its attack on anything that smacks of rest. Whether it is within religious cults, army boot camps, torture chambers or concentration camps, the exhausted self—shorn of the energy to do anything other than comply—is a malleable self.
So does it follow that, as Tricia Hersey puts it in her new book, “rest is resistance”? Unprogrammed time may be liberating (I have always wondered whether the thing that Winston and Julia treasure most in their affair is the lying in bed after sex, rather than the sex itself). But there are limitations to rest as a form of subversion, too; all that Winston manages in the end is to carve out tiny moments of freedom before he is inevitably crushed.
