Category: Prose

Short Fiction

Fields in Winter

Sam McKeon

Frosted fields, like giant sheets of grey-green watercolour paper dusted with icing sugar. Longer grassy tufts, stalks steely rising, catch the low skying eastern sun. Dark hedge shadows, like thick black inked cartographer’s pen, draw captive taking boundaries.

Close white clouds hang over misting chimneys from still water-flooded lowland while darker distant greys announce the pressing storm. In their midlands, a rainbow paints the landscape with finger clasping forest beech and hazel. “To us”, they beckon. “Paint us with your tender-textured hues, renew our drab, dampened branches with your primal palette.”

Sam McKeon

22nd October 2017

Prose

Doublethink

Sam McKeon

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 cancelled 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 that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment 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: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

George Orwell, 1984 Chapter 3.