Coming up for Air (1939) by George Orwell

The complete sequence of thought spoken by Orwell’s disappointed protagonist goes like this:

‘One thing I’ve noticed about the human mind is that it goes in jerks. There’s no emotion that stays by you for any length of time. During the last quarter of an hour I’d had what you could fairly describe as a shock.’

Poor George Bowling has had a shock. He has returned to his childhood haunts of Lower Binfield — the ‘bin’ part is important — and found nothing as he left it. Shock is a passing emotion but it’s also timeless. We don’t know how long we are in shock; it comes like an electric shock through the mind and then the body. George’s shock is related to an acute loss of familiar reference points.

‘But where was Lower Binfield? Where was the town I used to know?’

George has lost an entire world, and it is a mental world whose strange shapes filter through his mind as he looks about him. This world is a version of his childhood self; the historical child he still clings to with all of its geography and specific proportions. But the world he finds sits obliquely to his childhood self; it is new and unfriendly.

Humans like things to stay the same; we are shocked by change. George’s word for the sort of existential shock he experiences is queer. Everything he sees is queer, meaning off-centre, oblique, twisted and torqued in the wrong direction; perverse, at odds with his original mental settings. George wants to reset the cemetery with its gaudy ‘machine-made marble angels’, the houses with their new bright red roofs, to dismantle these new things and reinstate the old.

He understands that he’s suffering a jerk in consciousness. He has been jerked - jolted - from a former self; he is experiencing a sort of haunting:

‘Queer! You can’t imagine how queer! All the way down the hill I was seeing ghosts, chiefly the ghosts of hedges and trees and cows.’

Poor George is being followed by apparitions of the past that jerk in and out of his consciousness, a ghostly topography that twists and turns through his mind. George is experiencing is the basic stuff of memory where fiction meets fancy, those haunting ghosts that leer at us from the other side of the fence. Ghosts demanding to be rehoused, re-homed; to be taken out of the stinking rubbish bin and reinstated.