WSmcAC2e

1PART ONE    Chapter 1    It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
2Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
3The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.
4At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall.
5It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.
6Winston made for the stairs.
7It was no use trying the lift.
8Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours.
9It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week.
10The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way.
11On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall.
12It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move.
13BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
14Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron.
15The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall.
16Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable.
17The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
18He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party.
19His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
20Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.
21Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere.
22The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner.
23There was one on the house-front immediately opposite.
24BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own.
25Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC.
26In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight.
27It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows.
28The patrols did not matter, however.
29Only the Thought Police mattered.
30Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan.
31The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously.
32Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.
33There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.
34How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.
35It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.
36But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.
37You 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.
38Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen.
39It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.
40A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape.
41This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania.
42He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this.
43Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
44And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses?
45But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
46The Ministry of Truth--Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was the official language of Oceania.
47For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix.
48]--was startlingly different from any other object in sight.
49It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air.
50From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:     WAR IS PEACE   FREEDOM IS SLAVERY   IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH   The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.
51Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size.
52So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously.
53They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided.
54The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts.
55The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war.
56The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order.
57And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs.
58Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
59The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one.
60There were no windows in it at all.
61Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it.
62It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.
63Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
64Winston turned round abruptly.
65He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.
66He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen.
67By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast.
68He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN.
69It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit.
70Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
71Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes.
72The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club.
73The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful.
74He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor.
75With the next he was more successful.
76He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen.
77From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.
78For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position.
79Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window.
80To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves.
81By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went.
82He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen.
83It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
84But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer.
85It was a peculiarly beautiful book.
86Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past.
87He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that.
88He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it.
89Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way.
90He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty.
91At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose.
92He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase.
93Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.
94The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary.
95This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.
96Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off.
97The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil.
98Actually he was not used to writing by hand.
99Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose.
100He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second.
101A tremor had gone through his bowels.
102To mark the paper was the decisive act.
103In small clumsy letters he wrote:      April 4th, 1984.
104He sat back.
105A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him.
106To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984.
107It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
108For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary?
109For the future, for the unborn.
110His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word DOUBLETHINK.
111For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him.
112How could you communicate with the future?
113It was of its nature impossible.
114Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
115For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper.
116The telescreen had changed over to strident military music.
117It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.
118For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage.
119The actual writing would be easy.
120All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.
121At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up.
122Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably.
123He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed.
124The seconds were ticking by.
125He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
126Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down.
127His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:      April 4th, 1984.
128Last night to the flicks.
129All war films.
130One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean.
131Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank.
132then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it.
133there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms.
134little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him.
135then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood.
136then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never----   Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp.
137He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish.
138But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down.
139It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.
140It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.
141It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate.
142Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room.
143One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors.
144He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department.
145Presumably--since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner--she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines.
146She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements.
147A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
148Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her.
149He knew the reason.
150It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her.
151He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones.
152It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
153But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most.
154Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror.
155The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police.
156That, it was true, was very unlikely.
157Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
158The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature.
159A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching.
160O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face.
161In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner.
162He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming--in some indefinable way, curiously civilized.
163It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox.
164Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years.
165He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's physique.
166Much more it was because of a secretly held belief--or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope--that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was not perfect.
167Something in his face suggested it irresistibly.
168And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence.
169But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone.
170Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so.
171At this moment O'Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over.
172He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away.
173A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them.
174The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
175The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room.
176It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck.
177The Hate had started.
178As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen.
179There were hisses here and there among the audience.
180The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust.
181Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.
182The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure.
183He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity.
184All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.
185Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
186Winston's diaphragm was constricted.
187He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions.
188It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched.
189It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality.
190Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it.
191He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed--and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life.
192And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar.
193The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice.
194Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.
195The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically.
196He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other.
197But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.
198Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him.
199A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police.
200He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State.
201The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be.
202There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there.
203It was a book without a title.
204People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK.
205But one knew of such things only through vague rumours.
206Neither the Brotherhood nor THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
207In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy.
208People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.
209The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish.
210Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed.
211He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave.
212The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine!
213Swine!
214Swine!
215' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen.
216It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably.
217In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair.
218The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in.
219Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary.
220A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
221And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
222Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies.
223And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true.
224At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.
225It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that by a voluntary act.
226Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him.
227Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind.
228He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon.
229He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian.
230He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.
231Better than before, moreover, he realized WHY it was that he hated her.
232He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
233The Hate rose to its climax.
234The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep.
235Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats.
236But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen.
237Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying.
238It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.
239Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:     WAR IS PEACE   FREEDOM IS SLAVERY   IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH   But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately.
240The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her.
241With a tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!
242' she extended her arms towards the screen.
243Then she buried her face in her hands.
244It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.
245At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B!
246.
247.
248.
249B-B!
250'--over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms.
251For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up.
252It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion.
253Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
254Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold.
255In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of 'B-B!
256.
257.
258.
259B-B!
260' always filled him with horror.
261Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise.
262To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.
263But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him.
264And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened--if, indeed, it did happen.
265Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye.
266O'Brien had stood up.
267He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture.
268But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew--yes, he KNEW!
269--that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself.
270An unmistakable message had passed.
271It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes.
272'I am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him.
273'I know precisely what you are feeling.
274I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust.
275But don't worry, I am on your side!
276' And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.
277That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened.
278Such incidents never had any sequel.
279All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party.
280Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all--perhaps the Brotherhood really existed!
281It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth.
282Some days he believed in it, some days not.
283There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls--once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition.
284It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything.
285He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O'Brien again.
286The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind.
287It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it.
288For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story.
289But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
290Winston roused himself and sat up straighter.
291He let out a belch.
292The gin was rising from his stomach.
293His eyes re-focused on the page.
294He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action.
295And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before.
296His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals--     DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER   DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER   DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER   DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER   DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER   over and over again, filling half a page.
297He could not help feeling a twinge of panic.
298It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
299He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless.
300Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference.
301Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference.
302The Thought Police would get him just the same.
303He had committed--would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself.
304Thoughtcrime, they called it.
305Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever.
306You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
307It was always at night--the arrests invariably happened at night.
308The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed.
309In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest.
310People simply disappeared, always during the night.
311Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.
312You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.
313For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria.
314He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:      theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother----   He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen.
315The next moment he started violently.
316There was a knocking at the door.
317Already!
318He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt.
319But no, the knocking was repeated.
320The worst thing of all would be to delay.
321His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless.
322He got up and moved heavily towards the door.
323Chapter 2    As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he had left the diary open on the table.
324DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room.
325It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done.
326But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.
327He drew in his breath and opened the door.
328Instantly a warm wave of relief flowed through him.
329A colourless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face, was standing outside.
330'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, 'I thought I heard you come in.
331Do you think you could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink?
332It's got blocked up and----'  It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor.
333('Mrs' was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party--you were supposed to call everyone 'comrade'--but with some women one used it instinctively.
334) She was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older.
335One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face.
336Winston followed her down the passage.
337These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation.
338Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces.
339The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy.
340Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
341'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs Parsons vaguely.
342The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in a different way.
343Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal.
344Games impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
345On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother.
346There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which--one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how--was the sweat of some person not present at the moment.
347In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing from the telescreen.
348'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance at the door.
349'They haven't been out today.
350And of course----'  She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle.
351The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.
352Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe.
353He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing.
354Mrs Parsons looked on helplessly.
355'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,' she said.
356'He loves anything like that.
357He's ever so good with his hands, Tom is.
358'  Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth.
359He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.
360At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age.
361At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally.
362He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years.
363An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
364'Have you got a spanner?
365' said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the angle-joint.
366'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate.
367'I don't know, I'm sure.
368Perhaps the children----'  There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the children charged into the living-room.
369Mrs Parsons brought the spanner.
370Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe.
371He cleaned his fingers as best he could in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.
372'Up with your hands!
373' yelled a savage voice.
374A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
375Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies.
376Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.
377'You're a traitor!
378' yelled the boy.
379'You're a thought-criminal!
380You're a Eurasian spy!
381I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!
382'  Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!
383' and 'Thought-criminal!
384' the little girl imitating her brother in every movement.
385It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.
386There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.
387It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.
388Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again.
389In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.
390'They do get so noisy,' she said.
391'They're disappointed because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is.
392I'm too busy to take them.
393and Tom won't be back from work in time.
394'  'Why can't we go and see the hanging?
395' roared the boy in his huge voice.
396'Want to see the hanging!
397Want to see the hanging!
398' chanted the little girl, still capering round.
399Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered.
400This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle.
401Children always clamoured to be taken to see it.
402He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door.
403But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow.
404It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him.
405He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
406'Goldstein!
407' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him.
408But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman's greyish face.
409Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck.
410The music from the telescreen had stopped.
411Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
412With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror.
413Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy.
414Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.
415What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party.
416On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it.
417The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother--it was all a sort of glorious game to them.
418All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals.
419It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.
420And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which 'The Times' did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak--'child hero' was the phrase generally used--had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
421The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off.
422He picked up his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write in the diary.
423Suddenly he began thinking of O'Brien again.
424Years ago--how long was it?
425Seven years it must be--he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room.
426And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
427' It was said very quietly, almost casually--a statement, not a command.
428He had walked on without pausing.
429What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him.
430It was only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance.
431He could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that he had seen O'Brien for the first time, nor could he remember when he had first identified the voice as O'Brien's.
432But at any rate the identification existed.
433It was O'Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.
434Winston had never been able to feel sure--even after this morning's flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy.
435Nor did it even seem to matter greatly.
436There was a link of understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship.
437'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' he had said.
438Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.
439The voice from the telescreen paused.
440A trumpet call, clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air.
441The voice continued raspingly:  'Attention!
442Your attention, please!
443A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front.
444Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory.
445I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end.
446Here is the newsflash----'  Bad news coming, thought Winston.
447And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.
448Winston belched again.
449The gin was wearing off, leaving a deflated feeling.
450The telescreen--perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate--crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thee'.
451You were supposed to stand to attention.
452However, in his present position he was invisible.
453'Oceania, 'tis for thee' gave way to lighter music.
454Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the telescreen.
455The day was still cold and clear.
456Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar.
457About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present.
458Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished.
459Ingsoc.
460The sacred principles of Ingsoc.
461Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past.
462He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster.
463He was alone.
464The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
465What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side?
466And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER?
467Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:     WAR IS PEACE   FREEDOM IS SLAVERY   IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH   He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket.
468There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother.
469Even from the coin the eyes pursued you.
470On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette packet--everywhere.
471Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you.
472Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed--no escape.
473Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
474The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress.
475His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape.
476It was too strong, it could not be stormed.
477A thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down.
478He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary.
479For the future, for the past--for an age that might be imaginary.
480And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation.
481The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour.
482Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory.
483How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?
484The telescreen struck fourteen.
485He must leave in ten minutes.
486He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
487Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him.
488He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
489But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken.
490It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
491He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:      To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone--to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:    From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink--greetings!
492He was already dead, he reflected.
493It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step.
494The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.
495He wrote:      Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
496Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.
497Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained.
498It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you.
499Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fashioned pen, WHAT he had been writing--and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter.
500He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
501He put the diary away in the drawer.
502It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered.
503A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious.
504With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved.
505Chapter 3    Winston was dreaming of his mother.
506He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared.
507She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair.
508His father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing spectacles.
509The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the fifties.
510At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms.
511He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes.
512Both of them were looking up at him.
513They were down in some subterranean place--the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave--but it was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards.
514They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water.
515There was still air in the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the green waters which in another moment must hide them from sight for ever.
516He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here.
517He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces.
518There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things.
519He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own.
520It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.
521The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible.
522Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.
523His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable.
524Such things, he saw, could not happen today.
525Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.
526All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.
527Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground.
528The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world.
529In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country.
530It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there.
531In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women's hair.
532Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.
533The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field.
534With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside.
535Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it.
536What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside.
537With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.
538That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time.
539Winston woke up with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips.
540The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds.
541It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers.
542Winston wrenched his body out of bed--naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600--and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair.
543The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes.
544The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up.
545It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps.
546His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.
547'Thirty to forty group!
548' yapped a piercing female voice.
549'Thirty to forty group!
550Take your places, please.
551Thirties to forties!
552'  Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.
553'Arms bending and stretching!
554' she rapped out.
555'Take your time by me.
556ONE, two, three, four!
557ONE, two, three, four!
558Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it!
559ONE, two, three four!
560ONE two, three, four!
561.
562.
563.
564'  The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat.
565As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood.
566It was extraordinarily difficult.
567Beyond the late fifties everything faded.
568When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness.
569You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing.
570Everything had been different then.
571Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different.
572Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.
573Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise.
574Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester.
575He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father's hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest.
576His mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way behind them.
577She was carrying his baby sister--or perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had been born then.
578Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station.
579There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the other.
580Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side on a bunk.
581The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears.
582He reeked of gin.
583It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling from his eyes were pure gin.
584But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable.
585In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened.
586It also seemed to him that he knew what it was.
587Someone whom the old man loved--a little granddaughter, perhaps--had been killed.
588Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:  'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em.
589I said so, Ma, didn't I?
590That's what comes of trusting 'em.
591I said so all along.
592We didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers.
593'  But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted Winston could not now remember.
594Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.
595For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly.
596But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one.
597At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia.
598In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines.
599Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia.
600But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control.
601Officially the change of partners had never happened.
602Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
603The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
604The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles)--the frightening thing was that it might all be true.
605If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, IT NEVER HAPPENED--that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
606The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia.
607He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago.
608But where did that knowledge exist?
609Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.
610And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth.
611'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
612' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered.
613Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.
614It was quite simple.
615All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.
616'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.
617'Stand easy!
618' barked the instructress, a little more genially.
619Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air.
620His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink.
621To 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.
622That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
623Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
624The instructress had called them to attention again.
625'And now let's see which of us can touch our toes!
626' she said enthusiastically.
627'Right over from the hips, please, comrades.
628ONE-two!
629ONE-two!
630.
631.
632.
633'  Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit.
634The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations.
635The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed.
636For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?
637He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother.
638He thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but it was impossible to be certain.
639In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days.
640His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides.
641There was no knowing how much of this legend was true and how much invented.
642Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence.
643He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form--'English Socialism', that is to say--it had been current earlier.
644Everything melted into mist.
645Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie.
646It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes.
647He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood.
648But you could prove nothing.
649There was never any evidence.
650Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of an historical fact.
651And on that occasion----  'Smith!
652' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen.
653'6079 Smith W.!
654Yes, YOU!
655Bend lower, please!
656You can do better than that.
657You're not trying.
658Lower, please!
659THAT'S better, comrade.
660Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.
661'  A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body.
662His face remained completely inscrutable.
663Never show dismay!
664Never show resentment!
665A single flicker of the eyes could give you away.
666He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and--one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency--bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
667'THERE, comrades!
668THAT'S how I want to see you doing it.
669Watch me again.
670I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children.
671Now look.
672' She bent over again.
673'You see MY knees aren't bent.
674You can all do it if you want to,' she added as she straightened herself up.
675'Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes.
676We don't all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit.
677Remember our boys on the Malabar front!
678And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses!
679Just think what THEY have to put up with.
680Now try again.
681That's better, comrade, that's MUCH better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
682Chapter 4    With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles.
683Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.
684In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices.
685To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating.
686This last was for the disposal of waste paper.
687Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor.
688For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes.
689When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
690Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled.
691Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon--not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words--which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes.
692They ran:   times 17.
6933.
69484 bb speech malreported africa rectify  times 19.
69512.
69683 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue  times 14.
6972.
69884 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify  times 3.
69912.
70083 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling   With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside.
701It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last.
702The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.
703Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of 'The Times', which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay.
704The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify.
705For example, it appeared from 'The Times' of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa.
706As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone.
707It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.
708Or again, 'The Times' of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan.
709Today's issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong.
710Winston's job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones.
711As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes.
712As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a 'categorical pledge' were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984.
713Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week.
714All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
715As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of 'The Times' and pushed them into the pneumatic tube.
716Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
717What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms.
718As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of 'The Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.
719This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.
720Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.
721In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.
722All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
723In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
724The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction.
725A number of 'The Times' which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it.
726Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made.
727Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.
728But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery.
729It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.
730Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie.
731Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.
732A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.
733For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs.
734The actual output was given as sixty-two millions.
735Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled.
736In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions.
737Very likely no boots had been produced at all.
738Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared.
739All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.
740And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small.
741Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.
742Winston glanced across the hall.
743In the corresponding cubicle on the other side a small, precise-looking, dark-chinned man named Tillotson was working steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite.
744He had the air of trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen.
745He looked up, and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Winston's direction.
746Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he was employed on.
747People in the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs.
748In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name, though he daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the Two Minutes Hate.
749He knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed.
750There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier.
751And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies.
752And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department.
753Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.
754There were the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.
755There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices.
756There were the armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall.
757There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.
758And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.
759And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels--with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.
760And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat.
761There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally.
762Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.
763There was even a whole sub-section--Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak--engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.
764Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while Winston was working, but they were simple matters, and he had disposed of them before the Two Minutes Hate interrupted him.
765When the Hate was over he returned to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and settled down to his main job of the morning.
766Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his work.
767Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem--delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say.
768Winston was good at this kind of thing.
769On occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of 'The Times' leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak.
770He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier.
771It ran:      times 3.
77212.
77383 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling   In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:   The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in 'The Times' of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons.
774Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.
775Winston read through the offending article.
776Big Brother's Order for the Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an organization known as FFCC, which supplied cigarettes and other comforts to the sailors in the Floating Fortresses.
777A certain Comrade Withers, a prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.
778Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no reasons given.
779One could assume that Withers and his associates were now in disgrace, but there had been no report of the matter in the Press or on the telescreen.
780That was to be expected, since it was unusual for political offenders to be put on trial or even publicly denounced.
781The great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years.
782More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again.
783One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them.
784In some cases they might not even be dead.
785Perhaps thirty people personally known to Winston, not counting his parents, had disappeared at one time or another.
786Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip.
787In the cubicle across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching secretively over his speakwrite.
788He raised his head for a moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash.
789Winston wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged on the same job as himself.
790It was perfectly possible.
791So tricky a piece of work would never be entrusted to a single person: on the other hand, to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an act of fabrication was taking place.
792Very likely as many as a dozen people were now working away on rival versions of what Big Brother had actually said.
793And presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.
794Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced.
795Perhaps it was for corruption or incompetence.
796Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordinate.
797Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had been suspected of heretical tendencies.
798Or perhaps--what was likeliest of all--the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government.
799The only real clue lay in the words 'refs unpersons', which indicated that Withers was already dead.
800You could not invariably assume this to be the case when people were arrested.
801Sometimes they were released and allowed to remain at liberty for as much as a year or two years before being executed.
802Very occasionally some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever.
803Withers, however, was already an UNPERSON.
804He did not exist: he had never existed.
805Winston decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse the tendency of Big Brother's speech.
806It was better to make it deal with something totally unconnected with its original subject.
807He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much.
808What was needed was a piece of pure fantasy.
809Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances.
810There were occasions when Big Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed.
811Today he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy.
812It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.
813Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them ('What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades?
814The lesson--which is also one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc--that,' etc.
815, etc.
816), easy to imitate.
817At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a sub-machine gun, and a model helicopter.
818At six--a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules--he had joined the Spies, at nine he had been a troop leader.
819At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies.
820At seventeen he had been a district organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League.
821At nineteen he had designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst.
822At twenty-three he had perished in action.
823Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches and all--an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible to contemplate without feelings of envy.
824Big Brother added a few remarks on the purity and single-mindedness of Comrade Ogilvy's life.
825He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.
826He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally.
827Winston debated with himself whether to award Comrade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit: in the end he decided against it because of the unnecessary cross-referencing that it would entail.
828Once again he glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle.
829Something seemed to tell him with certainty that Tillotson was busy on the same job as himself.
830There was no way of knowing whose job would finally be adopted, but he felt a profound conviction that it would be his own.
831Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact.
832It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.
833Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
834Chapter 5    In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward.
835The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy.
836From the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin.
837On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.
838'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at Winston's back.
839He turned round.
840It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department.
841Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right word.
842You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others.
843Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak.
844Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
845He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.
846'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,' he said.
847'Not one!
848' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste.
849'I've tried all over the place.
850They don't exist any longer.
851'  Everyone kept asking you for razor blades.
852Actually he had two unused ones which he was hoarding up.
853There had been a famine of them for months past.
854At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply.
855Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades.
856You could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the 'free' market.
857'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added untruthfully.
858The queue gave another jerk forward.
859As they halted he turned and faced Syme again.
860Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.
861'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?
862' said Syme.
863'I was working,' said Winston indifferently.
864'I shall see it on the flicks, I suppose.
865'  'A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.
866His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face.
867'I know you,' the eyes seemed to say, 'I see through you.
868I know very well why you didn't go to see those prisoners hanged.
869' In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox.
870He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love.
871Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting.
872Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.
873'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently.
874'I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together.
875I like to see them kicking.
876And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue--a quite bright blue.
877That's the detail that appeals to me.
878'  'Nex', please!
879' yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.
880Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille.
881On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.
882'There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said Syme.
883'Let's pick up a gin on the way.
884'  The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs.
885They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit.
886Winston took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down.
887When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry.
888He began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat.
889Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied their pannikins.
890From the table at Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of the room.
891'How is the Dictionary getting on?
892' said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.
893'Slowly,' said Syme.
894'I'm on the adjectives.
895It's fascinating.
896'  He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak.
897He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.
898'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said.
899'We're getting the language into its final shape--the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else.
900When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again.
901You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words.
902But not a bit of it!
903We're destroying words--scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.
904We're cutting the language down to the bone.
905The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.
906'  He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion.
907His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.
908'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
909Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well.
910It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms.
911After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word?
912A word contains its opposite in itself.
913Take "good", for instance.
914If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"?
915"Ungood" will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.
916Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them?
917"Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still.
918Of course we use those forms already.
919but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else.
920In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word.
921Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?
922It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought.
923A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of Big Brother.
924Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
925'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost sadly.
926'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak.
927I've read some of those pieces that you write in "The Times" occasionally.
928They're good enough, but they're translations.
929In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning.
930You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words.
931Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?
932'  Winston did know that, of course.
933He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak.
934Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:  'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
935In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
936Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
937Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point.
938But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead.
939Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.
940Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime.
941It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control.
942But in the end there won't be any need even for that.
943The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
944Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.
945'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?
946'  'Except----' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
947It had been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the proles,' but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox.
948Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
949'The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly.
950'By 2050--earlier, probably--all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared.
951The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed.
952Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron--they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.
953Even the literature of the Party will change.
954Even the slogans will change.
955How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished?
956The whole climate of thought will be different.
957In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now.
958Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think.
959Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
960'  One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized.
961He is too intelligent.
962He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly.
963The Party does not like such people.
964One day he will disappear.
965It is written in his face.
966Winston had finished his bread and cheese.
967He turned a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee.
968At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away.
969A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said.
970From time to time Winston caught some such remark as 'I think you're so right, I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice.
971But the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking.
972Winston knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held some important post in the Fiction Department.
973He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth.
974His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes.
975What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word.
976Just once Winston caught a phrase--'complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism'--jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid.
977For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking.
978And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature.
979He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front--it made no difference.
980Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc.
981As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy.
982It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx.
983The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
984Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew.
985The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din.
986'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck.
987It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings.
988Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.
989'  Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again.
990He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a thought-criminal if he saw any reason for doing so.
991There was something subtly wrong with Syme.
992There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity.
993You could not say that he was unorthodox.
994He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach.
995Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him.
996He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians.
997There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place was somehow ill-omened.
998The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged.
999Goldstein himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago.
1000Syme's fate was not difficult to foresee.
1001And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police.
1002So would anybody else, for that matter: but Syme more than most.
1003Zeal was not enough.
1004Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
1005Syme looked up.
1006'Here comes Parsons,' he said.
1007Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that bloody fool'.
1008Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room--a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face.
1009At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish.
1010His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so much so that although he was wearing the regulation overalls, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies.
1011In visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms.
1012Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so.
1013He greeted them both with a cheery 'Hullo, hullo!
1014' and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat.
1015Beads of moisture stood out all over his pink face.
1016His powers of sweating were extraordinary.
1017At the Community Centre you could always tell when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat handle.
1018Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there was a long column of words, and was studying it with an ink-pencil between his fingers.
1019'Look at him working away in the lunch hour,' said Parsons, nudging Winston.
1020'Keenness, eh?
1021What's that you've got there, old boy?
1022Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect.
1023Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm chasing you.
1024It's that sub you forgot to give me.
1025'  'Which sub is that?
1026' said Winston, automatically feeling for money.
1027About a quarter of one's salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.
1028'For Hate Week.
1029You know--the house-by-house fund.
1030I'm treasurer for our block.
1031We're making an all-out effort--going to put on a tremendous show.
1032I tell you, it won't be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the biggest outfit of flags in the whole street.
1033Two dollars you promised me.
1034'  Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.
1035'By the way, old boy,' he said.
1036'I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday.
1037I gave him a good dressing-down for it.
1038In fact I told him I'd take the catapult away if he does it again.
1039'  'I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,' said Winston.
1040'Ah, well--what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn't it?
1041Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness!
1042All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course.
1043D'you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted way?
1044She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man.
1045They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.
1046'  'What did they do that for?
1047' said Winston, somewhat taken aback.
1048Parsons went on triumphantly:  'My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent--might have been dropped by parachute, for instance.
1049But here's the point, old boy.
1050What do you think put her on to him in the first place?
1051She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes--said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before.
1052So the chances were he was a foreigner.
1053Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?
1054'  'What happened to the man?
1055' said Winston.
1056'Ah, that I couldn't say, of course.
1057But I wouldn't be altogether surprised if----' Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
1058'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.
1059'Of course we can't afford to take chances,' agreed Winston dutifully.
1060'What I mean to say, there is a war on,' said Parsons.
1061As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above their heads.
1062However, it was not the proclamation of a military victory this time, but merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.
1063'Comrades!
1064' cried an eager youthful voice.
1065'Attention, comrades!
1066We have glorious news for you.
1067We have won the battle for production!
1068Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year.
1069All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.
1070Here are some of the completed figures.
1071Foodstuffs----'  The phrase 'our new, happy life' recurred several times.
1072It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty.
1073Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom.
1074He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they were in some way a cause for satisfaction.
1075He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco.
1076With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top.
1077Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal.
1078The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left.
1079For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen.
1080It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week.
1081And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week.
1082Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours?
1083Yes, they swallowed it.
1084Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal.
1085The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes.
1086Syme, too--in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it.
1087Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a memory?
1088The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen.
1089As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies--more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity.
1090Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.
1091As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern.
1092He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life.
1093Had it always been like this?
1094Had food always tasted like this?
1095He looked round the canteen.
1096A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes.
1097Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.
1098It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different.
1099In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient--nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin.
1100And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was NOT the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes?
1101Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
1102He looked round the canteen again.
1103Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls.
1104On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side.
1105How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal--tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree--existed and even predominated.
1106Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured.
1107It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes.
1108It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.
1109The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music.
1110Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.
1111'The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a good job this year,' he said with a knowing shake of his head.
1112'By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose you haven't got any razor blades you can let me have?
1113'  'Not one,' said Winston.
1114'I've been using the same blade for six weeks myself.
1115'  'Ah, well--just thought I'd ask you, old boy.
1116'  'Sorry,' said Winston.
1117The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Ministry's announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever.
1118For some reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face.
1119Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police.
1120Mrs Parsons would be vaporized.
1121Syme would be vaporized.
1122Winston would be vaporized.
1123O'Brien would be vaporized.
1124Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized.
1125The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized.
1126The little beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized.
1127And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department--she would never be vaporized either.
1128It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.
1129At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk.
1130The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him.
1131It was the girl with dark hair.
1132She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity.
1133The instant she caught his eye she looked away again.
1134The sweat started out on Winston's backbone.
1135A horrible pang of terror went through him.
1136It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind.
1137Why was she watching him?
1138Why did she keep following him about?
1139Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards.
1140But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no apparent need to do so.
1141Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and make sure whether he was shouting loudly enough.
1142His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all.
1143He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control.
1144It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen.
1145The smallest thing could give you away.
1146A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.
1147In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence.
1148There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called.
1149The girl had turned her back on him again.
1150Perhaps after all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running.
1151His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on the edge of the table.
1152He would finish smoking it after work, if he could keep the tobacco in it.
1153Quite likely the person at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted.
1154Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket.
1155Parsons had begun talking again.
1156'Did I ever tell you, old boy,' he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, 'about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman's skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.?
1157Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches.
1158Burned her quite badly, I believe.
1159Little beggars, eh?
1160But keen as mustard!
1161That's a first-rate training they give them in the Spies nowadays--better than in my day, even.
1162What d'you think's the latest thing they've served them out with?
1163Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes!
1164My little girl brought one home the other night--tried it out on our sitting-room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the hole.
1165Of course it's only a toy, mind you.
1166Still, gives 'em the right idea, eh?
1167'  At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle.
1168It was the signal to return to work.
1169All three men sprang to their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston's cigarette.
1170Chapter 6    Winston was writing in his diary:      It was three years ago.
1171It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations.
1172She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light.
1173She had a young face, painted very thick.
1174It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips.
1175Party women never paint their faces.
1176There was nobody else in the street, and no telescreens.
1177She said two dollars.
1178I----   For the moment it was too difficult to go on.
1179He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring.
1180He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice.
1181Or 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.
1182Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.
1183At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
1184He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back; a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief-case.
1185They were a few metres apart when the left side of the man's face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm.
1186It happened again just as they were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual.
1187He remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for.
1188And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious.
1189The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep.
1190There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see.
1191He drew his breath and went on writing:      I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen.
1192There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low.
1193She----   His teeth were set on edge.
1194He would have liked to spit.
1195Simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen he thought of Katharine, his wife.
1196Winston was married--had been married, at any rate: probably he still was married, so far as he knew his wife was not dead.
1197He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so.
1198Only the proles used scent.
1199In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.
1200When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years or thereabouts.
1201Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, of course, but it was one of those rules that you could occasionally nerve yourself to break.
1202It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter.
1203To be caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour camp: not more, if you had committed no other offence.
1204And it was easy enough, provided that you could avoid being caught in the act.
1205The poorer quarters swarmed with women who were ready to sell themselves.
1206Some could even be purchased for a bottle of gin, which the proles were not supposed to drink.
1207Tacitly the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed.
1208Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class.
1209The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between Party members.
1210But--though this was one of the crimes that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed to--it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.
1211The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control.
1212Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act.
1213Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it.
1214All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and--though the principle was never clearly stated--permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another.
1215The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party.
1216Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema.
1217This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards.
1218There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes.
1219All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (ARTSEM, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions.
1220This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party.
1221The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.
1222He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so.
1223And as far as the women were concerned, the Party's efforts were largely successful.
1224He thought again of Katharine.
1225It must be nine, ten--nearly eleven years since they had parted.
1226It was curious how seldom he thought of her.
1227For days at a time he was capable of forgetting that he had ever been married.
1228They had only been together for about fifteen months.
1229The Party did not permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases where there were no children.
1230Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements.
1231She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it.
1232Very early in her married life he had decided--though perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people--that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered.
1233She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.
1234'The human sound-track' he nicknamed her in his own mind.
1235Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing--sex.
1236As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen.
1237To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image.
1238And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength.
1239The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression.
1240She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but SUBMITTING.
1241It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible.
1242But even then he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate.
1243But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused this.
1244They must, she said, produce a child if they could.
1245So the performance continued to happen, once a week quite regularly, whenever it was not impossible.
1246She even used to remind him of it in the morning, as something which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten.
1247She had two names for it.
1248One was 'making a baby', and the other was 'our duty to the Party' (yes, she had actually used that phrase).
1249Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round.
1250But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they parted.
1251Winston sighed inaudibly.
1252He picked up his pen again and wrote:      She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt.
1253I----   He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of Katharine's white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the Party.
1254Why did it always have to be like this?
1255Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years?
1256But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event.
1257The women of the Party were all alike.
1258Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty.
1259By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them.
1260His reason told him that there must be exceptions, but his heart did not believe it.
1261They were all impregnable, as the Party intended that they should be.
1262And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life.
1263The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion.
1264Desire was thoughtcrime.
1265Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.
1266But the rest of the story had got to be written down.
1267He wrote:      I turned up the lamp.
1268When I saw her in the light----   After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp had seemed very bright.
1269For the first time he could see the woman properly.
1270He had taken a step towards her and then halted, full of lust and terror.
1271He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here.
1272It was perfectly possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out: for that matter they might be waiting outside the door at this moment.
1273If he went away without even doing what he had come here to do----!
1274It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed.
1275What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was OLD.
1276The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask.
1277There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness.
1278She had no teeth at all.
1279He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:      When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least.
1280But I went ahead and did it just the same.
1281He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again.
1282He had written it down at last, but it made no difference.
1283The therapy had not worked.
1284The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
1285Chapter 7    'If there is hope,' wrote Winston, 'it lies in the proles.
1286'  If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.
1287The Party could not be overthrown from within.
1288Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another.
1289Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes.
1290Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word.
1291But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength.
1292would have no need to conspire.
1293They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.
1294If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning.
1295Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it?
1296And yet----!
1297He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women's voices--had burst from a side-street a little way ahead.
1298It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh!
1299' that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell.
1300His heart had leapt.
1301It's started!
1302he had thought.
1303A riot!
1304The proles are breaking loose at last!
1305When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship.
1306But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels.
1307It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans.
1308They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get.
1309Now the supply had unexpectedly given out.
1310The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve.
1311There was a fresh outburst of yells.
1312Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands.
1313For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off.
1314Winston watched them disgustedly.
1315And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats!
1316Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
1317He wrote:      Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
1318That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks.
1319The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage.
1320Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six.
1321But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.
1322In reality very little was known about the proles.
1323It was not necessary to know much.
1324So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance.
1325Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern.
1326They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty.
1327Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds.
1328To keep them in control was not difficult.
1329A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party.
1330It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings.
1331All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations.
1332And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.
1333The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.
1334The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes.
1335Even the civil police interfered with them very little.
1336There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance.
1337In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code.
1338The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them.
1339Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted.
1340For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it.
1341They were beneath suspicion.
1342As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and animals are free.
1343'  Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer.
1344It had begun itching again.
1345The thing you invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution had really been like.
1346He took out of the drawer a copy of a children's history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copying a passage into the diary:      In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know today.
1347It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under.
1348Children no older than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water.
1349But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them.
1350These rich men were called capitalists.
1351They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page.
1352You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat.
1353This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear it.
1354The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave.
1355They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money.
1356If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death.
1357When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'.
1358The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and----   But he knew the rest of the catalogue.
1359There would be mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe.
1360There was also something called the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children.
1361It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.
1362How could you tell how much of it was lies?
1363It MIGHT be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution.
1364The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.
1365It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.
1366Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve.
1367Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end.
1368The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering--a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting--three hundred million people all with the same face.
1369The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.
1370He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.
1371He reached down and scratched his ankle again.
1372Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations--that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago.
1373Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.
1374The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent.
1375The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300--and so it went on.
1376It was like a single equation with two unknowns.
1377It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.
1378For all he knew there might never have been any such law as the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.
1379Everything faded into mist.
1380The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
1381Just once in his life he had possessed--AFTER the event: that was what counted--concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification.
1382He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds.
1383In 1973, it must have been--at any rate, it was at about the time when he and Katharine had parted.
1384But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.
1385The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all.
1386By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself.
1387All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter-revolutionaries.
1388Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at which they made confession of their crimes.
1389Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
1390It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested.
1391As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way.
1392They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
1393After confessing to these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important.
1394All three had written long, abject articles in 'The Times', analysing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.
1395Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe.
1396He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye.
1397They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the last great figures left over from the heroic days of the Party.
1398The glamour of the underground struggle and the civil war still faintly clung to them.
1399He had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother.
1400But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two.
1401No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end.
1402They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.
1403There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them.
1404It was not wise even to be seen in the neighbourhood of such people.
1405They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves which was the speciality of the cafe.
1406Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston.
1407Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution.
1408Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in The Times.
1409They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing.
1410Always they were a rehashing of the ancient themes--slum tenements, starving children, street battles, capitalists in top hats--even on the barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to their top hats an endless, hopeless effort to get back into the past.
1411He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips.
1412At one time he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction.
1413He seemed to be breaking up before one's eyes, like a mountain crumbling.
1414It was the lonely hour of fifteen.
1415Winston could not now remember how he had come to be in the cafe at such a time.
1416The place was almost empty.
1417A tinny music was trickling from the telescreens.
1418The three men sat in their corner almost motionless, never speaking.
1419Uncommanded, the waiter brought fresh glasses of gin.
1420There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the pieces set out but no game started.
1421And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to the telescreens.
1422The tune that they were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed too.
1423There came into it--but it was something hard to describe.
1424It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note.
1425And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:     Under the spreading chestnut tree   I sold you and you sold me:   There lie they, and here lie we   Under the spreading chestnut tree.
1426The three men never stirred.
1427But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears.
1428And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing AT WHAT he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.
1429A little later all three were re-arrested.
1430It appeared that they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release.
1431At their second trial they confessed to all their old crimes over again, with a whole string of new ones.
1432They were executed, and their fate was recorded in the Party histories, a warning to posterity.
1433About five years after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten.
1434The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance.
1435It was a half-page torn out of 'The Times' of about ten years earlier--the top half of the page, so that it included the date--and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York.
1436Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
1437There was no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the caption at the bottom.
1438The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil.
1439They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets.
1440The date had stuck in Winston's memory because it chanced to be midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in countless other places as well.
1441There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.
1442Of course, this was not in itself a discovery.
1443Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of.
1444But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory.
1445It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known.
1446He had gone straight on working.
1447As soon as he saw what the photograph was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of paper.
1448Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the point of view of the telescreen.
1449He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible.
1450To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up.
1451He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear that some accident--a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for instance--would betray him.
1452Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers.
1453Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes.
1454That was ten--eleven years ago.
1455Today, probably, he would have kept that photograph.
1456It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory.
1457Was the Party's hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer HAD ONCE existed?
1458But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence.
1459Already, at the time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed their country.
1460Since then there had been other changes--two, three, he could not remember how many.
1461Very likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance.
1462The past not only changed, but changed continuously.
1463What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken.
1464The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious.
1465He took up his pen again and wrote:      I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
1466He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic.
1467Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
1468At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable.
1469He might be ALONE in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic.
1470But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.
1471He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece.
1472The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own.
1473It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you--something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses.
1474In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.
1475It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.
1476Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.
1477The heresy of heresies was common sense.
1478And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right.
1479For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four?
1480Or that the force of gravity works?
1481Or that the past is unchangeable?
1482If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?
1483But no!
1484His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord.
1485The face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association, had floated into his mind.
1486He knew, with more certainty than before, that O'Brien was on his side.
1487He was writing the diary for O'Brien--TO O'Brien: it was like an interminable letter which no one would ever read, but which was addressed to a particular person and took its colour from that fact.
1488The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
1489It was their final, most essential command.
1490His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer.
1491And yet he was in the right!
1492They were wrong and he was right.
1493The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended.
1494Truisms are true, hold on to that!
1495The solid world exists, its laws do not change.
1496Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre.
1497With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:      Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
1498If that is granted, all else follows.
1499Chapter 8    From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee--real coffee, not Victory Coffee--came floating out into the street.
1500Winston paused involuntarily.
1501For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood.
1502Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
1503He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing.
1504This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked.
1505In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed.
1506It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous.
1507There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.
1508But this evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had tempted him.
1509The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable.
1510On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.
1511'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in the proles.
1512' The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
1513He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station.
1514He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes.
1515There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles.
1516In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers.
1517Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up.
1518Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity.
1519Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded across their aprons were talking outside a doorway.
1520Winston caught scraps of conversation as he approached.
1521'"Yes," I says to 'er, "that's all very well," I says.
1522"But if you'd of been in my place you'd of done the same as what I done.
1523It's easy to criticize," I says, "but you ain't got the same problems as what I got".
1524'  'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it.
1525That's jest where it is.
1526'  The strident voices stopped abruptly.
1527The women studied him in hostile silence as he went past.
1528But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal.
1529The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a street like this.
1530Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business there.
1531The patrols might stop you if you happened to run into them.
1532'May I see your papers, comrade?
1533What are you doing here?
1534What time did you leave work?
1535Is this your usual way home?
1536'--and so on and so forth.
1537Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual route: but it was enough to draw attention to you if the Thought Police heard about it.
1538Suddenly the whole street was in commotion.
1539There were yells of warning from all sides.
1540People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits.
1541A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapt back again, all in one movement.
1542At the same instant a man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.
1543'Steamer!
1544' he yelled.
1545'Look out, guv'nor!
1546Bang over'ead!
1547Lay down quick!
1548'  'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs.
1549Winston promptly flung himself on his face.
1550The proles were nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind.
1551They seemed to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled faster than sound.
1552Winston clasped his forearms above his head.
1553There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered on to his back.
1554When he stood up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window.
1555He walked on.
1556The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres up the street.
1557A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around the ruins.
1558There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak.
1559When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist.
1560Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.
1561He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right.
1562Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened.
1563It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ('pubs', they called them) were choked with customers.
1564From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer.
1565In an angle formed by a projecting house-front three men were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder.
1566Even before he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies.
1567It was obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading.
1568He was a few paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation.
1569For a moment they seemed almost on the point of blows.
1570'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say?
1571I tell you no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!
1572'  'Yes, it 'as, then!
1573'  'No, it 'as not!
1574Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for over two years wrote down on a piece of paper.
1575I takes 'em down reg'lar as the clock.
1576An' I tell you, no number ending in seven----'  'Yes, a seven 'AS won!
1577I could pretty near tell you the bleeding number.
1578Four oh seven, it ended in.
1579It were in February--second week in February.
1580'  'February your grandmother!
1581I got it all down in black and white.
1582An' I tell you, no number----'  'Oh, pack it in!
1583' said the third man.
1584They were talking about the Lottery.
1585Winston looked back when he had gone thirty metres.
1586They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces.
1587The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention.
1588It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive.
1589It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant.
1590Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.
1591There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets.
1592Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary.
1593Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons.
1594In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.
1595But if there was hope, it lay in the proles.
1596You had to cling on to that.
1597When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.
1598The street into which he had turned ran downhill.
1599He had a feeling that he had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was a main thoroughfare not far away.
1600From somewhere ahead there came a din of shouting voices.
1601The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers were selling tired-looking vegetables.
1602At this moment Winston remembered where he was.
1603The alley led out into the main street, and down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the junk-shop where he had bought the blank book which was now his diary.
1604And in a small stationer's shop not far away he had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.
1605He paused for a moment at the top of the steps.
1606On the opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were merely coated with dust.
1607A very old man, bent but active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in.
1608As Winston stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened.
1609He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism.
1610In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been formed before the Revolution.
1611The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender.
1612If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole.
1613Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into his diary came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of him.
1614He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him.
1615He would say to him: 'Tell me about your life when you were a boy.
1616What was it like in those days?
1617Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?
1618'  Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street.
1619It was madness of course.
1620As usual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles and frequenting their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed.
1621If the patrols appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it was not likely that they would believe him.
1622He pushed open the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in the face.
1623As he entered the din of voices dropped to about half its volume.
1624Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his blue overalls.
1625A game of darts which was going on at the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds.
1626The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man with enormous forearms.
1627A knot of others, standing round with glasses in their hands, were watching the scene.
1628'I arst you civil enough, didn't I?
1629' said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously.
1630'You telling me you ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer?
1631'  'And what in hell's name IS a pint?
1632' said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
1633''Ark at 'im!
1634Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a pint is!
1635Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four quarts to the gallon.
1636'Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.
1637'  'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly.
1638'Litre and half litre--that's all we serve.
1639There's the glasses on the shelf in front of you.
1640'  'I likes a pint,' persisted the old man.
1641'You could 'a drawed me off a pint easy enough.
1642We didn't 'ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.
1643'  'When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,' said the barman, with a glance at the other customers.
1644There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused by Winston's entry seemed to disappear.
1645The old man's white-stubbled face had flushed pink.
1646He turned away, muttering to himself, and bumped into Winston.
1647Winston caught him gently by the arm.
1648'May I offer you a drink?
1649' he said.
1650'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening his shoulders again.
1651He appeared not to have noticed Winston's blue overalls.
1652'Pint!
1653' he added aggressively to the barman.
1654'Pint of wallop.
1655'  The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thick glasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter.
1656Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs.
1657The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough.
1658The game of darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about lottery tickets.
1659Winston's presence was forgotten for a moment.
1660There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard.
1661It was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.
1662''E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass.
1663'A 'alf litre ain't enough.
1664It don't satisfy.
1665And a 'ole litre's too much.
1666It starts my bladder running.
1667Let alone the price.
1668'  'You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,' said Winston tentatively.
1669The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room that he expected the changes to have occurred.
1670'The beer was better,' he said finally.
1671'And cheaper!
1672When I was a young man, mild beer--wallop we used to call it--was fourpence a pint.
1673That was before the war, of course.
1674'  'Which war was that?
1675' said Winston.
1676'It's all wars,' said the old man vaguely.
1677He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again.
1678''Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!
1679'  In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam's apple made a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished.
1680Winston went to the bar and came back with two more half-litres.
1681The old man appeared to have forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full litre.
1682'You are very much older than I am,' said Winston.
1683'You must have been a grown man before I was born.
1684You can remember what it was like in the old days, before the Revolution.
1685People of my age don't really know anything about those times.
1686We can only read about them in books, and what it says in the books may not be true.
1687I should like your opinion on that.
1688The history books say that life before the Revolution was completely different from what it is now.
1689There was the most terrible oppression, injustice, poverty worse than anything we can imagine.
1690Here in London, the great mass of the people never had enough to eat from birth to death.
1691Half of them hadn't even boots on their feet.
1692They worked twelve hours a day, they left school at nine, they slept ten in a room.
1693And at the same time there were a very few people, only a few thousands--the capitalists, they were called--who were rich and powerful.
1694They owned everything that there was to own.
1695They lived in great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor-cars and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore top hats----'  The old man brightened suddenly.
1696'Top 'ats!
1697' he said.
1698'Funny you should mention 'em.
1699The same thing come into my 'ead only yesterday, I dono why.
1700I was jest thinking, I ain't seen a top 'at in years.
1701Gorn right out, they 'ave.
1702The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law's funeral.
1703And that was--well, I couldn't give you the date, but it must'a been fifty years ago.
1704Of course it was only 'ired for the occasion, you understand.
1705'  'It isn't very important about the top hats,' said Winston patiently.
1706'The point is, these capitalists--they and a few lawyers and priests and so forth who lived on them--were the lords of the earth.
1707Everything existed for their benefit.
1708You--the ordinary people, the workers--were their slaves.
1709They could do what they liked with you.
1710They could ship you off to Canada like cattle.
1711They could sleep with your daughters if they chose.
1712They could order you to be flogged with something called a cat-o'-nine tails.
1713You had to take your cap off when you passed them.
1714Every capitalist went about with a gang of lackeys who----'  The old man brightened again.
1715'Lackeys!
1716' he said.
1717'Now there's a word I ain't 'eard since ever so long.
1718Lackeys!
1719That reg'lar takes me back, that does.
1720I recollect--oh, donkey's years ago--I used to sometimes go to 'Yde Park of a Sunday afternoon to 'ear the blokes making speeches.
1721Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews, Indians--all sorts there was.
1722And there was one bloke--well, I couldn't give you 'is name, but a real powerful speaker 'e was.
1723'E didn't 'alf give it 'em!
1724"Lackeys"!
1725'e says, "lackeys of the bourgeoisie!
1726Flunkies of the ruling class"!
1727Parasites--that was another of them.
1728And 'yenas--'e definitely called 'em 'yenas.
1729Of course 'e was referring to the Labour Party, you understand.
1730'  Winston had the feeling that they were talking at cross-purposes.
1731'What I really wanted to know was this,' he said.
1732'Do you feel that you have more freedom now than you had in those days?
1733Are you treated more like a human being?
1734In the old days, the rich people, the people at the top----'  'The 'Ouse of Lords,' put in the old man reminiscently.
1735'The House of Lords, if you like.
1736What I am asking is, were these people able to treat you as an inferior, simply because they were rich and you were poor?
1737Is it a fact, for instance, that you had to call them "Sir" and take off your cap when you passed them?
1738'  The old man appeared to think deeply.
1739He drank off about a quarter of his beer before answering.
1740'Yes,' he said.
1741'They liked you to touch your cap to 'em.
1742It showed respect, like.
1743I didn't agree with it, myself, but I done it often enough.
1744Had to, as you might say.
1745'  'And was it usual--I'm only quoting what I've read in history books--was it usual for these people and their servants to push you off the pavement into the gutter?
1746'  'One of 'em pushed me once,' said the old man.
1747'I recollect it as if it was yesterday.
1748It was Boat Race night--terribly rowdy they used to get on Boat Race night--and I bumps into a young bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue.
1749Quite a gent, 'e was--dress shirt, top 'at, black overcoat.
1750'E was kind of zig-zagging across the pavement, and I bumps into 'im accidental-like.
1751'E says, "Why can't you look where you're going"?
1752'e says.
1753I say, "Ju think you've bought the bleeding pavement"?
1754'E says, "I'll twist your bloody 'ead off if you get fresh with me".
1755I says, "You're drunk.
1756I'll give you in charge in 'alf a minute," I says.
1757An' if you'll believe me, 'e puts 'is 'and on my chest and gives me a shove as pretty near sent me under the wheels of a bus.
1758Well, I was young in them days, and I was going to 'ave fetched 'im one, only----'  A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston.
1759The old man's memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details.
1760One could question him all day without getting any real information.
1761The party histories might still be true, after a fashion: they might even be completely true.
1762He made a last attempt.
1763'Perhaps I have not made myself clear,' he said.
1764'What I'm trying to say is this.
1765You have been alive a very long time; you lived half your life before the Revolution.
1766In 1925, for instance, you were already grown up.
1767Would you say from what you can remember, that life in 1925 was better than it is now, or worse?
1768If you could choose, would you prefer to live then or now?
1769'  The old man looked meditatively at the darts board.
1770He finished up his beer, more slowly than before.
1771When he spoke it was with a tolerant philosophical air, as though the beer had mellowed him.
1772'I know what you expect me to say,' he said.
1773'You expect me to say as I'd sooner be young again.
1774Most people'd say they'd sooner be young, if you arst 'em.
1775You got your 'ealth and strength when you're young.
1776When you get to my time of life you ain't never well.
1777I suffer something wicked from my feet, and my bladder's jest terrible.
1778Six and seven times a night it 'as me out of bed.
1779On the other 'and, there's great advantages in being a old man.
1780You ain't got the same worries.
1781No truck with women, and that's a great thing.
1782I ain't 'ad a woman for near on thirty year, if you'd credit it.
1783Nor wanted to, what's more.
1784'  Winston sat back against the window-sill.
1785It was no use going on.
1786He was about to buy some more beer when the old man suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal at the side of the room.
1787The extra half-litre was already working on him.
1788Winston sat for a minute or two gazing at his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out into the street again.
1789Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, 'Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?
1790' would have ceased once and for all to be answerable.
1791But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another.
1792They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision.
1793They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones.
1794And when memory failed and written records were falsified--when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
1795At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly.
1796He halted and looked up.
1797He was in a narrow street, with a few dark little shops, interspersed among dwelling-houses.
1798Immediately above his head there hung three discoloured metal balls which looked as if they had once been gilded.
1799He seemed to know the place.
1800Of course!
1801He was standing outside the junk-shop where he had bought the diary.
1802A twinge of fear went through him.
1803It had been a sufficiently rash act to buy the book in the beginning, and he had sworn never to come near the place again.
1804And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had brought him back here of their own accord.
1805It was precisely against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped to guard himself by opening the diary.
1806At the same time he noticed that although it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still open.
1807With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the doorway.
1808If questioned, he could plausibly say that he was trying to buy razor blades.
1809The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which gave off an unclean but friendly smell.
1810He was a man of perhaps sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles.
1811His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy and still black.
1812His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact that he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician.
1813His voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of proles.
1814'I recognized you on the pavement,' he said immediately.
1815'You're the gentleman that bought the young lady's keepsake album.
1816That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was.
1817Cream-laid, it used to be called.
1818There's been no paper like that made for--oh, I dare say fifty years.
1819' He peered at Winston over the top of his spectacles.
1820'Is there anything special I can do for you?
1821Or did you just want to look round?
1822'  'I was passing,' said Winston vaguely.
1823'I just looked in.
1824I don't want anything in particular.
1825'  'It's just as well,' said the other, 'because I don't suppose I could have satisfied you.
1826' He made an apologetic gesture with his softpalmed hand.
1827'You see how it is; an empty shop, you might say.
1828Between you and me, the antique trade's just about finished.
1829No demand any longer, and no stock either.
1830Furniture, china, glass it's all been broken up by degrees.
1831And of course the metal stuff's mostly been melted down.
1832I haven't seen a brass candlestick in years.
1833'  The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, but there was almost nothing in it of the slightest value.
1834The floorspace was very restricted, because all round the walls were stacked innumerable dusty picture-frames.
1835In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous rubbish.
1836Only on a small table in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends--lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like--which looked as though they might include something interesting.
1837As Winston wandered towards the table his eye was caught by a round, smooth thing that gleamed softly in the lamplight, and he picked it up.
1838It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere.
1839There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass.
1840At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.
1841'What is it?
1842' said Winston, fascinated.
1843'That's coral, that is,' said the old man.
1844'It must have come from the Indian Ocean.
1845They used to kind of embed it in the glass.
1846That wasn't made less than a hundred years ago.
1847More, by the look of it.
1848'  'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston.
1849'It is a beautiful thing,' said the other appreciatively.
1850'But there's not many that'd say so nowadays.
1851' He coughed.
1852'Now, if it so happened that you wanted to buy it, that'd cost you four dollars.
1853I can remember when a thing like that would have fetched eight pounds, and eight pounds was--well, I can't work it out, but it was a lot of money.
1854But who cares about genuine antiques nowadays--even the few that's left?
1855'  Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid the coveted thing into his pocket.
1856What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.
1857The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any glass that he had ever seen.
1858The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight.
1859It was very heavy in his pocket, but fortunately it did not make much of a bulge.
1860It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in his possession.
1861Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.
1862The old man had grown noticeably more cheerful after receiving the four dollars.
1863Winston realized that he would have accepted three or even two.
1864'There's another room upstairs that you might care to take a look at,' he said.
1865'There's not much in it.
1866Just a few pieces.
1867We'll do with a light if we're going upstairs.
1868'  He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowly up the steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into a room which did not give on the street but looked out on a cobbled yard and a forest of chimney-pots.
1869Winston noticed that the furniture was still arranged as though the room were meant to be lived in.
1870There was a strip of carpet on the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternly arm-chair drawn up to the fireplace.
1871An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece.
1872Under the window, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous bed with the mattress still on it.
1873'We lived here till my wife died,' said the old man half apologetically.
1874'I'm selling the furniture off by little and little.
1875Now that's a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it would be if you could get the bugs out of it.
1876But I dare say you'd find it a little bit cumbersome.
1877'  He was holding the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting.
1878The thought flitted through Winston's mind that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk.
1879It was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory.
1880It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.
1881'There's no telescreen!
1882' he could not help murmuring.
1883'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things.
1884Too expensive.
1885And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow.
1886Now that's a nice gateleg table in the corner there.
1887Though of course you'd have to put new hinges on it if you wanted to use the flaps.
1888'  There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had already gravitated towards it.
1889It contained nothing but rubbish.
1890The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else.
1891It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960.
1892The old man, still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on the other side of the fireplace, opposite the bed.
1893'Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all----' he began delicately.
1894Winston came across to examine the picture.
1895It was a steel engraving of an oval building with rectangular windows, and a small tower in front.
1896There was a railing running round the building, and at the rear end there was what appeared to be a statue.
1897Winston gazed at it for some moments.
1898It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember the statue.
1899'The frame's fixed to the wall,' said the old man, 'but I could unscrew it for you, I dare say.
1900'  'I know that building,' said Winston finally.
1901'It's a ruin now.
1902It's in the middle of the street outside the Palace of Justice.
1903'  'That's right.
1904Outside the Law Courts.
1905It was bombed in--oh, many years ago.
1906It was a church at one time, St Clement Danes, its name was.
1907' He smiled apologetically, as though conscious of saying something slightly ridiculous, and added: 'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's!
1908'  'What's that?
1909' said Winston.
1910'Oh--"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's".
1911That was a rhyme we had when I was a little boy.
1912How it goes on I don't remember, but I do know it ended up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head".
1913It was a kind of a dance.
1914They held out their arms for you to pass under, and when they came to "Here comes a chopper to chop off your head" they brought their arms down and caught you.
1915It was just names of churches.
1916All the London churches were in it--all the principal ones, that is.
1917'  Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged.
1918It was always difficult to determine the age of a London building.
1919Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, while anything that was obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim period called the Middle Ages.
1920The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any value.
1921One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books.
1922Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets--anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered.
1923'I never knew it had been a church,' he said.
1924'There's a lot of them left, really,' said the old man, 'though they've been put to other uses.
1925Now, how did that rhyme go?
1926Ah!
1927I've got it!
1928"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,   You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's----"   there, now, that's as far as I can get.
1929A farthing, that was a small copper coin, looked something like a cent.
1930'  'Where was St Martin's?
1931' said Winston.
1932'St Martin's?
1933That's still standing.
1934It's in Victory Square, alongside the picture gallery.
1935A building with a kind of a triangular porch and pillars in front, and a big flight of steps.
1936'  Winston knew the place well.
1937It was a museum used for propaganda displays of various kinds--scale models of rocket bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux illustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.
1938'St Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be called,' supplemented the old man, 'though I don't recollect any fields anywhere in those parts.
1939'  Winston did not buy the picture.
1940It would have been an even more incongruous possession than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry home, unless it were taken out of its frame.
1941But he lingered for some minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not Weeks--as one might have gathered from the inscription over the shop-front--but Charrington.
1942Mr Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years.
1943Throughout that time he had been intending to alter the name over the window, but had never quite got to the point of doing it.
1944All the while that they were talking the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston's head.
1945Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's!
1946It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten.
1947From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth.
1948Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.
1949He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as not to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out of the door.
1950He had already made up his mind that after a suitable interval--a month, say--he would take the risk of visiting the shop again.
1951It was perhaps not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Centre.
1952The serious piece of folly had been to come back here in the first place, after buying the diary and without knowing whether the proprietor of the shop could be trusted.
1953However----!
1954Yes, he thought again, he would come back.
1955He would buy further scraps of beautiful rubbish.
1956He would buy the engraving of St Clement Danes, take it out of its frame, and carry it home concealed under the jacket of his overalls.
1957He would drag the rest of that poem out of Mr Charrington's memory.
1958Even the lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed momentarily through his mind again.
1959For perhaps five seconds exaltation made him careless, and he stepped out on to the pavement without so much as a preliminary glance through the window.
1960He had even started humming to an improvised tune     Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,   You owe me three farthings, say the----   Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water.
1961A figure in blue overalls was coming down the pavement, not ten metres away.
1962It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair.
1963The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her.
1964She looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.
1965For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move.
1966Then he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction.
1967At any rate, one question was settled.
1968There was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him.
1969She must have followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived.
1970It was too great a coincidence.
1971Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly mattered.
1972It was enough that she was watching him.
1973Probably she had seen him go into the pub as well.
1974It was an effort to walk.
1975The lump of glass in his pocket banged against his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it away.
1976The worst thing was the pain in his belly.
1977For a couple of minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did not reach a lavatory soon.
1978But there would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this.
1979Then the spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.
1980The street was a blind alley.
1981Winston halted, stood for several seconds wondering vaguely what to do, then turned round and began to retrace his steps.
1982As he turned it occurred to him that the girl had only passed him three minutes ago and that by running he could probably catch up with her.
1983He could keep on her track till they were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone.
1984The piece of glass in his pocket would be heavy enough for the job.
1985But he abandoned the idea immediately, because even the thought of making any physical effort was unbearable.
1986He could not run, he could not strike a blow.
1987Besides, she was young and lusty and would defend herself.
1988He thought also of hurrying to the Community Centre and staying there till the place closed, so as to establish a partial alibi for the evening.
1989But that too was impossible.
1990A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him.
1991All he wanted was to get home quickly and then sit down and be quiet.
1992It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the flat.
1993The lights would be switched off at the main at twenty-three thirty.
1994He went into the kitchen and swallowed nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin.
1995Then he went to the table in the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out of the drawer.
1996But he did not open it at once.
1997From the telescreen a brassy female voice was squalling a patriotic song.
1998He sat staring at the marbled cover of the book, trying without success to shut the voice out of his consciousness.
1999It was at night that they came for you, always at night.
2000The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you.
2001Undoubtedly some people did so.
2002Many of the disappearances were actually suicides.
2003But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable.
2004He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.
2005He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act.
2006It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body.
2007Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible.
2008And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations.
2009On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
2010He opened the diary.
2011It was important to write something down.
2012The woman on the telescreen had started a new song.
2013Her voice seemed to stick into his brain like jagged splinters of glass.
2014He tried to think of O'Brien, for whom, or to whom, the diary was written, but instead he began thinking of the things that would happen to him after the Thought Police took him away.
2015It would not matter if they killed you at once.
2016To be killed was what you expected.
2017But 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.
2018Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same?
2019Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life?
2020Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess.
2021When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead.
2022Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time?
2023He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of O'Brien.
2024'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' O'Brien had said to him.
2025He knew what it meant, or thought he knew.
2026The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in.
2027But with the voice from the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not follow the train of thought further.
2028He put a cigarette in his mouth.
2029Half the tobacco promptly fell out on to his tongue, a bitter dust which was difficult to spit out again.
2030The face of Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that of O'Brien.
2031Just as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of his pocket and looked at it.
2032The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache?
2033Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:     WAR IS PEACE   FREEDOM IS SLAVERY   IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH      PART TWO     Chapter 1    It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory.
2034A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor.
2035It was the girl with dark hair.
2036Four days had gone past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop.
2037As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls.
2038Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were 'roughed in'.
2039It was a common accident in the Fiction Department.
2040They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost flat on her face.
2041A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her.
2042She must have fallen right on the injured arm.
2043Winston stopped short.
2044The girl had risen to her knees.
2045Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her mouth stood out redder than ever.
2046Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.
2047A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart.
2048In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone.
2049Already he had instinctively started forward to help her.
2050In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.
2051'You're hurt?
2052' he said.
2053'It's nothing.
2054My arm.
2055It'll be all right in a second.
2056'  She spoke as though her heart were fluttering.
2057She had certainly turned very pale.
2058'You haven't broken anything?
2059'  'No, I'm all right.
2060It hurt for a moment, that's all.
2061'  She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up.
2062She had regained some of her colour, and appeared very much better.
2063'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly.
2064'I only gave my wrist a bit of a bang.
2065Thanks, comrade!
2066'  And with that she walked on in the direction in which she had been going, as briskly as though it had really been nothing.
2067The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute.
2068Not to let one's feelings appear in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen when the thing happened.
2069Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand.
2070There was no question that she had done it intentionally.
2071It was something small and flat.
2072As he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers.
2073It was a scrap of paper folded into a square.
2074While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to get it unfolded.
2075Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on it.
2076For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets and read it at once.
2077But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew.
2078There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously.
2079He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper casually among the other papers on the desk, put on his spectacles and hitched the speakwrite towards him.
2080'Five minutes,' he told himself, 'five minutes at the very least!
2081' His heart bumped in his breast with frightening loudness.
2082Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing close attention.
2083Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political meaning.
2084So far as he could see there were two possibilities.
2085One, much the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the Thought Police, just as he had feared.
2086He did not know why the Thought Police should choose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons.
2087The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description.
2088But there was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it.
2089This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police at all, but from some kind of underground organization.
2090Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all!
2091Perhaps the girl was part of it!
2092No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his hand.
2093It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other, more probable explanation had occurred to him.
2094And even now, though his intellect told him that the message probably meant death--still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with difficulty that he kept his voice from trembling as he murmured his figures into the speakwrite.
2095He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatic tube.
2096Eight minutes had gone by.
2097He re-adjusted his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work towards him, with the scrap of paper on top of it.
2098He flattened it out.
2099On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting:  I LOVE YOU.
2100For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating thing into the memory hole.
2101When he did so, although he knew very well the danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once again, just to make sure that the words were really there.
2102For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work.
2103What was even worse than having to focus his mind on a series of niggling jobs was the need to conceal his agitation from the telescreen.
2104He felt as though a fire were burning in his belly.
2105Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise-filled canteen was torment.
2106He had hoped to be alone for a little while during the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week.
2107He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big Brother's head, two metres wide, which was being made for the occasion by his daughter's troop of Spies.
2108The irritating thing was that in the racket of voices Winston could hardly hear what Parsons was saying, and was constantly having to ask for some fatuous remark to be repeated.
2109Just once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other girls at the far end of the room.
2110She appeared not to have seen him, and he did not look in that direction again.
2111The afternoon was more bearable.
2112Immediately after lunch there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hours and necessitated putting everything else aside.
2113It consisted in falsifying a series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a cloud.
2114This was the kind of thing that Winston was good at, and for more than two hours he succeeded in shutting the girl out of his mind altogether.
2115Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire to be alone.
2116Until he could be alone it was impossible to think this new development out.
2117Tonight was one of his nights at the Community Centre.
2118He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group', played two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to chess'.
2119His soul writhed with boredom, but for once he had had no impulse to shirk his evening at the Centre.
2120At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.
2121It was not till twenty-three hours, when he was home and in bed--in the darkness, where you were safe even from the telescreen so long as you kept silent--that he was able to think continuously.
2122It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting.
2123He did not consider any longer the possibility that she might be laying some kind of trap for him.
2124He knew that it was not so, because of her unmistakable agitation when she handed him the note.
2125Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, as well she might be.
2126Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross his mind.
2127Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance.
2128He thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream.
2129He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice.
2130A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him!
2131What he feared more than anything else was that she would simply change her mind if he did not get in touch with her quickly.
2132But the physical difficulty of meeting was enormous.
2133It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated.
2134Whichever way you turned, the telescreen faced you.
2135Actually, all the possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to him within five minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to think, he went over them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments on a table.
2136Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this morning could not be repeated.
2137If she had worked in the Records Department it might have been comparatively simple, but he had only a very dim idea whereabouts in the building the Fiction Department lay, and he had no pretext for going there.
2138If he had known where she lived, and at what time she left work, he could have contrived to meet her somewhere on her way home; but to try to follow her home was not safe, because it would mean loitering about outside the Ministry, which was bound to be noticed.
2139As for sending a letter through the mails, it was out of the question.
2140By a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit.
2141Actually, few people ever wrote letters.
2142For the messages that it was occasionally necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases, and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable.
2143In any case he did not know the girl's name, let alone her address.
2144Finally he decided that the safest place was the canteen.
2145If he could get her at a table by herself, somewhere in the middle of the room, not too near the telescreens, and with a sufficient buzz of conversation all round--if these conditions endured for, say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange a few words.
2146For a week after this, life was like a restless dream.
2147On the next day she did not appear in the canteen until he was leaving it, the whistle having already blown.
2148Presumably she had been changed on to a later shift.
2149They passed each other without a glance.
2150On the day after that she was in the canteen at the usual time, but with three other girls and immediately under a telescreen.
2151Then for three dreadful days she did not appear at all.
2152His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony.
2153Even in sleep he could not altogether escape from her image.
2154He did not touch the diary during those days.
2155If there was any relief, it was in his work, in which he could sometimes forget himself for ten minutes at a stretch.
2156He had absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her.
2157There was no enquiry he could make.
2158She might have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she might have been transferred to the other end of Oceania: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.
2159The next day she reappeared.
2160Her arm was out of the sling and she had a band of sticking-plaster round her wrist.
2161The relief of seeing her was so great that he could not resist staring directly at her for several seconds.
2162On the following day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her.
2163When he came into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the wall, and was quite alone.
2164It was early, and the place was not very full.
2165The queue edged forward till Winston was almost at the counter, then was held up for two minutes because someone in front was complaining that he had not received his tablet of saccharine.
2166But the girl was still alone when Winston secured his tray and began to make for her table.
2167He walked casually towards her, his eyes searching for a place at some table beyond her.
2168She was perhaps three metres away from him.
2169Another two seconds would do it.
2170Then a voice behind him called, 'Smith!
2171' He pretended not to hear.
2172'Smith!
2173' repeated the voice, more loudly.
2174It was no use.
2175He turned round.
2176A blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew, was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table.
2177It was not safe to refuse.
2178After having been recognized, he could not go and sit at a table with an unattended girl.
2179It was too noticeable.
2180He sat down with a friendly smile.
2181The silly blond face beamed into his.
2182Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it.
2183The girl's table filled up a few minutes later.
2184But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps she would take the hint.
2185Next day he took care to arrive early.
2186Surely enough, she was at a table in about the same place, and again alone.
2187The person immediately ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like man with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes.
2188As Winston turned away from the counter with his tray, he saw that the little man was making straight for the girl's table.
2189His hopes sank again.
2190There was a vacant place at a table further away, but something in the little man's appearance suggested that he would be sufficiently attentive to his own comfort to choose the emptiest table.
2191With ice at his heart Winston followed.
2192It was no use unless he could get the girl alone.
2193At this moment there was a tremendous crash.
2194The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had gone flying, two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across the floor.
2195He started to his feet with a malignant glance at Winston, whom he evidently suspected of having tripped him up.
2196But it was all right.
2197Five seconds later, with a thundering heart, Winston was sitting at the girl's table.
2198He did not look at her.
2199He unpacked his tray and promptly began eating.
2200It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else came, but now a terrible fear had taken possession of him.
2201A week had gone by since she had first approached him.
2202She would have changed her mind, she must have changed her mind!
2203It was impossible that this affair should end successfully; such things did not happen in real life.
2204He might have flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had not seen Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply round the room with a tray, looking for a place to sit down.
2205In his vague way Ampleforth was attached to Winston, and would certainly sit down at his table if he caught sight of him.
2206There was perhaps a minute in which to act.
2207Both Winston and the girl were eating steadily.
2208The stuff they were eating was a thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans.
2209In a low murmur Winston began speaking.
2210Neither of them looked up; steadily they spooned the watery stuff into their mouths, and between spoonfuls exchanged the few necessary words in low expressionless voices.
2211'What time do you leave work?
2212'  'Eighteen-thirty.
2213'  'Where can we meet?
2214'  'Victory Square, near the monument.
2215'  'It's full of telescreens.
2216'  'It doesn't matter if there's a crowd.
2217'  'Any signal?
2218'  'No.
2219Don't come up to me until you see me among a lot of people.
2220And don't look at me.
2221Just keep somewhere near me.
2222'  'What time?
2223'  'Nineteen hours.
2224'  'All right.
2225'  Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another table.
2226They did not speak again, and, so far as it was possible for two people sitting on opposite sides of the same table, they did not look at one another.
2227The girl finished her lunch quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to smoke a cigarette.
2228Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time.
2229He wandered round the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother's statue gazed southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One.
2230In the street in front of it there was a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell.
2231At five minutes past the hour the girl had still not appeared.
2232Again the terrible fear seized upon Winston.
2233She was not coming, she had changed her mind!
2234He walked slowly up to the north side of the square and got a sort of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin's Church, whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed 'You owe me three farthings.
2235' Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column.
2236It was not safe to go near her until some more people had accumulated.
2237There were telescreens all round the pediment.
2238But at this moment there was a din of shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left.
2239Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square.
2240The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush.
2241Winston followed.
2242As he ran, he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian prisoners was passing.
2243Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of the square.
2244Winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward into the heart of the crowd.
2245Soon he was within arm's length of the girl, but the way was blocked by an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of flesh.
2246Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them.
2247For a moment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp between the two muscular hips, then he had broken through, sweating a little.
2248He was next to the girl.
2249They were shoulder to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them.
2250A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street.
2251In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together.
2252Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious.
2253Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons.
2254Truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces passed.
2255Winston knew they were there but he saw them only intermittently.
2256The girl's shoulder, and her arm right down to the elbow, were pressed against his.
2257Her cheek was almost near enough for him to feel its warmth.
2258She had immediately taken charge of the situation, just as she had done in the canteen.
2259She began speaking in the same expressionless voice as before, with lips barely moving, a mere murmur easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks.
2260'Can you hear me?
2261'  'Yes.
2262'  'Can you get Sunday afternoon off?
2263'  'Yes.
2264'  'Then listen carefully.
2265You'll have to remember this.
2266Go to Paddington Station----'  With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she outlined the route that he was to follow.
2267A half-hour railway journey; turn left outside the station; two kilometres along the road; a gate with the top bar missing; a path across a field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes; a dead tree with moss on it.
2268It was as though she had a map inside her head.
2269'Can you remember all that?
2270' she murmured finally.
2271'Yes.
2272'  'You turn left, then right, then left again.
2273And the gate's got no top bar.
2274'  'Yes.
2275What time?
2276'  'About fifteen.
2277You may have to wait.
2278I'll get there by another way.
2279Are you sure you remember everything?
2280'  'Yes.
2281'  'Then get away from me as quick as you can.
2282'  She need not have told him that.
2283But for the moment they could not extricate themselves from the crowd.
2284The trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping.
2285At the start there had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and had soon stopped.
2286The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity.
2287Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal.
2288One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them.
2289Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps.
2290The round Mogol faces had given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded and exhausted.
2291From over scrubby cheekbones eyes looked into Winston's, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again.
2292The convoy was drawing to an end.
2293In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound together.
2294It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part.
2295But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.
2296It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together.
2297He had time to learn every detail of her hand.
2298He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist.
2299Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight.
2300In the same instant it occurred to him that he did not know what colour the girl's eyes were.
2301They were probably brown, but people with dark hair sometimes had blue eyes.
2302To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly.
2303With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.
2304Chapter 2    Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled light and shade, stepping out into pools of gold wherever the boughs parted.
2305Under the trees to the left of him the ground was misty with bluebells.
2306The air seemed to kiss one's skin.
2307It was the second of May.
2308From somewhere deeper in the heart of the wood came the droning of ring-doves.
2309He was a bit early.
2310There had been no difficulties about the journey, and the girl was so evidently experienced that he was less frightened than he would normally have been.
2311Presumably she could be trusted to find a safe place.
2312In general you could not assume that you were much safer in the country than in London.
2313There were no telescreens, of course, but there was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey by yourself without attracting attention.
2314For distances of less than 100 kilometres it was not necessary to get your passport endorsed, but sometimes there were patrols hanging about the railway stations, who examined the papers of any Party member they found there and asked awkward questions.
2315However, no patrols had appeared, and on the walk from the station he had made sure by cautious backward glances that he was not being followed.
2316The train was full of proles, in holiday mood because of the summery weather.
2317The wooden-seated carriage in which he travelled was filled to overflowing by a single enormous family, ranging from a toothless great-grandmother to a month-old baby, going out to spend an afternoon with 'in-laws' in the country, and, as they freely explained to Winston, to get hold of a little black-market butter.
2318The lane widened, and in a minute he came to the footpath she had told him of, a mere cattle-track which plunged between the bushes.
2319He had no watch, but it could not be fifteen yet.
2320The bluebells were so thick underfoot that it was impossible not to tread on them.
2321He knelt down and began picking some partly to pass the time away, but also from a vague idea that he would like to have a bunch of flowers to offer to the girl when they met.
2322He had got together a big bunch and was smelling their faint sickly scent when a sound at his back froze him, the unmistakable crackle of a foot on twigs.
2323He went on picking bluebells.
2324It was the best thing to do.
2325It might be the girl, or he might have been followed after all.
2326To look round was to show guilt.
2327He picked another and another.
2328A hand fell lightly on his shoulder.
2329He looked up.
2330It was the girl.
2331She shook her head, evidently as a warning that he must keep silent, then parted the bushes and quickly led the way along the narrow track into the wood.
2332Obviously she had been that way before, for she dodged the boggy bits as though by habit.
2333Winston followed, still clasping his bunch of flowers.
2334His first feeling was relief, but as he watched the strong slender body moving in front of him, with the scarlet sash that was just tight enough to bring out the curve of her hips, the sense of his own inferiority was heavy upon him.
2335Even now it seemed quite likely that when she turned round and looked at him she would draw back after all.
2336The sweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves daunted him.
2337Already on the walk from the station the May sunshine had made him feel dirty and etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of London in the pores of his skin.
2338It occurred to him that till now she had probably never seen him in broad daylight in the open.
2339They came to the fallen tree that she had spoken of.
2340The girl hopped over and forced apart the bushes, in which there did not seem to be an opening.
2341When Winston followed her, he found that they were in a natural clearing, a tiny grassy knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely.
2342The girl stopped and turned.
2343'Here we are,' she said.
2344He was facing her at several paces' distance.
2345As yet he did not dare move nearer to her.
2346'I didn't want to say anything in the lane,' she went on, 'in case there's a mike hidden there.
2347I don't suppose there is, but there could be.
2348There's always the chance of one of those swine recognizing your voice.
2349We're all right here.
2350'  He still had not the courage to approach her.
2351'We're all right here?
2352' he repeated stupidly.
2353'Yes.
2354Look at the trees.
2355' They were small ashes, which at some time had been cut down and had sprouted up again into a forest of poles, none of them thicker than one's wrist.
2356'There's nothing big enough to hide a mike in.
2357Besides, I've been here before.
2358'  They were only making conversation.
2359He had managed to move closer to her now.
2360She stood before him very upright, with a smile on her face that looked faintly ironical, as though she were wondering why he was so slow to act.
2361The bluebells had cascaded on to the ground.
2362They seemed to have fallen of their own accord.
2363He took her hand.
2364'Would you believe,' he said, 'that till this moment I didn't know what colour your eyes were?
2365' They were brown, he noted, a rather light shade of brown, with dark lashes.
2366'Now that you've seen what I'm really like, can you still bear to look at me?
2367'  'Yes, easily.
2368'  'I'm thirty-nine years old.
2369I've got a wife that I can't get rid of.
2370I've got varicose veins.
2371I've got five false teeth.
2372'  'I couldn't care less,' said the girl.
2373The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was in his arms.
2374At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity.
2375The youthful body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes!
2376actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth.
2377She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was calling him darling, precious one, loved one.
2378He had pulled her down on to the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her.
2379But the truth was that he had no physical sensation, except that of mere contact.
2380All he felt was incredulity and pride.
2381He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physical desire.
2382It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened him, he was too much used to living without women--he did not know the reason.
2383The girl picked herself up and pulled a bluebell out of her hair.
2384She sat against him, putting her arm round his waist.
2385'Never mind, dear.
2386There's no hurry.
2387We've got the whole afternoon.
2388Isn't this a splendid hide-out?
2389I found it when I got lost once on a community hike.
2390If anyone was coming you could hear them a hundred metres away.
2391'  'What is your name?
2392' said Winston.
2393'Julia.
2394I know yours.
2395It's Winston--Winston Smith.
2396'  'How did you find that out?
2397'  'I expect I'm better at finding things out than you are, dear.
2398Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?
2399'  He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her.
2400It was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst.
2401'I hated the sight of you,' he said.
2402'I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards.
2403Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone.
2404If you really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police.
2405'  The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise.
2406'Not the Thought Police!
2407You didn't honestly think that?
2408'  'Well, perhaps not exactly that.
2409But from your general appearance--merely because you're young and fresh and healthy, you understand--I thought that probably----'  'You thought I was a good Party member.
2410Pure in word and deed.
2411Banners, processions, slogans, games, community hikes all that stuff.
2412And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance I'd denounce you as a thought-criminal and get you killed off?
2413'  'Yes, something of that kind.
2414A great many young girls are like that, you know.
2415'  'It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said, ripping off the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to a bough.
2416Then, as though touching her waist had reminded her of something, she felt in the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate.
2417She broke it in half and gave one of the pieces to Winston.
2418Even before he had taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate.
2419It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper.
2420Chocolate normally was dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a rubbish fire.
2421But at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like the piece she had given him.
2422The first whiff of its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling.
2423'Where did you get this stuff?
2424' he said.
2425'Black market,' she said indifferently.
2426'Actually I am that sort of girl, to look at.
2427I'm good at games.
2428I was a troop-leader in the Spies.
2429I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League.
2430Hours and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London.
2431I always carry one end of a banner in the processions.
2432I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything.
2433Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say.
2434It's the only way to be safe.
2435'  The first fragment of chocolate had melted on Winston's tongue.
2436The taste was delightful.
2437But there was still that memory moving round the edges of his consciousness, something strongly felt but not reducible to definite shape, like an object seen out of the corner of one's eye.
2438He pushed it away from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action which he would have liked to undo but could not.
2439'You are very young,' he said.
2440'You are ten or fifteen years younger than I am.
2441What could you see to attract you in a man like me?
2442'  'It was something in your face.
2443I thought I'd take a chance.
2444I'm good at spotting people who don't belong.
2445As soon as I saw you I knew you were against THEM.
2446'  THEM, it appeared, meant the Party, and above all the Inner Party, about whom she talked with an open jeering hatred which made Winston feel uneasy, although he knew that they were safe here if they could be safe anywhere.
2447A thing that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her language.
2448Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston himself very seldom did swear, aloud, at any rate.
2449Julia, however, seemed unable to mention the Party, and especially the Inner Party, without using the kind of words that you saw chalked up in dripping alley-ways.
2450He did not dislike it.
2451It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay.
2452They had left the clearing and were wandering again through the chequered shade, with their arms round each other's waists whenever it was wide enough to walk two abreast.
2453He noticed how much softer her waist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone.
2454They did not speak above a whisper.
2455Outside the clearing, Julia said, it was better to go quietly.
2456Presently they had reached the edge of the little wood.
2457She stopped him.
2458'Don't go out into the open.
2459There might be someone watching.
2460We're all right if we keep behind the boughs.
2461'  They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes.
2462The sunlight, filtering through innumerable leaves, was still hot on their faces.
2463Winston looked out into the field beyond, and underwent a curious, slow shock of recognition.
2464He knew it by sight.
2465An old, close-bitten pasture, with a footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there.
2466In the ragged hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in dense masses like women's hair.
2467Surely somewhere nearby, but out of sight, there must be a stream with green pools where dace were swimming?
2468'Isn't there a stream somewhere near here?
2469' he whispered.
2470'That's right, there is a stream.
2471It's at the edge of the next field, actually.
2472There are fish in it, great big ones.
2473You can watch them lying in the pools under the willow trees, waving their tails.
2474'  'It's the Golden Country--almost,' he murmured.
2475'The Golden Country?
2476'  'It's nothing, really.
2477A landscape I've seen sometimes in a dream.
2478'  'Look!
2479' whispered Julia.
2480A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level of their faces.
2481Perhaps it had not seen them.
2482It was in the sun, they in the shade.
2483It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song.
2484In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling.
2485Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated.
2486The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity.
2487Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song.
2488Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence.
2489For whom, for what, was that bird singing?
2490No mate, no rival was watching it.
2491What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?
2492He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near.
2493He and Julia had spoken only in low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would pick up the thrush.
2494Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small, beetle-like man was listening intently--listening to that.
2495But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind.
2496It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves.
2497He stopped thinking and merely felt.
2498The girl's waist in the bend of his arm was soft and warm.
2499He pulled her round so that they were breast to breast; her body seemed to melt into his.
2500Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as water.
2501Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier.
2502When they moved their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply.
2503The bird took fright and fled with a clatter of wings.
2504Winston put his lips against her ear.
2505'NOW,' he whispered.
2506'Not here,' she whispered back.
2507'Come back to the hide-out.
2508It's safer.
2509'  Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back to the clearing.
2510When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him.
2511They were both breathing fast, but the smile had reappeared round the corners of her mouth.
2512She stood looking at him for an instant, then felt at the zipper of her overalls.
2513And, yes!
2514it was almost as in his dream.
2515Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.
2516Her body gleamed white in the sun.
2517But for a moment he did not look at her body; his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile.
2518He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.
2519'Have you done this before?
2520'  'Of course.
2521Hundreds of times--well, scores of times, anyway.
2522'  'With Party members?
2523'  'Yes, always with Party members.
2524'  'With members of the Inner Party?
2525'  'Not with those swine, no.
2526But there's plenty that WOULD if they got half a chance.
2527They're not so holy as they make out.
2528'  His heart leapt.
2529Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been hundreds--thousands.
2530Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope.
2531Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.
2532If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so!
2533Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine!
2534He pulled her down so that they were kneeling face to face.
2535'Listen.
2536The more men you've had, the more I love you.
2537Do you understand that?
2538'  'Yes, perfectly.
2539'  'I hate purity, I hate goodness!
2540I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere.
2541I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
2542'  'Well then, I ought to suit you, dear.
2543I'm corrupt to the bones.
2544'  'You like doing this?
2545I don't mean simply me: I mean the thing in itself?
2546'  'I adore it.
2547'  That was above all what he wanted to hear.
2548Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.
2549He pressed her down upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells.
2550This time there was no difficulty.
2551Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed, and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart.
2552The sun seemed to have grown hotter.
2553They were both sleepy.
2554He reached out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her.
2555Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.
2556Winston woke first.
2557He sat up and watched the freckled face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand.
2558Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful.
2559There was a line or two round the eyes, if you looked closely.
2560The short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and soft.
2561It occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where she lived.
2562The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling.
2563But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back.
2564He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank.
2565In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story.
2566But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays.
2567No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.
2568Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory.
2569It was a blow struck against the Party.
2570It was a political act.
2571Chapter 3    'We can come here once again,' said Julia.
2572'It's generally safe to use any hide-out twice.
2573But not for another month or two, of course.
2574'  As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed.
2575She became alert and business-like, put her clothes on, knotted the scarlet sash about her waist, and began arranging the details of the journey home.
2576It seemed natural to leave this to her.
2577She obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked, and she seemed also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside round London, stored away from innumerable community hikes.
2578The route she gave him was quite different from the one by which he had come, and brought him out at a different railway station.
2579'Never go home the same way as you went out,' she said, as though enunciating an important general principle.
2580She would leave first, and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her.
2581She had named a place where they could meet after work, four evenings hence.
2582It was a street in one of the poorer quarters, where there was an open market which was generally crowded and noisy.
2583She would be hanging about among the stalls, pretending to be in search of shoelaces or sewing-thread.
2584If she judged that the coast was clear she would blow her nose when he approached; otherwise he was to walk past her without recognition.
2585But with luck, in the middle of the crowd, it would be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting.
2586'And now I must go,' she said as soon as he had mastered his instructions.
2587'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty.
2588I've got to put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or something.
2589Isn't it bloody?
2590Give me a brush-down, would you?
2591Have I got any twigs in my hair?
2592Are you sure?
2593Then good-bye, my love, good-bye!
2594'  She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a moment later pushed her way through the saplings and disappeared into the wood with very little noise.
2595Even now he had not found out her surname or her address.
2596However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.
2597As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in the wood.
2598During the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love.
2599That was in another hiding-place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.
2600It was a good hiding-place when once you got there, but the getting there was very dangerous.
2601For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time.
2602In the street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion.
2603As they drifted down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following day.
2604Julia appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation, which she called 'talking by instalments'.
2605She was also surprisingly adept at speaking without moving her lips.
2606Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings they managed to exchange a kiss.
2607They were passing in silence down a side-street (Julia would never speak when they were away from the main streets) when there was a deafening roar, the earth heaved, and the air darkened, and Winston found himself lying on his side, bruised and terrified.
2608A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at hand.
2609Suddenly he became aware of Julia's face a few centimetres from his own, deathly white, as white as chalk.
2610Even her lips were white.
2611She was dead!
2612He clasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live warm face.
2613But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips.
2614Both of their faces were thickly coated with plaster.
2615There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to walk past one another without a sign, because a patrol had just come round the corner or a helicopter was hovering overhead.
2616Even if it had been less dangerous, it would still have been difficult to find time to meet.
2617Winston's working week was sixty hours, Julia's was even longer, and their free days varied according to the pressure of work and did not often coincide.
2618Julia, in any case, seldom had an evening completely free.
2619She spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing literature for the junior Anti-Sex League, preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections for the savings campaign, and such-like activities.
2620It paid, she said, it was camouflage.
2621If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.
2622She even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munition work which was done voluntarily by zealous Party members.
2623So, one evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit workshop where the knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.
2624When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary conversation were filled up.
2625It was a blazing afternoon.
2626The air in the little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung.
2627They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the arrowslits and make sure that no one was coming.
2628Julia was twenty-six years old.
2629She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls ('Always in the stink of women!
2630How I hate women!
2631' she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department.
2632She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor.
2633She was 'not clever', but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery.
2634She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad.
2635But she was not interested in the finished product.
2636She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said.
2637Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
2638She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight.
2639At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running.
2640She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League.
2641She had always borne an excellent character.
2642She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles.
2643It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked.
2644There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like 'Spanking Stories' or 'One Night in a Girls' School', to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.
2645'What are these books like?
2646' said Winston curiously.
2647'Oh, ghastly rubbish.
2648They're boring, really.
2649They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit.
2650Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes.
2651I was never in the Rewrite Squad.
2652I'm not literary, dear--not even enough for that.
2653'  He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were girls.
2654The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.
2655'They don't even like having married women there,' she added.
2656Girls are always supposed to be so pure.
2657Here's one who isn't, anyway.
2658She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest.
2659'And a good job too,' said Julia, 'otherwise they'd have had my name out of him when he confessed.
2660' Since then there had been various others.
2661Life as she saw it was quite simple.
2662You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could.
2663She seemed to think it just as natural that 'they' should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught.
2664She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it.
2665Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine.
2666He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday use.
2667She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence.
2668Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid.
2669The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.
2670He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.
2671They did not discuss the possibility of getting married.
2672It was too remote to be worth thinking about.
2673No imaginable committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston's wife, could somehow have been got rid of.
2674It was hopeless even as a daydream.
2675'What was she like, your wife?
2676' said Julia.
2677'She was--do you know the Newspeak word GOODTHINKFUL?
2678Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?
2679'  'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.
2680'  He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already.
2681She described to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine's body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him.
2682With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things: Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became merely a distasteful one.
2683'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,' he said.
2684He told her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week.
2685'She hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it.
2686She used to call it--but you'll never guess.
2687'  'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.
2688'How did you know that?
2689'  'I've been at school too, dear.
2690Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens.
2691And in the Youth Movement.
2692They rub it into you for years.
2693I dare say it works in a lot of cases.
2694But of course you can never tell; people are such hypocrites.
2695'  She began to enlarge upon the subject.
2696With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality.
2697As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness.
2698Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism.
2699It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible.
2700What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.
2701The way she put it was:  'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything.
2702They can't bear you to feel like that.
2703They want you to be bursting with energy all the time.
2704All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.
2705If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?
2706'  That was very true, he thought.
2707There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy.
2708For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?
2709The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.
2710They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood.
2711The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way.
2712The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations.
2713The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.
2714It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
2715Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine.
2716Katharine would unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions.
2717But what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat out on his forehead.
2718He began telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.
2719It was three or four months after they were married.
2720They had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent.
2721They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry.
2722It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the bottom.
2723There was nobody of whom they could ask the way.
2724As soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy.
2725To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing.
2726She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start searching in the other direction.
2727But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them.
2728One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently growing on the same root.
2729He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and look at it.
2730'Look, Katharine!
2731Look at those flowers.
2732That clump down near the bottom.
2733Do you see they're two different colours?
2734'  She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for a moment.
2735She even leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was pointing.
2736He was standing a little behind her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her.
2737At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they were.
2738There was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake.
2739In a place like this the danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very small, and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up sounds.
2740It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon.
2741The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face.
2742And the thought struck him.
2743.
2744.
2745'Why didn't you give her a good shove?
2746' said Julia.
2747'I would have.
2748'  'Yes, dear, you would have.
2749I would, if I'd been the same person then as I am now.
2750Or perhaps I would--I'm not certain.
2751'  'Are you sorry you didn't?
2752'  'Yes.
2753On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.
2754'  They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor.
2755He pulled her closer against him.
2756Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung.
2757She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.
2758'Actually it would have made no difference,' he said.
2759'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?
2760'  'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative.
2761In this game that we're playing, we can't win.
2762Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.
2763'  He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent.
2764She always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind.
2765She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated.
2766In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose.
2767All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness.
2768She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.
2769'We are the dead,' he said.
2770'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.
2771'Not physically.
2772Six months, a year--five years, conceivably.
2773I am afraid of death.
2774You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am.
2775Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can.
2776But it makes very little difference.
2777So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
2778'  'Oh, rubbish!
2779Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton?
2780Don't you enjoy being alive?
2781Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive!
2782Don't you like THIS?
2783'  She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him.
2784He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls.
2785Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigour into his.
2786'Yes, I like that,' he said.
2787'Then stop talking about dying.
2788And now listen, dear, we've got to fix up about the next time we meet.
2789We may as well go back to the place in the wood.
2790We've given it a good long rest.
2791But you must get there by a different way this time.
2792I've got it all planned out.
2793You take the train--but look, I'll draw it out for you.
2794'  And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust, and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the floor.
2795Chapter 4    Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr Charrington's shop.
2796Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster.
2797The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece.
2798In the corner, on the gateleg table, the glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of the half-darkness.
2799In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups, provided by Mr Charrington.
2800Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water to boil.
2801He had brought an envelope full of Victory Coffee and some saccharine tablets.
2802The clock's hands said seventeen-twenty: it was nineteen-twenty really.
2803She was coming at nineteen-thirty.
2804Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly.
2805Of all the crimes that a Party member could commit, this one was the least possible to conceal.
2806Actually the idea had first floated into his head in the form of a vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table.
2807As he had foreseen, Mr Charrington had made no difficulty about letting the room.
2808He was obviously glad of the few dollars that it would bring him.
2809Nor did he seem shocked or become offensively knowing when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room for the purpose of a love-affair.
2810Instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in generalities, with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he had become partly invisible.
2811Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing.
2812Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally.
2813And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself.
2814He even, seeming almost to fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries to the house, one of them through the back yard, which gave on an alley.
2815Under the window somebody was singing.
2816Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain.
2817The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies' diapers.
2818Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:     It was only an 'opeless fancy.
2819It passed like an Ipril dye,   But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!
2820They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
2821The tune had been haunting London for weeks past.
2822It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department.
2823The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.
2824But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.
2825He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
2826Folly, folly, folly!
2827he thought again.
2828It was inconceivable that they could frequent this place for more than a few weeks without being caught.
2829But the temptation of having a hiding-place that was truly their own, indoors and near at hand, had been too much for both of them.
2830For some time after their visit to the church belfry it had been impossible to arrange meetings.
2831Working hours had been drastically increased in anticipation of Hate Week.
2832It was more than a month distant, but the enormous, complex preparations that it entailed were throwing extra work on to everybody.
2833Finally both of them managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day.
2834They had agreed to go back to the clearing in the wood.
2835On the evening beforehand they met briefly in the street.
2836As usual, Winston hardly looked at Julia as they drifted towards one another in the crowd, but from the short glance he gave her it seemed to him that she was paler than usual.
2837'It's all off,' she murmured as soon as she judged it safe to speak.
2838'Tomorrow, I mean.
2839'  'What?
2840'  'Tomorrow afternoon.
2841I can't come.
2842'  'Why not?
2843'  'Oh, the usual reason.
2844It's started early this time.
2845'  For a moment he was violently angry.
2846During the month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed.
2847At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it.
2848Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will.
2849But after the second time it was different.
2850The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him.
2851She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to.
2852When she said that she could not come, he had the feeling that she was cheating him.
2853But just at this moment the crowd pressed them together and their hands accidentally met.
2854She gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection.
2855It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal, recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him.
2856He wished that they were a married couple of ten years' standing.
2857He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household.
2858He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met.
2859It was not actually at that moment, but at some time on the following day, that the idea of renting Mr Charrington's room had occurred to him.
2860When he suggested it to Julia she had agreed with unexpected readiness.
2861Both of them knew that it was lunacy.
2862It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves.
2863As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love.
2864It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's consciousness.
2865There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100.
2866One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.
2867At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs.
2868Julia burst into the room.
2869She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse brown canvas, such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and fro at the Ministry.
2870He started forward to take her in his arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly because she was still holding the tool-bag.
2871'Half a second,' she said.
2872'Just let me show you what I've brought.
2873Did you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee?
2874I thought you would.
2875You can chuck it away again, because we shan't be needing it.
2876Look here.
2877'  She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it.
2878Underneath were a number of neat paper packets.
2879The first packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling.
2880It was filled with some kind of heavy, sand-like stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.
2881'It isn't sugar?
2882' he said.
2883'Real sugar.
2884Not saccharine, sugar.
2885And here's a loaf of bread--proper white bread, not our bloody stuff--and a little pot of jam.
2886And here's a tin of milk--but look!
2887This is the one I'm really proud of.
2888I had to wrap a bit of sacking round it, because----'  But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up.
2889The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.
2890'It's coffee,' he murmured, 'real coffee.
2891'  'It's Inner Party coffee.
2892There's a whole kilo here,' she said.
2893'How did you manage to get hold of all these things?
2894'  'It's all Inner Party stuff.
2895There's nothing those swine don't have, nothing.
2896But of course waiters and servants and people pinch things, and--look, I got a little packet of tea as well.
2897'  Winston had squatted down beside her.
2898He tore open a corner of the packet.
2899'It's real tea.
2900Not blackberry leaves.
2901'  'There's been a lot of tea about lately.
2902They've captured India, or something,' she said vaguely.
2903'But listen, dear.
2904I want you to turn your back on me for three minutes.
2905Go and sit on the other side of the bed.
2906Don't go too near the window.
2907And don't turn round till I tell you.
2908'  Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain.
2909Down in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub and the line.
2910She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:     They sye that time 'eals all things,   They sye you can always forget;   But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years   They twist my 'eart-strings yet!
2911She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed.
2912Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy.
2913One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish.
2914It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously.
2915It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself.
2916Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about.
2917'You can turn round now,' said Julia.
2918He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her.
2919What he had actually expected was to see her naked.
2920But she was not naked.
2921The transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that.
2922She had painted her face.
2923She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and bought herself a complete set of make-up materials.
2924Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brighter.
2925It was not very skilfully done, but Winston's standards in such matters were not high.
2926He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face.
2927The improvement in her appearance was startling.
2928With just a few dabs of colour in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above all, far more feminine.
2929Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added to the effect.
2930As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils.
2931He remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen, and a woman's cavernous mouth.
2932It was the very same scent that she had used; but at the moment it did not seem to matter.
2933'Scent too!
2934' he said.
2935'Yes, dear, scent too.
2936And do you know what I'm going to do next?
2937I'm going to get hold of a real woman's frock from somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers.
2938I'll wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes!
2939In this room I'm going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.
2940'  They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed.
2941It was the first time that he had stripped himself naked in her presence.
2942Until now he had been too much ashamed of his pale and meagre body, with the varicose veins standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch over his ankle.
2943There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them.
2944'It's sure to be full of bugs, but who cares?
2945' said Julia.
2946One never saw a double bed nowadays, except in the homes of the proles.
2947Winston had occasionally slept in one in his boyhood: Julia had never been in one before, so far as she could remember.
2948Presently they fell asleep for a little while.
2949When Winston woke up the hands of the clock had crept round to nearly nine.
2950He did not stir, because Julia was sleeping with her head in the crook of his arm.
2951Most of her make-up had transferred itself to his own face or the bolster, but a light stain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone.
2952A yellow ray from the sinking sun fell across the foot of the bed and lighted up the fireplace, where the water in the pan was boiling fast.
2953Down in the yard the woman had stopped singing, but the faint shouts of children floated in from the street.
2954He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside.
2955Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?
2956Julia woke up, rubbed her eyes, and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.
2957'Half that water's boiled away,' she said.
2958'I'll get up and make some coffee in another moment.
2959We've got an hour.
2960What time do they cut the lights off at your flats?
2961'  'Twenty-three thirty.
2962'  'It's twenty-three at the hostel.
2963But you have to get in earlier than that, because--Hi!
2964Get out, you filthy brute!
2965'  She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor, and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during the Two Minutes Hate.
2966'What was it?
2967' he said in surprise.
2968'A rat.
2969I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting.
2970There's a hole down there.
2971I gave him a good fright, anyway.
2972'  'Rats!
2973' murmured Winston.
2974'In this room!
2975'  'They're all over the place,' said Julia indifferently as she lay down again.
2976'We've even got them in the kitchen at the hostel.
2977Some parts of London are swarming with them.
2978Did you know they attack children?
2979Yes, they do.
2980In some of these streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes.
2981It's the great huge brown ones that do it.
2982And the nasty thing is that the brutes always----'  'DON'T GO ON!
2983' said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut.
2984'Dearest!
2985You've gone quite pale.
2986What's the matter?
2987Do they make you feel sick?
2988'  'Of all horrors in the world--a rat!
2989'  She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body.
2990He did not reopen his eyes immediately.
2991For several moments he had had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life.
2992It was always very much the same.
2993He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced.
2994In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of darkness.
2995With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the open.
2996He always woke up without discovering what it was: but somehow it was connected with what Julia had been saying when he cut her short.
2997'I'm sorry,' he said, 'it's nothing.
2998I don't like rats, that's all.
2999'  'Don't worry, dear, we're not going to have the filthy brutes in here.
3000I'll stuff the hole with a bit of sacking before we go.
3001And next time we come here I'll bring some plaster and bung it up properly.
3002'  Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten.
3003Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the bedhead.
3004Julia got out of bed, pulled on her overalls, and made the coffee.
3005The smell that rose from the saucepan was so powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive.
3006What was even better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after years of saccharine.
3007With one hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the other, Julia wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the bookcase, pointing out the best way of repairing the gateleg table, plumping herself down in the ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and examining the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant amusement.
3008She brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light.
3009He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the glass.
3010'What is it, do you think?
3011' said Julia.
3012'I don't think it's anything--I mean, I don't think it was ever put to any use.
3013That's what I like about it.
3014It's a little chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter.
3015It's a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.
3016'  'And that picture over there'--she nodded at the engraving on the opposite wall--'would that be a hundred years old?
3017'  'More.
3018Two hundred, I dare say.
3019One can't tell.
3020It's impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.
3021'  She went over to look at it.
3022'Here's where that brute stuck his nose out,' she said, kicking the wainscoting immediately below the picture.
3023'What is this place?
3024I've seen it before somewhere.
3025'  'It's a church, or at least it used to be.
3026St Clement Danes its name was.
3027' The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught him came back into his head, and he added half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's"!
3028To his astonishment she capped the line:     'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,   When will you pay me?
3029say the bells of Old Bailey----'   'I can't remember how it goes on after that.
3030But anyway I remember it ends up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head"!
3031'  It was like the two halves of a countersign.
3032But there must be another line after 'the bells of Old Bailey'.
3033Perhaps it could be dug out of Mr Charrington's memory, if he were suitably prompted.
3034'Who taught you that?
3035' he said.
3036'My grandfather.
3037He used to say it to me when I was a little girl.
3038He was vaporized when I was eight--at any rate, he disappeared.
3039I wonder what a lemon was,' she added inconsequently.
3040'I've seen oranges.
3041They're a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.
3042'  'I can remember lemons,' said Winston.
3043'They were quite common in the fifties.
3044They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them.
3045'  'I bet that picture's got bugs behind it,' said Julia.
3046'I'll take it down and give it a good clean some day.
3047I suppose it's almost time we were leaving.
3048I must start washing this paint off.
3049What a bore!
3050I'll get the lipstick off your face afterwards.
3051'  Winston did not get up for a few minutes more.
3052The room was darkening.
3053He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight.
3054The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself.
3055There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air.
3056It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete.
3057He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself.
3058The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
3059Chapter 5    Syme had vanished.
3060A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence.
3061On the next day nobody mentioned him.
3062On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board.
3063One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one.
3064It looked almost exactly as it had looked before--nothing had been crossed out--but it was one name shorter.
3065It was enough.
3066Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
3067The weather was baking hot.
3068In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the pavements scorched one's feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours was a horror.
3069The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime.
3070Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
3071Julia's unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets.
3072Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in going through back files of 'The Times' and altering and embellishing news items which were to be quoted in speeches.
3073Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air.
3074The rocket bombs crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance there were enormous explosions which no one could explain and about which there were wild rumours.
3075The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song, it was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens.
3076It had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum.
3077Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying.
3078The proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed with the still-popular 'It was only a hopeless fancy'.
3079The Parsons children played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper.
3080Winston's evenings were fuller than ever.
3081Squads of volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers.
3082Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred metres of bunting.
3083He was in his native element and as happy as a lark.
3084The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings.
3085He was everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.
3086A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London.
3087It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip.
3088From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you.
3089The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother.
3090The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism.
3091As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual.
3092One fell on a crowded film theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins.
3093The whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting.
3094Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen children were blown to pieces.
3095There were further angry demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and a number of shops were looted in the turmoil; then a rumour flew round that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their house set on fire and perished of suffocation.
3096In the room over Mr Charrington's shop, when they could get there, Julia and Winston lay side by side on a stripped bed under the open window, naked for the sake of coolness.
3097The rat had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in the heat.
3098It did not seem to matter.
3099Dirty or clean, the room was paradise.
3100As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes, and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counter-attack.
3101Four, five, six--seven times they met during the month of June.
3102Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours.
3103He seemed to have lost the need for it.
3104He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided, leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing in the early morning had stopped.
3105The process of life had ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice.
3106Now that they had a secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time.
3107What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist.
3108To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it.
3109The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.
3110Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal.
3111He usually stopped to talk with Mr Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs.
3112The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other hand to have almost no customers.
3113He led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient gramophone with an enormous horn.
3114He seemed glad of the opportunity to talk.
3115Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had always vaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman.
3116With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or that--a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby's hair--never asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it.
3117To talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out musical-box.
3118He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes.
3119There was one about four and twenty blackbirds, and another about a cow with a crumpled horn, and another about the death of poor Cock Robin.
3120'It just occurred to me you might be interested,' he would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new fragment.
3121But he could never recall more than a few lines of any one rhyme.
3122Both of them knew--in a way, it was never out of their minds that what was now happening could not last long.
3123There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking.
3124But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence.
3125So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them.
3126Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary.
3127It was as when Winston had gazed into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside that glassy world, and that once inside it time could be arrested.
3128Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of escape.
3129Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry on their intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives.
3130Or Katharine would die, and by subtle manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would succeed in getting married.
3131Or they would commit suicide together.
3132Or they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak with proletarian accents, get jobs in a factory and live out their lives undetected in a back-street.
3133It was all nonsense, as they both knew.
3134In reality there was no escape.
3135Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out.
3136To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
3137Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the Party, but with no notion of how to take the first step.
3138Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a reality, there still remained the difficulty of finding one's way into it.
3139He told her of the strange intimacy that existed, or seemed to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the impulse he sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's presence, announce that he was the enemy of the Party, and demand his help.
3140Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do.
3141She was used to judging people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should believe O'Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes.
3142Moreover she took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the Party and would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so.
3143But she refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition existed or could exist.
3144The tales about Goldstein and his underground army, she said, were simply a lot of rubbish which the Party had invented for its own purposes and which you had to pretend to believe in.
3145Times beyond number, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations, she had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of people whose names she had never heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the faintest belief.
3146When public trials were happening she had taken her place in the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded the courts from morning to night, chanting at intervals 'Death to the traitors!
3147' During the Two Minutes Hate she always excelled all others in shouting insults at Goldstein.
3148Yet she had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what doctrines he was supposed to represent.
3149She had grown up since the Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the fifties and sixties.
3150Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible.
3151It would always exist, and it would always be the same.
3152You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.
3153In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda.
3154Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening.
3155The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'.
3156This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him.
3157She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing.
3158But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life.
3159Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her.
3160She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes.
3161(In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.
3162) And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting.
3163After all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes?
3164It was rather more of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia.
3165It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed.
3166'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she said vaguely.
3167It frightened him a little.
3168The invention of aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was grown up.
3169He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour.
3170In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy.
3171But the issue still struck her as unimportant.
3172'Who cares?
3173' she said impatiently.
3174'It's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.
3175'  Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent forgeries that he committed there.
3176Such things did not appear to horrify her.
3177She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths.
3178He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had once held between his fingers.
3179It did not make much impression on her.
3180At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.
3181'Were they friends of yours?
3182' she said.
3183'No, I never knew them.
3184They were Inner Party members.
3185Besides, they were far older men than I was.
3186They belonged to the old days, before the Revolution.
3187I barely knew them by sight.
3188'  'Then what was there to worry about?
3189People are being killed off all the time, aren't they?
3190'  He tried to make her understand.
3191'This was an exceptional case.
3192It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed.
3193Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished?
3194If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there.
3195Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution.
3196Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.
3197And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
3198History has stopped.
3199Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
3200I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself.
3201After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains.
3202The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories.
3203Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event--years after it.
3204'  'And what good was that?
3205'  'It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes later.
3206But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it.
3207'  'Well, I wouldn't!
3208' said Julia.
3209'I'm quite ready to take risks, but only for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper.
3210What could you have done with it even if you had kept it?
3211'  'Not much, perhaps.
3212But it was evidence.
3213It might have planted a few doubts here and there, supposing that I'd dared to show it to anybody.
3214I don't imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime.
3215But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there--small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off.
3216'  'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear.
3217I'm interested in US.
3218'  'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.
3219She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight.
3220In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest.
3221Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing.
3222One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it?
3223She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed.
3224If he persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep.
3225She was one of those people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position.
3226Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant.
3227In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.
3228They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.
3229By lack of understanding they remained sane.
3230They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
3231Chapter 6    It had happened at last.
3232The expected message had come.
3233All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen.
3234He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and he was almost at the spot where Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he became aware that someone larger than himself was walking just behind him.
3235The person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a prelude to speaking.
3236Winston stopped abruptly and turned.
3237It was O'Brien.
3238At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only impulse was to run away.
3239His heart bounded violently.
3240He would have been incapable of speaking.
3241O'Brien, however, had continued forward in the same movement, laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston's arm, so that the two of them were walking side by side.
3242He began speaking with the peculiar grave courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members.
3243'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,' he said.
3244'I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in 'The Times' the other day.
3245You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?
3246'  Winston had recovered part of his self-possession.
3247'Hardly scholarly,' he said.
3248'I'm only an amateur.
3249It's not my subject.
3250I have never had anything to do with the actual construction of the language.
3251'  'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien.
3252'That is not only my own opinion.
3253I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an expert.
3254His name has slipped my memory for the moment.
3255'  Again Winston's heart stirred painfully.
3256It was inconceivable that this was anything other than a reference to Syme.
3257But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson.
3258Any identifiable reference to him would have been mortally dangerous.
3259O'Brien's remark must obviously have been intended as a signal, a codeword.
3260By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices.
3261They had continued to stroll slowly down the corridor, but now O'Brien halted.
3262With the curious, disarming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the gesture he resettled his spectacles on his nose.
3263Then he went on:  'What I had really intended to say was that in your article I noticed you had used two words which have become obsolete.
3264But they have only become so very recently.
3265Have you seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?
3266'  'No,' said Winston.
3267'I didn't think it had been issued yet.
3268We are still using the ninth in the Records Department.
3269'  'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I believe.
3270But a few advance copies have been circulated.
3271I have one myself.
3272It might interest you to look at it, perhaps?
3273'  'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where this tended.
3274'Some of the new developments are most ingenious.
3275The reduction in the number of verbs--that is the point that will appeal to you, I think.
3276Let me see, shall I send a messenger to you with the dictionary?
3277But I am afraid I invariably forget anything of that kind.
3278Perhaps you could pick it up at my flat at some time that suited you?
3279Wait.
3280Let me give you my address.
3281'  They were standing in front of a telescreen.
3282Somewhat absent-mindedly O'Brien felt two of his pockets and then produced a small leather-covered notebook and a gold ink-pencil.
3283Immediately beneath the telescreen, in such a position that anyone who was watching at the other end of the instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbled an address, tore out the page and handed it to Winston.
3284'I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said.
3285'If not, my servant will give you the dictionary.
3286'  He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper, which this time there was no need to conceal.
3287Nevertheless he carefully memorized what was written on it, and some hours later dropped it into the memory hole along with a mass of other papers.
3288They had been talking to one another for a couple of minutes at the most.
3289There was only one meaning that the episode could possibly have.
3290It had been contrived as a way of letting Winston know O'Brien's address.
3291This was necessary, because except by direct enquiry it was never possible to discover where anyone lived.
3292There were no directories of any kind.
3293'If you ever want to see me, this is where I can be found,' was what O'Brien had been saying to him.
3294Perhaps there would even be a message concealed somewhere in the dictionary.
3295But at any rate, one thing was certain.
3296The conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.
3297He knew that sooner or later he would obey O'Brien's summons.
3298Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay--he was not certain.
3299What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago.
3300The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary.
3301He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions.
3302The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love.
3303He had accepted it.
3304The end was contained in the beginning.
3305But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive.
3306Even while he was speaking to O'Brien, when the meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body.
3307He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.
3308Chapter 7    Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears.
3309Julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been 'What's the matter?
3310'  'I dreamt--' he began, and stopped short.
3311It was too complex to be put into words.
3312There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.
3313He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream.
3314It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain.
3315It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable distances.
3316The dream had also been comprehended by--indeed, in some sense it had consisted in--a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blew them both to pieces.
3317'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed I had murdered my mother?
3318'  'Why did you murder her?
3319' said Julia, almost asleep.
3320'I didn't murder her.
3321Not physically.
3322'  In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back.
3323It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years.
3324He was not certain of the date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened.
3325His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he could not remember.
3326He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance--above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat.
3327He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.
3328When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over her.
3329She seemed to have become completely spiritless.
3330It was evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something that she knew must happen.
3331She did everything that was needed--cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece--always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own accord.
3332Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness.
3333For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian by thinness.
3334Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying anything.
3335He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.
3336He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane.
3337There was a gas ring in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms.
3338He remembered his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something in a saucepan.
3339Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles at mealtimes.
3340He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his share.
3341His mother was quite ready to give him more than his share.
3342She took it for granted that he, 'the boy', should have the biggest portion; but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more.
3343At every meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use.
3344He would cry out with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister's plate.
3345He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it.
3346The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify him.
3347Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.
3348One day a chocolate ration was issued.
3349There had been no such issue for weeks or months past.
3350He remembered quite clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate.
3351It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days) between the three of them.
3352It was obvious that it ought to be divided into three equal parts.
3353Suddenly, as though he were listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in a loud booming voice that he should be given the whole piece.
3354His mother told him not to be greedy.
3355There was a long, nagging argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings.
3356His tiny sister, clinging to her mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes.
3357In the end his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave it to Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister.
3358The little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was.
3359Winston stood watching her for a moment.
3360Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate out of his sister's hand and was fleeing for the door.
3361'Winston, Winston!
3362' his mother called after him.
3363'Come back!
3364Give your sister back her chocolate!
3365'  He stopped, but did not come back.
3366His mother's anxious eyes were fixed on his face.
3367Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was that was on the point of happening.
3368His sister, conscious of having been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail.
3369His mother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast.
3370Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying.
3371He turned and fled down the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.
3372He never saw his mother again.
3373After he had devoured the chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several hours, until hunger drove him home.
3374When he came back his mother had disappeared.
3375This was already becoming normal at that time.
3376Nothing was gone from the room except his mother and his sister.
3377They had not taken any clothes, not even his mother's overcoat.
3378To this day he did not know with any certainty that his mother was dead.
3379It was perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a forced-labour camp.
3380As for his sister, she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies for homeless children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which had grown up as a result of the civil war, or she might have been sent to the labour camp along with his mother, or simply left somewhere or other to die.
3381The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained.
3382His mind went back to another dream of two months ago.
3383Exactly as his mother had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water.
3384He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance.
3385Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.
3386'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,' she said indistinctly.
3387'All children are swine.
3388'  'Yes.
3389But the real point of the story----'  From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again.
3390He would have liked to continue talking about his mother.
3391He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones.
3392Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside.
3393It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless.
3394If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
3395When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms.
3396It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it.
3397The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper.
3398The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world.
3399When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference.
3400Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again.
3401You were lifted clean out of the stream of history.
3402And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history.
3403They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question.
3404What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.
3405The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition.
3406They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another.
3407For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world.
3408The proles had stayed human.
3409They had not become hardened inside.
3410They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort.
3411And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.
3412'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud.
3413'We are not human.
3414'  'Why not?
3415' said Julia, who had woken up again.
3416He thought for a little while.
3417'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here before it's too late, and never see each other again?
3418'  'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times.
3419But I'm not going to do it, all the same.
3420'  'We've been lucky,' he said 'but it can't last much longer.
3421You're young.
3422You look normal and innocent.
3423If you keep clear of people like me, you might stay alive for another fifty years.
3424'  'No.
3425I've thought it all out.
3426What you do, I'm going to do.
3427And don't be too downhearted.
3428I'm rather good at staying alive.
3429'  'We may be together for another six months--a year--there's no knowing.
3430At the end we're certain to be apart.
3431Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?
3432When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that either of us can do for the other.
3433If I confess, they'll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the same.
3434Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as much as five minutes.
3435Neither of us will even know whether the other is alive or dead.
3436We shall be utterly without power of any kind.
3437The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although even that can't make the slightest difference.
3438'  'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that, right enough.
3439Everybody always confesses.
3440You can't help it.
3441They torture you.
3442'  'I don't mean confessing.
3443Confession is not betrayal.
3444What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter.
3445If they could make me stop loving you--that would be the real betrayal.
3446'  She thought it over.
3447'They can't do that,' she said finally.
3448'It's the one thing they can't do.
3449They can make you say anything--ANYTHING--but they can't make you believe it.
3450They can't get inside you.
3451'  'No,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite true.
3452They can't get inside you.
3453If you can FEEL that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.
3454'  He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear.
3455They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them.
3456With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking.
3457Perhaps that was less true when you were actually in their hands.
3458One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning.
3459Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden.
3460They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture.
3461But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make?
3462They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to.
3463They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.
3464Chapter 8    They had done it, they had done it at last!
3465The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit.
3466The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on velvet.
3467At the far end of the room O'Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of papers on either side of him.
3468He had not bothered to look up when the servant showed Julia and Winston in.
3469Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be able to speak.
3470They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he could think.
3471It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; though it was true that they had come by different routes and only met on O'Brien's doorstep.
3472But merely to walk into such a place needed an effort of the nerve.
3473It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived.
3474The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro--everything was intimidating.
3475Although he had a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers, and order him to get out.
3476O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of them without demur.
3477He was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face which might have been that of a Chinese.
3478The passage down which he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean.
3479That too was intimidating.
3480Winston could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human bodies.
3481O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying it intently.
3482His heavy face, bent down so that one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent.
3483For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without stirring.
3484Then he pulled the speakwrite towards him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:  'Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stop unproceed constructionwise antegetting plusfull estimates machinery overheads stop end message.
3485'  He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across the soundless carpet.
3486A little of the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him with the Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer than usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed.
3487The terror that Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary embarrassment.
3488It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake.
3489For what evidence had he in reality that O'Brien was any kind of political conspirator?
3490Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a dream.
3491He could not even fall back on the pretence that he had come to borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia's presence was impossible to explain.
3492As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him.
3493He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall.
3494There was a sharp snap.
3495The voice had stopped.
3496Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise.
3497Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.
3498'You can turn it off!
3499' he said.
3500'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off.
3501We have that privilege.
3502'  He was opposite them now.
3503His solid form towered over the pair of them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable.
3504He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what?
3505Even now it was quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he had been interrupted.
3506Nobody spoke.
3507After the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent.
3508The seconds marched past, enormous.
3509With difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O'Brien's.
3510Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile.
3511With his characteristic gesture O'Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose.
3512'Shall I say it, or will you?
3513' he said.
3514'I will say it,' said Winston promptly.
3515'That thing is really turned off?
3516'  'Yes, everything is turned off.
3517We are alone.
3518'  'We have come here because----'  He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives.
3519Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here.
3520He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious:  'We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it.
3521We want to join it and work for it.
3522We are enemies of the Party.
3523We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc.
3524We are thought-criminals.
3525We are also adulterers.
3526I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy.
3527If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready.
3528'  He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door had opened.
3529Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in without knocking.
3530Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses.
3531'Martin is one of us,' said O'Brien impassively.
3532'Bring the drinks over here, Martin.
3533Put them on the round table.
3534Have we enough chairs?
3535Then we may as well sit down and talk in comfort.
3536Bring a chair for yourself, Martin.
3537This is business.
3538You can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes.
3539'  The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with a servant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege.
3540Winston regarded him out of the corner of his eye.
3541It struck him that the man's whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality even for a moment.
3542O'Brien took the decanter by the neck and filled up the glasses with a dark-red liquid.
3543It aroused in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a hoarding--a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass.
3544Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the decanter it gleamed like a ruby.
3545It had a sour-sweet smell.
3546He saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at it with frank curiosity.
3547'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile.
3548'You will have read about it in books, no doubt.
3549Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am afraid.
3550' His face grew solemn again, and he raised his glass: 'I think it is fitting that we should begin by drinking a health.
3551To our Leader: To Emmanuel Goldstein.
3552'  Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness.
3553Wine was a thing he had read and dreamed about.
3554Like the glass paperweight or Mr Charrington's half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts.
3555For some reason he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect.
3556Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing.
3557The truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it.
3558He set down the empty glass.
3559'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?
3560' he said.
3561'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive.
3562Where, I do not know.
3563'  'And the conspiracy--the organization?
3564Is it real?
3565It is not simply an invention of the Thought Police?
3566'  'No, it is real.
3567The Brotherhood, we call it.
3568You will never learn much more about the Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it.
3569I will come back to that presently.
3570' He looked at his wrist-watch.
3571'It is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour.
3572You ought not to have come here together, and you will have to leave separately.
3573You, comrade'--he bowed his head to Julia--'will leave first.
3574We have about twenty minutes at our disposal.
3575You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions.
3576In general terms, what are you prepared to do?
3577'  'Anything that we are capable of,' said Winston.
3578O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Winston.
3579He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her.
3580For a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes.
3581He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.
3582'You are prepared to give your lives?
3583'  'Yes.
3584'  'You are prepared to commit murder?
3585'  'Yes.
3586'  'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?
3587'  'Yes.
3588'  'To betray your country to foreign powers?
3589'  'Yes.
3590'  'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?
3591'  'Yes.
3592'  'If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face--are you prepared to do that?
3593'  'Yes.
3594'  'You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-worker?
3595'  'Yes.
3596'  'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?
3597'  'Yes.
3598'  'You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?
3599'  'No!
3600' broke in Julia.
3601It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered.
3602For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech.
3603His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again.
3604Until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say.
3605'No,' he said finally.
3606'You did well to tell me,' said O'Brien.
3607'It is necessary for us to know everything.
3608'  He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with somewhat more expression in it:  'Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different person?
3609We may be obliged to give him a new identity.
3610His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair--even his voice would be different.
3611And you yourself might have become a different person.
3612Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition.
3613Sometimes it is necessary.
3614Sometimes we even amputate a limb.
3615'  Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin's Mongolian face.
3616There were no scars that he could see.
3617Julia had turned a shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she faced O'Brien boldly.
3618She murmured something that seemed to be assent.
3619'Good.
3620Then that is settled.
3621'  There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table.
3622With a rather absent-minded air O'Brien pushed them towards the others, took one himself, then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as though he could think better standing.
3623They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper.
3624O'Brien looked at his wrist-watch again.
3625'You had better go back to your Pantry, Martin,' he said.
3626'I shall switch on in a quarter of an hour.
3627Take a good look at these comrades' faces before you go.
3628You will be seeing them again.
3629I may not.
3630'  Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little man's dark eyes flickered over their faces.
3631There was not a trace of friendliness in his manner.
3632He was memorizing their appearance, but he felt no interest in them, or appeared to feel none.
3633It occurred to Winston that a synthetic face was perhaps incapable of changing its expression.
3634Without speaking or giving any kind of salutation, Martin went out, closing the door silently behind him.
3635O'Brien was strolling up and down, one hand in the pocket of his black overalls, the other holding his cigarette.
3636'You understand,' he said, 'that you will be fighting in the dark.
3637You will always be in the dark.
3638You will receive orders and you will obey them, without knowing why.
3639Later I shall send you a book from which you will learn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategy by which we shall destroy it.
3640When you have read the book, you will be full members of the Brotherhood.
3641But between the general aims that we are fighting for and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything.
3642I tell you that the Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers a hundred members, or ten million.
3643From your personal knowledge you will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen.
3644You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as they disappear.
3645As this was your first contact, it will be preserved.
3646When you receive orders, they will come from me.
3647If we find it necessary to communicate with you, it will be through Martin.
3648When you are finally caught, you will confess.
3649That is unavoidable.
3650But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions.
3651You will not be able to betray more than a handful of unimportant people.
3652Probably you will not even betray me.
3653By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a different person, with a different face.
3654'  He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet.
3655In spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements.
3656It came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette.
3657More even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony.
3658However much in earnest he might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that belongs to a fanatic.
3659When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of persiflage.
3660'This is unavoidable,' his voice seemed to say; 'this is what we have got to do, unflinchingly.
3661But this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth living again.
3662' A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards O'Brien.
3663For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy figure of Goldstein.
3664When you looked at O'Brien's powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe that he could be defeated.
3665There was no stratagem that he was not equal to, no danger that he could not foresee.
3666Even Julia seemed to be impressed.
3667She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently.
3668O'Brien went on:  'You will have heard rumours of the existence of the Brotherhood.
3669No doubt you have formed your own picture of it.
3670You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messages on walls, recognizing one another by codewords or by special movements of the hand.
3671Nothing of the kind exists.
3672The members of the Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, and it is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others.
3673Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete list of members, or any information that would lead them to a complete list.
3674No such list exists.
3675The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense.
3676Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.
3677You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea.
3678You will get no comradeship and no encouragement.
3679When finally you are caught, you will get no help.
3680We never help our members.
3681At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell.
3682You will have to get used to living without results and without hope.
3683You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die.
3684Those are the only results that you will ever see.
3685There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime.
3686We are the dead.
3687Our only true life is in the future.
3688We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.
3689But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.
3690It might be a thousand years.
3691At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little.
3692We cannot act collectively.
3693We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.
3694In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.
3695'  He halted and looked for the third time at his wrist-watch.
3696'It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,' he said to Julia.
3697'Wait.
3698The decanter is still half full.
3699'  He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the stem.
3700'What shall it be this time?
3701' he said, still with the same faint suggestion of irony.
3702'To the confusion of the Thought Police?
3703To the death of Big Brother?
3704To humanity?
3705To the future?
3706'  'To the past,' said Winston.
3707'The past is more important,' agreed O'Brien gravely.
3708They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood up to go.
3709O'Brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat white tablet which he told her to place on her tongue.
3710It was important, he said, not to go out smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very observant.
3711As soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared to forget her existence.
3712He took another pace or two up and down, then stopped.
3713'There are details to be settled,' he said.
3714'I assume that you have a hiding-place of some kind?
3715'  Winston explained about the room over Mr Charrington's shop.
3716'That will do for the moment.
3717Later we will arrange something else for you.
3718It is important to change one's hiding-place frequently.
3719Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of THE BOOK'--even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to pronounce the words as though they were in italics--'Goldstein's book, you understand, as soon as possible.
3720It may be some days before I can get hold of one.
3721There are not many in existence, as you can imagine.
3722The Thought Police hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as we can produce them.
3723It makes very little difference.
3724The book is indestructible.
3725If the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word.
3726Do you carry a brief-case to work with you?
3727' he added.
3728'As a rule, yes.
3729'  'What is it like?
3730'  'Black, very shabby.
3731With two straps.
3732'  'Black, two straps, very shabby--good.
3733One day in the fairly near future--I cannot give a date--one of the messages among your morning's work will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a repeat.
3734On the following day you will go to work without your brief-case.
3735At some time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say "I think you have dropped your brief-case".
3736The one he gives you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book.
3737You will return it within fourteen days.
3738'  They were silent for a moment.
3739'There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said O'Brien.
3740'We shall meet again--if we do meet again----'  Winston looked up at him.
3741'In the place where there is no darkness?
3742' he said hesitantly.
3743O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise.
3744'In the place where there is no darkness,' he said, as though he had recognized the allusion.
3745'And in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave?
3746Any message?
3747Any question?
3748.
3749'  Winston thought.
3750There did not seem to be any further question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding generalities.
3751Instead of anything directly connected with O'Brien or the Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room over Mr Charrington's shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood frame.
3752Almost at random he said:  'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's"?
3753'  Again O'Brien nodded.
3754With a sort of grave courtesy he completed the stanza:     'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,   You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,   When will you pay me?
3755say the bells of Old Bailey,   When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.
3756'   'You knew the last line!
3757' said Winston.
3758'Yes, I knew the last line.
3759And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go.
3760But wait.
3761You had better let me give you one of these tablets.
3762'  As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand.
3763His powerful grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm.
3764At the door Winston looked back, but O'Brien seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind.
3765He was waiting with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen.
3766Beyond him Winston could see the writing-table with its green-shaded lamp and the speakwrite and the wire baskets deep-laden with papers.
3767The incident was closed.
3768Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, O'Brien would be back at his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.
3769Chapter 9    Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.
3770Gelatinous was the right word.
3771It had come into his head spontaneously.
3772His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its translucency.
3773He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light through it.
3774All the blood and lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin.
3775All sensations seemed to be magnified.
3776His overalls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creak.
3777He had worked more than ninety hours in five days.
3778So had everyone else in the Ministry.
3779Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to do, no Party work of any description, until tomorrow morning.
3780He could spend six hours in the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed.
3781Slowly, in mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction of Mr Charrington's shop, keeping one eye open for the patrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was no danger of anyone interfering with him.
3782The heavy brief-case that he was carrying bumped against his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his leg.
3783Inside it was the book, which he had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at.
3784On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns--after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces--at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia.
3785Oceania was at war with Eastasia.
3786Eurasia was an ally.
3787There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place.
3788Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.
3789Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened.
3790It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit.
3791The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies.
3792On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd.
3793A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head.
3794His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties.
3795It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened.
3796At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats.
3797The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren.
3798The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand.
3799He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech.
3800Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different.
3801Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd.
3802Oceania was at war with Eastasia!
3803The next moment there was a tremendous commotion.
3804The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong!
3805Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them.
3806It was sabotage!
3807The agents of Goldstein had been at work!
3808There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot.
3809The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys.
3810But within two or three minutes it was all over.
3811The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech.
3812One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd.
3813The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
3814The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.
3815But at the moment he had other things to preoccupy him.
3816It was during the moment of disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Excuse me, I think you've dropped your brief-case.
3817' He took the brief-case abstractedly, without speaking.
3818He knew that it would be days before he had an opportunity to look inside it.
3819The instant that the demonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours.
3820The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise.
3821The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary.
3822Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
3823A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete.
3824Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs--all had to be rectified at lightning speed.
3825Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.
3826The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names.
3827Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep.
3828Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen.
3829Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half-burying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat enough pile to give him room to work.
3830What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical.
3831Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination.
3832Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
3833By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed wiping every few minutes.
3834It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish.
3835In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie.
3836He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be perfect.
3837On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down.
3838For as much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube; then one more cylinder, then nothing.
3839Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off.
3840A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the Department.
3841A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had been achieved.
3842It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with Eurasia had ever happened.
3843At twelve hundred it was unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free till tomorrow morning.
3844Winston, still carrying the brief-case containing the book, which had remained between his feet while he worked and under his body while he slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.
3845With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stair above Mr Charrington's shop.
3846He was tired, but not sleepy any longer.
3847He opened the window, lit the dirty little oilstove and put on a pan of water for coffee.
3848Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book.
3849He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the brief-case.
3850A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover.
3851The print also looked slightly irregular.
3852The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the book had passed through many hands.
3853The inscription on the title-page ran:     THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF   OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM   by   Emmanuel Goldstein   Winston began reading:   Chapter I Ignorance is Strength  Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low.
3854They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered.
3855Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.
3856The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable.
3857.
3858.
3859Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety.
3860He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand.
3861The sweet summer air played against his cheek.
3862From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock.
3863He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender.
3864It was bliss, it was eternity.
3865Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it at a different place and found himself at Chapter III.
3866He went on reading:   Chapter III War is Peace  The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century.
3867With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being.
3868The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting.
3869The frontiers between the three super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines.
3870Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait.
3871Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa.
3872Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
3873In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years.
3874War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century.
3875It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference.
3876This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous.
3877On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.
3878But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties.
3879The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes.
3880In the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths.
3881War has in fact changed its character.
3882More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance.
3883Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon.
3884To understand the nature of the present war--for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war--one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive.
3885None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination.
3886They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable.
3887Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants.
3888Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about.
3889With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death.
3890In any case each of the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries.
3891In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power.
3892Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth.
3893It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling.
3894In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area.
3895Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment.
3896All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods.
3897But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour.
3898Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.
3899The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely.
3900It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas.
3901The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate.
3902Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world's economy.
3903They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.
3904By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up.
3905But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially different.
3906The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.
3907Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society.
3908At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work.
3909The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward.
3910In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient--a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete--was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.
3911Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing.
3912This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.
3913As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago.
3914Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired.
3915Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there.
3916From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared.
3917If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.
3918And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process--by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute--the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
3919But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction--indeed, in some sense was the destruction--of a hierarchical society.
3920In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared.
3921If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.
3922It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which WEALTH, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while POWER remained in the hands of a small privileged caste.
3923But in practice such a society could not long remain stable.
3924For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.
3925In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
3926To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution.
3927It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.
3928Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods.
3929This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940.
3930The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity.
3931But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable.
3932The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world.
3933Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.
3934And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
3935The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour.
3936War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
3937Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.
3938A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships.
3939Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.
3940In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population.
3941In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage.
3942It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
3943By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life.
3944Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter--set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'.
3945The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty.
3946And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
3947War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way.
3948In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them.
3949But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.
3950What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself.
3951Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph.
3952In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.
3953It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly.
3954All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.
3955The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes.
3956It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest.
3957In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of DOUBLETHINK.
3958Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
3959All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith.
3960It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon.
3961The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet.
3962In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist.
3963In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'.
3964The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.
3965And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.
3966In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.
3967The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery.
3968But in matters of vital importance--meaning, in effect, war and police espionage--the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated.
3969The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.
3970There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve.
3971One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.
3972In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter.
3973The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.
3974In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work.
3975Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's centre.
3976But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on the others.
3977What is more remarkable is that all three powers already possess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any that their present researches are likely to discover.
3978Although the Party, according to its habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as the nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about ten years later.
3979At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America.
3980The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power.
3981Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped.
3982All three powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later.
3983And meanwhile the art of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years.
3984Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development.
3985The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.
3986And in spite of the endless slaughters reported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have never been repeated.
3987None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre which involves the risk of serious defeat.
3988When any large operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally.
3989The strategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is the same.
3990The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to sleep.
3991During this time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally they will all be fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating as to make retaliation impossible.
3992It will then be time to sign a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power, in preparation for another attack.
3993This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of realization.
3994Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken.
3995This explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between the super-states are arbitrary.
3996Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula.
3997But this would violate the principle, followed on all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity.
3998If Oceania were to conquer the areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred million people, who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level.
3999The problem is the same for all three super-states.
4000It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves.
4001Even the official ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion.
4002War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages.
4003If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies.
4004The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.
4005It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.
4006Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same.
4007In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self.
4008The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense.
4009Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all.
4010Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.
4011It follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so.
4012On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn.
4013And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing.
4014Their lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and without victory.
4015Meanwhile the fact that there IS no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought.
4016Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character.
4017In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat.
4018In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality.
4019All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency.
4020So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious.
4021Physical facts could not be ignored.
4022In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.
4023Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions.
4024Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past.
4025Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised today would have been impossible.
4026War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards.
4027While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.
4028But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous.
4029When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity.
4030Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded.
4031As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important.
4032Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed.
4033Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.
4034Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised.
4035Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life--the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like.
4036Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all.
4037Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down.
4038The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be.
4039They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.
4040The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture.
4041It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another.
4042But though it is unreal it is not meaningless.
4043It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.
4044War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair.
4045In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished.
4046In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all.
4047The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
4048The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading.
4049It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.
4050The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different.
4051The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries.
4052For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger.
4053A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
4054This--although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense--is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
4055Winston stopped reading for a moment.
4056Somewhere in remote distance a rocket bomb thundered.
4057The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off.
4058Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek.
4059The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him.
4060In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction.
4061It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order.
4062It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden.
4063The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
4064He had just turned back to Chapter I when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair and started out of his chair to meet her.
4065She dumped her brown tool-bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms.
4066It was more than a week since they had seen one another.
4067'I've got THE BOOK,' he said as they disentangled themselves.
4068'Oh, you've got it?
4069Good,' she said without much interest, and almost immediately knelt down beside the oil stove to make the coffee.
4070They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half an hour.
4071The evening was just cool enough to make it worth while to pull up the counterpane.
4072From below came the familiar sound of singing and the scrape of boots on the flagstones.
4073The brawny red-armed woman whom Winston had seen there on his first visit was almost a fixture in the yard.
4074There seemed to be no hour of daylight when she was not marching to and fro between the washtub and the line, alternately gagging herself with clothes pegs and breaking forth into lusty song.
4075Julia had settled down on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep.
4076He reached out for the book, which was lying on the floor, and sat up against the bedhead.
4077'We must read it,' he said.
4078'You too.
4079All members of the Brotherhood have to read it.
4080'  'You read it,' she said with her eyes shut.
4081'Read it aloud.
4082That's the best way.
4083Then you can explain it to me as you go.
4084'  The clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen.
4085They had three or four hours ahead of them.
4086He propped the book against his knees and began reading:   Chapter I Ignorance is Strength  Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low.
4087They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered.
4088Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other   'Julia, are you awake?
4089' said Winston.
4090'Yes, my love, I'm listening.
4091Go on.
4092It's marvellous.
4093'  He continued reading:   The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable.
4094The aim of the High is to remain where they are.
4095The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High.
4096The aim of the Low, when they have an aim--for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives--is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
4097Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again.
4098For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both.
4099They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice.
4100As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High.
4101Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again.
4102Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims.
4103It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind.
4104Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago.
4105But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer.
4106From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
4107By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern had become obvious to many observers.
4108There then rose schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that inequality was the unalterable law of human life.
4109This doctrine, of course, had always had its adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put forward there was a significant change.
4110In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High.
4111It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave.
4112The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity.
4113Now, however, the concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not yet in positions of command, but merely hoped to be so before long.
4114In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown.
4115The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand.
4116Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages.
4117But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned.
4118The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating UNfreedom and INequality.
4119These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology.
4120But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment.
4121The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop.
4122As usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who would then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.
4123The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of historical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, which had hardly existed before the nineteenth century.
4124The cyclical movement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was alterable.
4125But the principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible.
4126It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth.
4127In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable.
4128Inequality was the price of civilization.
4129With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered.
4130Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels.
4131Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted.
4132In more primitive ages, when a just and peaceful society was in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it.
4133The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years.
4134And this vision had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually profited by each historical change.
4135The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent.
4136But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian.
4137The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable.
4138Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation.
4139And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years--imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations--not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.
4140It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories.
4141But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious.
4142What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious.
4143The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.
4144These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government.
4145As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.
4146This last difference was cardinal.
4147By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient.
4148The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.
4149Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.
4150Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.
4151The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further.
4152With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.
4153Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.
4154The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
4155After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low.
4156But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position.
4157It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism.
4158Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly.
4159The so-called 'abolition of private property' which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals.
4160Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings.
4161Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit.
4162In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization.
4163It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated.
4164Factories, mines, land, houses, transport--everything had been taken away from them: and since these things were no longer private property, it followed that they must be public property.
4165Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.
4166But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this.
4167There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power.
4168Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern.
4169These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree.
4170A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently.
4171Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.
4172After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in reality disappeared.
4173Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable through slow demographic changes which a government with wide powers can easily avert.
4174The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one.
4175The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed.
4176Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
4177The recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations can and do happen without having political results, because there is no way in which discontent can become articulate.
4178As for the problem of over-production, which has been latent in our society since the development of machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III), which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch.
4179From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks.
4180The problem, that is to say, is educational.
4181It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it.
4182The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way.
4183Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society.
4184At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother.
4185Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful.
4186Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration.
4187Nobody has ever seen Big Brother.
4188He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen.
4189We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born.
4190Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world.
4191His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization.
4192Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party.
4193Its numbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per cent of the population of Oceania.
4194Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands.
4195Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population.
4196In the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low: for the slave population of the equatorial lands who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure.
4197In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary.
4198The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party.
4199Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen.
4200Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another.
4201Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area.
4202In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital.
4203Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows.
4204Except that English is its chief LINGUA FRANCA and Newspeak its official language, it is not centralized in any way.
4205Its rulers are not held together by blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine.
4206It is true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines.
4207There is far less to-and-fro movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrial age.
4208Between the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise.
4209Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party.
4210The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated.
4211But this state of affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle.
4212The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word.
4213It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat.
4214In the crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition.
4215The older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called 'class privilege' assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent.
4216He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years.
4217The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.
4218A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors.
4219The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself.
4220WHO wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
4221All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived.
4222Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible.
4223From the proletarians nothing is to be feared.
4224Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
4225They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining.
4226What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference.
4227They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.
4228In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.
4229A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police.
4230Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone.
4231Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected.
4232Nothing that he does is indifferent.
4233His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized.
4234Not only any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected.
4235He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever.
4236On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of behaviour.
4237In Oceania there is no law.
4238Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future.
4239A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts.
4240Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc.
4241If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a GOODTHINKER), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion.
4242But in any case an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words CRIMESTOP, BLACKWHITE, and DOUBLETHINK, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever.
4243A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm.
4244He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party.
4245The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline.
4246The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP.
4247CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.
4248It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
4249CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity.
4250But stupidity is not enough.
4251On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.
4252Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible.
4253But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.
4254The keyword here is BLACKWHITE.
4255Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings.
4256Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.
4257Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.
4258But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.
4259This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK.
4260The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary.
4261The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison.
4262He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising.
4263But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party.
4264It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right.
4265It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted.
4266For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness.
4267If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy.
4268And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered.
4269Thus history is continuously rewritten.
4270This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
4271The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc.
4272Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories.
4273The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.
4274And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.
4275It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance.
4276For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version IS the past, and no different past can ever have existed.
4277This holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a year.
4278At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now.
4279It will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the training of memory.
4280To make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act.
4281But it is also necessary to REMEMBER that events happened in the desired manner.
4282And if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to FORGET that one has done so.
4283The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique.
4284It is learned by the majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox.
4285In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 'reality control'.
4286In Newspeak it is called DOUBLETHINK, though DOUBLETHINK comprises much else as well.
4287DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
4288The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of DOUBLETHINK he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.
4289The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.
4290DOUBLETHINK lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.
4291To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies--all this is indispensably necessary.
4292Even in using the word DOUBLETHINK it is necessary to exercise DOUBLETHINK.
4293For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of DOUBLETHINK one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
4294Ultimately it is by means of DOUBLETHINK that the Party has been able--and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years--to arrest the course of history.
4295All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they grew soft.
4296Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again were overthrown.
4297They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness.
4298It is the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously.
4299And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent.
4300If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.
4301For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.
4302It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of DOUBLETHINK are those who invented DOUBLETHINK and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating.
4303In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is.
4304In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.
4305One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale.
4306Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples of the disputed territories.
4307To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave.
4308Which side is winning is a matter of complete indifference to them.
4309They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as the old ones.
4310The slightly more favoured workers whom we call 'the proles' are only intermittently conscious of the war.
4311When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening.
4312It is in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found.
4313World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible.
4314This peculiar linking-together of opposites--knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism--is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society.
4315The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them.
4316Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism.
4317It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason.
4318It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty.
4319Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts.
4320The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.
4321These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in DOUBLETHINK.
4322For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.
4323In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken.
4324If human equality is to be for ever averted--if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently--then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
4325But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored.
4326It is; WHY should human equality be averted?
4327Supposing that the mechanics of the process have been rightly described, what is the motive for this huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time?
4328Here we reach the central secret.
4329As we have seen.
4330the mystique of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, depends upon DOUBLETHINK But deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought DOUBLETHINK, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards.
4331This motive really consists.
4332.
4333.
4334Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound.
4335It seemed to him that Julia had been very still for some time past.
4336She was lying on her side, naked from the waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed on her hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes.
4337Her breast rose and fell slowly and regularly.
4338'Julia.
4339'  No answer.
4340'Julia, are you awake?
4341'  No answer.
4342She was asleep.
4343He shut the book, put it carefully on the floor, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them.
4344He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret.
4345He understood HOW; he did not understand WHY.
4346Chapter I, like Chapter III, had not actually told him anything that he did not know, it had merely systematized the knowledge that he possessed already.
4347But after reading it he knew better than before that he was not mad.
4348Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.
4349There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
4350A yellow beam from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell across the pillow.
4351He shut his eyes.
4352The sun on his face and the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling.
4353He was safe, everything was all right.
4354He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,' with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.
4355*****  When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only twenty-thirty.
4356He lay dozing for a while; then the usual deep-lunged singing struck up from the yard below:     'It was only an 'opeless fancy,   It passed like an Ipril dye,   But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred   They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
4357'   The drivelling song seemed to have kept its popularity.
4358You still heard it all over the place.
4359It had outlived the Hate Song.
4360Julia woke at the sound, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of bed.
4361'I'm hungry,' she said.
4362'Let's make some more coffee.
4363Damn!
4364The stove's gone out and the water's cold.
4365' She picked the stove up and shook it.
4366'There's no oil in it.
4367'  'We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.
4368'  'The funny thing is I made sure it was full.
4369I'm going to put my clothes on,' she added.
4370'It seems to have got colder.
4371'  Winston also got up and dressed himself.
4372The indefatigable voice sang on:     'They sye that time 'eals all things,   They sye you can always forget;   But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years   They twist my 'eart-strings yet!
4373'   As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window.
4374The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the yard any longer.
4375The flagstones were wet as though they had just been washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots.
4376Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more.
4377He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren.
4378Julia had come across to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below.
4379As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful.
4380It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful.
4381But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not?
4382The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose.
4383Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?
4384'She's beautiful,' he murmured.
4385'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
4386'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
4387He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm.
4388From the hip to the knee her flank was against his.
4389Out of their bodies no child would ever come.
4390That was the one thing they could never do.
4391Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret.
4392The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly.
4393He wondered how many children she had given birth to.
4394It might easily be fifteen.
4395She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years.
4396At the end of it she was still singing.
4397The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance.
4398It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here.
4399And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.
4400If there was hope, it lay in the proles!
4401Without having read to the end of THE BOOK, he knew that that must be Goldstein's final message.
4402The future belonged to the proles.
4403And could he be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party?
4404Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity.
4405Where there is equality there can be sanity.
4406Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness.
4407The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard.
4408In the end their awakening would come.
4409And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.
4410'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?
4411'  'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia.
4412'He was singing to please himself.
4413Not even that.
4414He was just singing.
4415'  The birds sang, the proles sang.
4416the Party did not sing.
4417All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan--everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.
4418Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.
4419You were the dead, theirs was the future.
4420But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
4421'We are the dead,' he said.
4422'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.
4423'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.
4424They sprang apart.
4425Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice.
4426He could see the white all round the irises of Julia's eyes.
4427Her face had turned a milky yellow.
4428The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.
4429'You are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.
4430'It was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.
4431'It was behind the picture,' said the voice.
4432'Remain exactly where you are.
4433Make no movement until you are ordered.
4434'  It was starting, it was starting at last!
4435They could do nothing except stand gazing into one another's eyes.
4436To run for life, to get out of the house before it was too late--no such thought occurred to them.
4437Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall.
4438There was a snap as though a catch had been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass.
4439The picture had fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it.
4440'Now they can see us,' said Julia.
4441'Now we can see you,' said the voice.
4442'Stand out in the middle of the room.
4443Stand back to back.
4444Clasp your hands behind your heads.
4445Do not touch one another.
4446'  They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia's body shaking.
4447Or perhaps it was merely the shaking of his own.
4448He could just stop his teeth from chattering, but his knees were beyond his control.
4449There was a sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and outside.
4450The yard seemed to be full of men.
4451Something was being dragged across the stones.
4452The woman's singing had stopped abruptly.
4453There was a long, rolling clang, as though the washtub had been flung across the yard, and then a confusion of angry shouts which ended in a yell of pain.
4454'The house is surrounded,' said Winston.
4455'The house is surrounded,' said the voice.
4456He heard Julia snap her teeth together.
4457'I suppose we may as well say good-bye,' she said.
4458'You may as well say good-bye,' said the voice.
4459And then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in; 'And by the way, while we are on the subject, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head"!
4460'  Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back.
4461The head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame.
4462Someone was climbing through the window.
4463There was a stampede of boots up the stairs.
4464The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands.
4465Winston was not trembling any longer.
4466Even his eyes he barely moved.
4467One thing alone mattered; to keep still, to keep still and not give them an excuse to hit you!
4468A man with a smooth prize-fighter's jowl in which the mouth was only a slit paused opposite him balancing his truncheon meditatively between thumb and forefinger.
4469Winston met his eyes.
4470The feeling of nakedness, with one's hands behind one's head and one's face and body all exposed, was almost unbearable.
4471The man protruded the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and then passed on.
4472There was another crash.
4473Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.
4474The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat.
4475How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!
4476There was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received a violent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance.
4477One of the men had smashed his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler.
4478She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting for breath.
4479Winston dared not turn his head even by a millimetre, but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within the angle of his vision.
4480Even in his terror it was as though he could feel the pain in his own body, the deadly pain which nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to get back her breath.
4481He knew what it was like; the terrible, agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not be suffered yet, because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe.
4482Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the room like a sack.
4483Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the eyes shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that was the last he saw of her.
4484He stood dead still.
4485No one had hit him yet.
4486Thoughts which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind.
4487He wondered whether they had got Mr Charrington.
4488He wondered what they had done to the woman in the yard.
4489He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago.
4490He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one.
4491But the light seemed too strong.
4492Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an August evening?
4493He wondered whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the time--had slept the clock round and thought it was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning.
4494But he did not pursue the thought further.
4495It was not interesting.
4496There was another, lighter step in the passage.
4497Mr Charrington came into the room.
4498The demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued.
4499Something had also changed in Mr Charrington's appearance.
4500His eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight.
4501'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply.
4502A man stooped to obey.
4503The cockney accent had disappeared; Winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the telescreen.
4504Mr Charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black.
4505Also he was not wearing his spectacles.
4506He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him.
4507He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer.
4508His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger.
4509His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation.
4510The black eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter.
4511It was the alert, cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty.
4512It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.
4513PART THREE     Chapter 1    He did not know where he was.
4514Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making certain.
4515He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.
4516Concealed lamps flooded it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound which he supposed had something to do with the air supply.
4517A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden seat.
4518There were four telescreens, one in each wall.
4519There was a dull aching in his belly.
4520It had been there ever since they had bundled him into the closed van and driven him away.
4521But he was also hungry, with a gnawing, unwholesome kind of hunger.
4522It might be twenty-four hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six.
4523He still did not know, probably never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when they arrested him.
4524Since he was arrested he had not been fed.
4525He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his hands crossed on his knee.
4526He had already learned to sit still.
4527If you made unexpected movements they yelled at you from the telescreen.
4528But the craving for food was growing upon him.
4529What he longed for above all was a piece of bread.
4530He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs in the pocket of his overalls.
4531It was even possible--he thought this because from time to time something seemed to tickle his leg--that there might be a sizeable bit of crust there.
4532In the end the temptation to find out overcame his fear; he slipped a hand into his pocket.
4533'Smith!
4534' yelled a voice from the telescreen.
4535'6079 Smith W.!
4536Hands out of pockets in the cells!
4537'  He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee.
4538Before being brought here he had been taken to another place which must have been an ordinary prison or a temporary lock-up used by the patrols.
4539He did not know how long he had been there; some hours at any rate; with no clocks and no daylight it was hard to gauge the time.
4540It was a noisy, evil-smelling place.
4541They had put him into a cell similar to the one he was now in, but filthily dirty and at all times crowded by ten or fifteen people.
4542The majority of them were common criminals, but there were a few political prisoners among them.
4543He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to take much interest in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference in demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others.
4544The Party prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody.
4545They yelled insults at the guards, fought back fiercely when their belongings were impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled food which they produced from mysterious hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when it tried to restore order.
4546On the other hand some of them seemed to be on good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle cigarettes through the spyhole in the door.
4547The guards, too, treated the common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle them roughly.
4548There was much talk about the forced-labour camps to which most of the prisoners expected to be sent.
4549It was 'all right' in the camps, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts and knew the ropes.
4550There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol distilled from potatoes.
4551The positions of trust were given only to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy.
4552All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals.
4553There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-marketeers, drunks, prostitutes.
4554Some of the drunks were so violent that the other prisoners had to combine to suppress them.
4555An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty, with great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come down in her struggles, was carried in, kicking and shouting, by four guards, who had hold of her one at each corner.
4556They wrenched off the boots with which she had been trying to kick them, and dumped her down across Winston's lap, almost breaking his thigh-bones.
4557The woman hoisted herself upright and followed them out with a yell of 'F---- bastards!
4558' Then, noticing that she was sitting on something uneven, she slid off Winston's knees on to the bench.
4559'Beg pardon, dearie,' she said.
4560'I wouldn't 'a sat on you, only the buggers put me there.
4561They dono 'ow to treat a lady, do they?
4562' She paused, patted her breast, and belched.
4563'Pardon,' she said, 'I ain't meself, quite.
4564'  She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.
4565'Thass better,' she said, leaning back with closed eyes.
4566'Never keep it down, thass what I say.
4567Get it up while it's fresh on your stomach, like.
4568'  She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and seemed immediately to take a fancy to him.
4569She put a vast arm round his shoulder and drew him towards her, breathing beer and vomit into his face.
4570'Wass your name, dearie?
4571' she said.
4572'Smith,' said Winston.
4573'Smith?
4574' said the woman.
4575'Thass funny.
4576My name's Smith too.
4577Why,' she added sentimentally, 'I might be your mother!
4578'  She might, thought Winston, be his mother.
4579She was about the right age and physique, and it was probable that people changed somewhat after twenty years in a forced-labour camp.
4580No one else had spoken to him.
4581To a surprising extent the ordinary criminals ignored the Party prisoners.
4582'The polITS,' they called them, with a sort of uninterested contempt.
4583The Party prisoners seemed terrified of speaking to anybody, and above all of speaking to one another.
4584Only once, when two Party members, both women, were pressed close together on the bench, he overheard amid the din of voices a few hurriedly-whispered words; and in particular a reference to something called 'room one-oh-one', which he did not understand.
4585It might be two or three hours ago that they had brought him here.
4586The dull pain in his belly never went away, but sometimes it grew better and sometimes worse, and his thoughts expanded or contracted accordingly.
4587When it grew worse he thought only of the pain itself, and of his desire for food.
4588When it grew better, panic took hold of him.
4589There were moments when he foresaw the things that would happen to him with such actuality that his heart galloped and his breath stopped.
4590He felt the smash of truncheons on his elbows and iron-shod boots on his shins; he saw himself grovelling on the floor, screaming for mercy through broken teeth.
4591He hardly thought of Julia.
4592He could not fix his mind on her.
4593He loved her and would not betray her; but that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of arithmetic.
4594He felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered what was happening to her.
4595He thought oftener of O'Brien, with a flickering hope.
4596O'Brien might know that he had been arrested.
4597The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried to save its members.
4598But there was the razor blade; they would send the razor blade if they could.
4599There would be perhaps five seconds before the guard could rush into the cell.
4600The blade would bite into him with a sort of burning coldness, and even the fingers that held it would be cut to the bone.
4601Everything came back to his sick body, which shrank trembling from the smallest pain.
4602He was not certain that he would use the razor blade even if he got the chance.
4603It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes' life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it.
4604Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain bricks in the walls of the cell.
4605It should have been easy, but he always lost count at some point or another.
4606More often he wondered where he was, and what time of day it was.
4607At one moment he felt certain that it was broad daylight outside, and at the next equally certain that it was pitch darkness.
4608In this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be turned out.
4609It was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O'Brien had seemed to recognize the allusion.
4610In the Ministry of Love there were no windows.
4611His cell might be at the heart of the building or against its outer wall; it might be ten floors below ground, or thirty above it.
4612He moved himself mentally from place to place, and tried to determine by the feeling of his body whether he was perched high in the air or buried deep underground.
4613There was a sound of marching boots outside.
4614The steel door opened with a clang.
4615A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure who seemed to glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway.
4616He motioned to the guards outside to bring in the prisoner they were leading.
4617The poet Ampleforth shambled into the cell.
4618The door clanged shut again.
4619Ampleforth made one or two uncertain movements from side to side, as though having some idea that there was another door to go out of, and then began to wander up and down the cell.
4620He had not yet noticed Winston's presence.
4621His troubled eyes were gazing at the wall about a metre above the level of Winston's head.
4622He was shoeless; large, dirty toes were sticking out of the holes in his socks.
4623He was also several days away from a shave.
4624A scrubby beard covered his face to the cheekbones, giving him an air of ruffianism that went oddly with his large weak frame and nervous movements.
4625Winston roused himself a little from his lethargy.
4626He must speak to Ampleforth, and risk the yell from the telescreen.
4627It was even conceivable that Ampleforth was the bearer of the razor blade.
4628'Ampleforth,' he said.
4629There was no yell from the telescreen.
4630Ampleforth paused, mildly startled.
4631His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston.
4632'Ah, Smith!
4633' he said.
4634'You too!
4635'  'What are you in for?
4636'  'To tell you the truth--' He sat down awkwardly on the bench opposite Winston.
4637'There is only one offence, is there not?
4638' he said.
4639'And have you committed it?
4640'  'Apparently I have.
4641'  He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for a moment, as though trying to remember something.
4642'These things happen,' he began vaguely.
4643'I have been able to recall one instance--a possible instance.
4644It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly.
4645We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling.
4646I allowed the word "God" to remain at the end of a line.
4647I could not help it!
4648' he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston.
4649'It was impossible to change the line.
4650The rhyme was "rod".
4651Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to "rod" in the entire language?
4652For days I had racked my brains.
4653There WAS no other rhyme.
4654'  The expression on his face changed.
4655The annoyance passed out of it and for a moment he looked almost pleased.
4656A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt and scrubby hair.
4657'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?
4658'  No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston.
4659Nor, in the circumstances, did it strike him as very important or interesting.
4660'Do you know what time of day it is?
4661' he said.
4662Ampleforth looked startled again.
4663'I had hardly thought about it.
4664They arrested me--it could be two days ago--perhaps three.
4665' His eyes flitted round the walls, as though he half expected to find a window somewhere.
4666'There is no difference between night and day in this place.
4667I do not see how one can calculate the time.
4668'  They talked desultorily for some minutes, then, without apparent reason, a yell from the telescreen bade them be silent.
4669Winston sat quietly, his hands crossed.
4670Ampleforth, too large to sit in comfort on the narrow bench, fidgeted from side to side, clasping his lank hands first round one knee, then round the other.
4671The telescreen barked at him to keep still.
4672Time passed.
4673Twenty minutes, an hour--it was difficult to judge.
4674Once more there was a sound of boots outside.
4675Winston's entrails contracted.
4676Soon, very soon, perhaps in five minutes, perhaps now, the tramp of boots would mean that his own turn had come.
4677The door opened.
4678The cold-faced young officer stepped into the cell.
4679With a brief movement of the hand he indicated Ampleforth.
4680'Room 101,' he said.
4681Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards, his face vaguely perturbed, but uncomprehending.
4682What seemed like a long time passed.
4683The pain in Winston's belly had revived.
4684His mind sagged round and round on the same trick, like a ball falling again and again into the same series of slots.
4685He had only six thoughts.
4686The pain in his belly; a piece of bread; the blood and the screaming; O'Brien; Julia; the razor blade.
4687There was another spasm in his entrails, the heavy boots were approaching.
4688As the door opened, the wave of air that it created brought in a powerful smell of cold sweat.
4689Parsons walked into the cell.
4690He was wearing khaki shorts and a sports-shirt.
4691This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness.
4692'YOU here!
4693' he said.
4694Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there was neither interest nor surprise, but only misery.
4695He began walking jerkily up and down, evidently unable to keep still.
4696Each time he straightened his pudgy knees it was apparent that they were trembling.
4697His eyes had a wide-open, staring look, as though he could not prevent himself from gazing at something in the middle distance.
4698'What are you in for?
4699' said Winston.
4700'Thoughtcrime!
4701' said Parsons, almost blubbering.
4702The tone of his voice implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous horror that such a word could be applied to himself.
4703He paused opposite Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: 'You don't think they'll shoot me, do you, old chap?
4704They don't shoot you if you haven't actually done anything--only thoughts, which you can't help?
4705I know they give you a fair hearing.
4706Oh, I trust them for that!
4707They'll know my record, won't they?
4708YOU know what kind of chap I was.
4709Not a bad chap in my way.
4710Not brainy, of course, but keen.
4711I tried to do my best for the Party, didn't I?
4712I'll get off with five years, don't you think?
4713Or even ten years?
4714A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in a labour-camp.
4715They wouldn't shoot me for going off the rails just once?
4716'  'Are you guilty?
4717' said Winston.
4718'Of course I'm guilty!
4719' cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen.
4720'You don't think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?
4721' His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly sanctimonious expression.
4722'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,' he said sententiously.
4723'It's insidious.
4724It can get hold of you without your even knowing it.
4725Do you know how it got hold of me?
4726In my sleep!
4727Yes, that's a fact.
4728There I was, working away, trying to do my bit--never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all.
4729And then I started talking in my sleep.
4730Do you know what they heard me saying?
4731'  He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to utter an obscenity.
4732'"Down with Big Brother"!
4733Yes, I said that!
4734Said it over and over again, it seems.
4735Between you and me, old man, I'm glad they got me before it went any further.
4736Do you know what I'm going to say to them when I go up before the tribunal?
4737"Thank you," I'm going to say, "thank you for saving me before it was too late".
4738'  'Who denounced you?
4739' said Winston.
4740'It was my little daughter,' said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride.
4741'She listened at the keyhole.
4742Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day.
4743Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?
4744I don't bear her any grudge for it.
4745In fact I'm proud of her.
4746It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.
4747'  He made a few more jerky movements up and down, several times, casting a longing glance at the lavatory pan.
4748Then he suddenly ripped down his shorts.
4749'Excuse me, old man,' he said.
4750'I can't help it.
4751It's the waiting.
4752'  He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory pan.
4753Winston covered his face with his hands.
4754'Smith!
4755' yelled the voice from the telescreen.
4756'6079 Smith W.!
4757Uncover your face.
4758No faces covered in the cells.
4759'  Winston uncovered his face.
4760Parsons used the lavatory, loudly and abundantly.
4761It then turned out that the plug was defective and the cell stank abominably for hours afterwards.
4762Parsons was removed.
4763More prisoners came and went, mysteriously.
4764One, a woman, was consigned to 'Room 101', and, Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel and turn a different colour when she heard the words.
4765A time came when, if it had been morning when he was brought here, it would be afternoon; or if it had been afternoon, then it would be midnight.
4766There were six prisoners in the cell, men and women.
4767All sat very still.
4768Opposite Winston there sat a man with a chinless, toothy face exactly like that of some large, harmless rodent.
4769His fat, mottled cheeks were so pouched at the bottom that it was difficult not to believe that he had little stores of food tucked away there.
4770His pale-grey eyes flitted timorously from face to face and turned quickly away again when he caught anyone's eye.
4771The door opened, and another prisoner was brought in whose appearance sent a momentary chill through Winston.
4772He was a commonplace, mean-looking man who might have been an engineer or technician of some kind.
4773But what was startling was the emaciation of his face.
4774It was like a skull.
4775Because of its thinness the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large, and the eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or something.
4776The man sat down on the bench at a little distance from Winston.
4777Winston did not look at him again, but the tormented, skull-like face was as vivid in his mind as though it had been straight in front of his eyes.
4778Suddenly he realized what was the matter.
4779The man was dying of starvation.
4780The same thought seemed to occur almost simultaneously to everyone in the cell.
4781There was a very faint stirring all the way round the bench.
4782The eyes of the chinless man kept flitting towards the skull-faced man, then turning guiltily away, then being dragged back by an irresistible attraction.
4783Presently he began to fidget on his seat.
4784At last he stood up, waddled clumsily across the cell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls, and, with an abashed air, held out a grimy piece of bread to the skull-faced man.
4785There was a furious, deafening roar from the telescreen.
4786The chinless man jumped in his tracks.
4787The skull-faced man had quickly thrust his hands behind his back, as though demonstrating to all the world that he refused the gift.
4788'Bumstead!
4789' roared the voice.
4790'2713 Bumstead J.!
4791Let fall that piece of bread!
4792'  The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor.
4793'Remain standing where you are,' said the voice.
4794'Face the door.
4795Make no movement.
4796'  The chinless man obeyed.
4797His large pouchy cheeks were quivering uncontrollably.
4798The door clanged open.
4799As the young officer entered and stepped aside, there emerged from behind him a short stumpy guard with enormous arms and shoulders.
4800He took his stand opposite the chinless man, and then, at a signal from the officer, let free a frightful blow, with all the weight of his body behind it, full in the chinless man's mouth.
4801The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the floor.
4802His body was flung across the cell and fetched up against the base of the lavatory seat.
4803For a moment he lay as though stunned, with dark blood oozing from his mouth and nose.
4804A very faint whimpering or squeaking, which seemed unconscious, came out of him.
4805Then he rolled over and raised himself unsteadily on hands and knees.
4806Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the two halves of a dental plate fell out of his mouth.
4807The prisoners sat very still, their hands crossed on their knees.
4808The chinless man climbed back into his place.
4809Down one side of his face the flesh was darkening.
4810His mouth had swollen into a shapeless cherry-coloured mass with a black hole in the middle of it.
4811From time to time a little blood dripped on to the breast of his overalls.
4812His grey eyes still flitted from face to face, more guiltily than ever, as though he were trying to discover how much the others despised him for his humiliation.
4813The door opened.
4814With a small gesture the officer indicated the skull-faced man.
4815'Room 101,' he said.
4816There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston's side.
4817The man had actually flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hand clasped together.
4818'Comrade!
4819Officer!
4820' he cried.
4821'You don't have to take me to that place!
4822Haven't I told you everything already?
4823What else is it you want to know?
4824There's nothing I wouldn't confess, nothing!
4825Just tell me what it is and I'll confess straight off.
4826Write it down and I'll sign it--anything!
4827Not room 101!
4828'  'Room 101,' said the officer.
4829The man's face, already very pale, turned a colour Winston would not have believed possible.
4830It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of green.
4831'Do anything to me!
4832' he yelled.
4833'You've been starving me for weeks.
4834Finish it off and let me die.
4835Shoot me.
4836Hang me.
4837Sentence me to twenty-five years.
4838Is there somebody else you want me to give away?
4839Just say who it is and I'll tell you anything you want.
4840I don't care who it is or what you do to them.
4841I've got a wife and three children.
4842The biggest of them isn't six years old.
4843You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch it.
4844But not Room 101!
4845'  'Room 101,' said the officer.
4846The man looked frantically round at the other prisoners, as though with some idea that he could put another victim in his own place.
4847His eyes settled on the smashed face of the chinless man.
4848He flung out a lean arm.
4849'That's the one you ought to be taking, not me!
4850' he shouted.
4851'You didn't hear what he was saying after they bashed his face.
4852Give me a chance and I'll tell you every word of it.
4853HE'S the one that's against the Party, not me.
4854' The guards stepped forward.
4855The man's voice rose to a shriek.
4856'You didn't hear him!
4857' he repeated.
4858'Something went wrong with the telescreen.
4859HE'S the one you want.
4860Take him, not me!
4861'  The two sturdy guards had stooped to take him by the arms.
4862But just at this moment he flung himself across the floor of the cell and grabbed one of the iron legs that supported the bench.
4863He had set up a wordless howling, like an animal.
4864The guards took hold of him to wrench him loose, but he clung on with astonishing strength.
4865For perhaps twenty seconds they were hauling at him.
4866The prisoners sat quiet, their hands crossed on their knees, looking straight in front of them.
4867The howling stopped; the man had no breath left for anything except hanging on.
4868Then there was a different kind of cry.
4869A kick from a guard's boot had broken the fingers of one of his hands.
4870They dragged him to his feet.
4871'Room 101,' said the officer.
4872The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with head sunken, nursing his crushed hand, all the fight had gone out of him.
4873A long time passed.
4874If it had been midnight when the skull-faced man was taken away, it was morning: if morning, it was afternoon.
4875Winston was alone, and had been alone for hours.
4876The pain of sitting on the narrow bench was such that often he got up and walked about, unreproved by the telescreen.
4877The piece of bread still lay where the chinless man had dropped it.
4878At the beginning it needed a hard effort not to look at it, but presently hunger gave way to thirst.
4879His mouth was sticky and evil-tasting.
4880The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head.
4881He would get up because the ache in his bones was no longer bearable, and then would sit down again almost at once because he was too dizzy to make sure of staying on his feet.
4882Whenever his physical sensations were a little under control the terror returned.
4883Sometimes with a fading hope he thought of O'Brien and the razor blade.
4884It was thinkable that the razor blade might arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed.
4885More dimly he thought of Julia.
4886Somewhere or other she was suffering perhaps far worse than he.
4887She might be screaming with pain at this moment.
4888He thought: 'If I could save Julia by doubling my own pain, would I do it?
4889Yes, I would.
4890' But that was merely an intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to take it.
4891He did not feel it.
4892In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and foreknowledge of pain.
4893Besides, was it possible, when you were actually suffering it, to wish for any reason that your own pain should increase?
4894But that question was not answerable yet.
4895The boots were approaching again.
4896The door opened.
4897O'Brien came in.
4898Winston started to his feet.
4899The shock of the sight had driven all caution out of him.
4900For the first time in many years he forgot the presence of the telescreen.
4901'They've got you too!
4902' he cried.
4903'They got me a long time ago,' said O'Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony.
4904He stepped aside.
4905From behind him there emerged a broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his hand.
4906'You know this, Winston,' said O'Brien.
4907'Don't deceive yourself.
4908You did know it--you have always known it.
4909'  Yes, he saw now, he had always known it.
4910But there was no time to think of that.
4911All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the guard's hand.
4912It might fall anywhere; on the crown, on the tip of the ear, on the upper arm, on the elbow----  The elbow!
4913He had slumped to his knees, almost paralysed, clasping the stricken elbow with his other hand.
4914Everything had exploded into yellow light.
4915Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain!
4916The light cleared and he could see the other two looking down at him.
4917The guard was laughing at his contortions.
4918One question at any rate was answered.
4919Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain.
4920Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.
4921Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.
4922In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.
4923Chapter 2    He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he could not move.
4924Light that seemed stronger than usual was falling on his face.
4925O'Brien was standing at his side, looking down at him intently.
4926At the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe.
4927Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings only gradually.
4928He had the impression of swimming up into this room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath it.
4929How long he had been down there he did not know.
4930Since the moment when they arrested him he had not seen darkness or daylight.
4931Besides, his memories were not continuous.
4932There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again after a blank interval.
4933But whether the intervals were of days or weeks or only seconds, there was no way of knowing.
4934With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had started.
4935Later he was to realize that all that then happened was merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected.
4936There was a long range of crimes--espionage, sabotage, and the like--to which everyone had to confess as a matter of course.
4937The confession was a formality, though the torture was real.
4938How many times he had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember.
4939Always there were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously.
4940Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots.
4941There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge the kicks, and simply inviting more and yet more kicks, in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine.
4942There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not force himself into losing consciousness.
4943There were times when his nerve so forsook him that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began, when the mere sight of a fist drawn back for a blow was enough to make him pour forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes.
4944There were other times when he started out with the resolve of confessing nothing, when every word had to be forced out of him between gasps of pain, and there were times when he feebly tried to compromise, when he said to himself: 'I will confess, but not yet.
4945I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable.
4946Three more kicks, two more kicks, and then I will tell them what they want.
4947' Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardly stand, then flung like a sack of potatoes on to the stone floor of a cell, left to recuperate for a few hours, and then taken out and beaten again.
4948There were also longer periods of recovery.
4949He remembered them dimly, because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor.
4950He remembered a cell with a plank bed, a sort of shelf sticking out from the wall, and a tin wash-basin, and meals of hot soup and bread and sometimes coffee.
4951He remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make him sleep.
4952The beatings grew less frequent, and became mainly a threat, a horror to which he could be sent back at any moment when his answers were unsatisfactory.
4953His questioners now were not ruffians in black uniforms but Party intellectuals, little rotund men with quick movements and flashing spectacles, who worked on him in relays over periods which lasted--he thought, he could not be sure--ten or twelve hours at a stretch.
4954These other questioners saw to it that he was in constant slight pain, but it was not chiefly pain that they relied on.
4955They slapped his face, wrung his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water; but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning.
4956Their real weapon was the merciless questioning that went on and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything that he said, convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction until he began weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue.
4957Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a single session.
4958Most of the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened at every hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again; but sometimes they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeal to him in the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even now he had not enough loyalty to the Party left to make him wish to undo the evil he had done.
4959When his nerves were in rags after hours of questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling tears.
4960In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards.
4961He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed, whatever was demanded of him.
4962His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullying started anew.
4963He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind.
4964He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian government as far back as 1968.
4965He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of capitalism, and a sexual pervert.
4966He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife was still alive.
4967He confessed that for years he had been in personal touch with Goldstein and had been a member of an underground organization which had included almost every human being he had ever known.
4968It was easier to confess everything and implicate everybody.
4969Besides, in a sense it was all true.
4970It was true that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed.
4971There were also memories of another kind.
4972They stood out in his mind disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all round them.
4973He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light, because he could see nothing except a pair of eyes.
4974Near at hand some kind of instrument was ticking slowly and regularly.
4975The eyes grew larger and more luminous.
4976Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes, and was swallowed up.
4977He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, under dazzling lights.
4978A man in a white coat was reading the dials.
4979There was a tramp of heavy boots outside.
4980The door clanged open.
4981The waxed-faced officer marched in, followed by two guards.
4982'Room 101,' said the officer.
4983The man in the white coat did not turn round.
4984He did not look at Winston either; he was looking only at the dials.
4985He was rolling down a mighty corridor, a kilometre wide, full of glorious, golden light, roaring with laughter and shouting out confessions at the top of his voice.
4986He was confessing everything, even the things he had succeeded in holding back under the torture.
4987He was relating the entire history of his life to an audience who knew it already.
4988With him were the guards, the other questioners, the men in white coats, O'Brien, Julia, Mr Charrington, all rolling down the corridor together and shouting with laughter.
4989Some dreadful thing which had lain embedded in the future had somehow been skipped over and had not happened.
4990Everything was all right, there was no more pain, the last detail of his life was laid bare, understood, forgiven.
4991He was starting up from the plank bed in the half-certainty that he had heard O'Brien's voice.
4992All through his interrogation, although he had never seen him, he had had the feeling that O'Brien was at his elbow, just out of sight.
4993It was O'Brien who was directing everything.
4994It was he who set the guards on to Winston and who prevented them from killing him.
4995It was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the drugs should be pumped into his arm.
4996It was he who asked the questions and suggested the answers.
4997He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.
4998And once--Winston could not remember whether it was in drugged sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in a moment of wakefulness--a voice murmured in his ear: 'Don't worry, Winston; you are in my keeping.
4999For seven years I have watched over you.
5000Now the turning-point has come.
5001I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.
5002' He was not sure whether it was O'Brien's voice; but it was the same voice that had said to him, 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' in that other dream, seven years ago.
5003He did not remember any ending to his interrogation.
5004There was a period of blackness and then the cell, or room, in which he now was had gradually materialized round him.
5005He was almost flat on his back, and unable to move.
5006His body was held down at every essential point.
5007Even the back of his head was gripped in some manner.
5008O'Brien was looking down at him gravely and rather sadly.
5009His face, seen from below, looked coarse and worn, with pouches under the eyes and tired lines from nose to chin.
5010He was older than Winston had thought him; he was perhaps forty-eight or fifty.
5011Under his hand there was a dial with a lever on top and figures running round the face.
5012'I told you,' said O'Brien, 'that if we met again it would be here.
5013'  'Yes,' said Winston.
5014Without any warning except a slight movement of O'Brien's hand, a wave of pain flooded his body.
5015It was a frightening pain, because he could not see what was happening, and he had the feeling that some mortal injury was being done to him.
5016He did not know whether the thing was really happening, or whether the effect was electrically produced; but his body was being wrenched out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart.
5017Although the pain had brought the sweat out on his forehead, the worst of all was the fear that his backbone was about to snap.
5018He set his teeth and breathed hard through his nose, trying to keep silent as long as possible.
5019'You are afraid,' said O'Brien, watching his face, 'that in another moment something is going to break.
5020Your especial fear is that it will be your backbone.
5021You have a vivid mental picture of the vertebrae snapping apart and the spinal fluid dripping out of them.
5022That is what you are thinking, is it not, Winston?
5023'  Winston did not answer.
5024O'Brien drew back the lever on the dial.
5025The wave of pain receded almost as quickly as it had come.
5026'That was forty,' said O'Brien.
5027'You can see that the numbers on this dial run up to a hundred.
5028Will you please remember, throughout our conversation, that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you at any moment and to whatever degree I choose?
5029If you tell me any lies, or attempt to prevaricate in any way, or even fall below your usual level of intelligence, you will cry out with pain, instantly.
5030Do you understand that?
5031'  'Yes,' said Winston.
5032O'Brien's manner became less severe.
5033He resettled his spectacles thoughtfully, and took a pace or two up and down.
5034When he spoke his voice was gentle and patient.
5035He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish.
5036'I am taking trouble with you, Winston,' he said, 'because you are worth trouble.
5037You know perfectly well what is the matter with you.
5038You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge.
5039You are mentally deranged.
5040You suffer from a defective memory.
5041You are unable to remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened.
5042Fortunately it is curable.
5043You have never cured yourself of it, because you did not choose to.
5044There was a small effort of the will that you were not ready to make.
5045Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue.
5046Now we will take an example.
5047At this moment, which power is Oceania at war with?
5048'  'When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with Eastasia.
5049'  'With Eastasia.
5050Good.
5051And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, has it not?
5052'  Winston drew in his breath.
5053He opened his mouth to speak and then did not speak.
5054He could not take his eyes away from the dial.
5055'The truth, please, Winston.
5056YOUR truth.
5057Tell me what you think you remember.
5058'  'I remember that until only a week before I was arrested, we were not at war with Eastasia at all.
5059We were in alliance with them.
5060The war was against Eurasia.
5061That had lasted for four years.
5062Before that----'  O'Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand.
5063'Another example,' he said.
5064'Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed.
5065You believed that three men, three one-time Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford--men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession--were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with.
5066You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false.
5067There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination.
5068You believed that you had actually held it in your hands.
5069It was a photograph something like this.
5070'  An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's fingers.
5071For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston's vision.
5072It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity.
5073It was THE photograph.
5074It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed.
5075For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again.
5076But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it!
5077He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free.
5078It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction.
5079For the moment he had even forgotten the dial.
5080All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.
5081'It exists!
5082' he cried.
5083'No,' said O'Brien.
5084He stepped across the room.
5085There was a memory hole in the opposite wall.
5086O'Brien lifted the grating.
5087Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame.
5088O'Brien turned away from the wall.
5089'Ashes,' he said.
5090'Not even identifiable ashes.
5091Dust.
5092It does not exist.
5093It never existed.
5094'  'But it did exist!
5095It does exist!
5096It exists in memory.
5097I remember it.
5098You remember it.
5099'  'I do not remember it,' said O'Brien.
5100Winston's heart sank.
5101That was doublethink.
5102He had a feeling of deadly helplessness.
5103If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter.
5104But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph.
5105And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting.
5106How could one be sure that it was simple trickery?
5107Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.
5108O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively.
5109More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.
5110'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,' he said.
5111'Repeat it, if you please.
5112'  '"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,"' repeated Winston obediently.
5113'"Who controls the present controls the past,"' said O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval.
5114'Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?
5115'  Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston.
5116His eyes flitted towards the dial.
5117He not only did not know whether 'yes' or 'no' was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.
5118O'Brien smiled faintly.
5119'You are no metaphysician, Winston,' he said.
5120'Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence.
5121I will put it more precisely.
5122Does the past exist concretely, in space?
5123Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?
5124'  'No.
5125'  'Then where does the past exist, if at all?
5126'  'In records.
5127It is written down.
5128'  'In records.
5129And----?
5130'  'In the mind.
5131In human memories.
5132'  'In memory.
5133Very well, then.
5134We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories.
5135Then we control the past, do we not?
5136'  'But how can you stop people remembering things?
5137' cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial.
5138'It is involuntary.
5139It is outside oneself.
5140How can you control memory?
5141You have not controlled mine!
5142'  O'Brien's manner grew stern again.
5143He laid his hand on the dial.
5144'On the contrary,' he said, 'YOU have not controlled it.
5145That is what has brought you here.
5146You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline.
5147You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.
5148You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.
5149Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston.
5150You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right.
5151You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident.
5152When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you.
5153But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external.
5154Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
5155Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.
5156Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth.
5157It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.
5158That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston.
5159It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will.
5160You must humble yourself before you can become sane.
5161'  He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to sink in.
5162'Do you remember,' he went on, 'writing in your diary, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four"?
5163'  'Yes,' said Winston.
5164O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
5165'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
5166'  'Four.
5167'  'And if the party says that it is not four but five--then how many?
5168'  'Four.
5169'  The word ended in a gasp of pain.
5170The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five.
5171The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body.
5172The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop.
5173O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended.
5174He drew back the lever.
5175This time the pain was only slightly eased.
5176'How many fingers, Winston?
5177'  'Four.
5178'  The needle went up to sixty.
5179'How many fingers, Winston?
5180'  'Four!
5181Four!
5182What else can I say?
5183Four!
5184'  The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it.
5185The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision.
5186The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
5187'How many fingers, Winston?
5188'  'Four!
5189Stop it, stop it!
5190How can you go on?
5191Four!
5192Four!
5193'  'How many fingers, Winston?
5194'  'Five!
5195Five!
5196Five!
5197'  'No, Winston, that is no use.
5198You are lying.
5199You still think there are four.
5200How many fingers, please?
5201'  'Four!
5202five!
5203Four!
5204Anything you like.
5205Only stop it, stop the pain!
5206'  Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brien's arm round his shoulders.
5207He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds.
5208The bonds that had held his body down were loosened.
5209He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks.
5210For a moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders.
5211He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it.
5212'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.
5213'How can I help it?
5214' he blubbered.
5215'How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes?
5216Two and two are four.
5217'  'Sometimes, Winston.
5218Sometimes they are five.
5219Sometimes they are three.
5220Sometimes they are all of them at once.
5221You must try harder.
5222It is not easy to become sane.
5223'  He laid Winston down on the bed.
5224The grip of his limbs tightened again, but the pain had ebbed away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold.
5225O'Brien motioned with his head to the man in the white coat, who had stood immobile throughout the proceedings.
5226The man in the white coat bent down and looked closely into Winston's eyes, felt his pulse, laid an ear against his chest, tapped here and there, then he nodded to O'Brien.
5227'Again,' said O'Brien.
5228The pain flowed into Winston's body.
5229The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five.
5230He had shut his eyes this time.
5231He knew that the fingers were still there, and still four.
5232All that mattered was somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over.
5233He had ceased to notice whether he was crying out or not.
5234The pain lessened again.
5235He opened his eyes.
5236O'Brien had drawn back the lever.
5237'How many fingers, Winston?
5238'  'Four.
5239I suppose there are four.
5240I would see five if I could.
5241I am trying to see five.
5242'  'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?
5243'  'Really to see them.
5244'  'Again,' said O'Brien.
5245Perhaps the needle was eighty--ninety.
5246Winston could not intermittently remember why the pain was happening.
5247Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again.
5248He was trying to count them, he could not remember why.
5249He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four.
5250The pain died down again.
5251When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing.
5252Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing.
5253He shut his eyes again.
5254'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
5255'  'I don't know.
5256I don't know.
5257You will kill me if you do that again.
5258Four, five, six--in all honesty I don't know.
5259'  'Better,' said O'Brien.
5260A needle slid into Winston's arm.
5261Almost in the same instant a blissful, healing warmth spread all through his body.
5262The pain was already half-forgotten.
5263He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O'Brien.
5264At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligent, his heart seemed to turn over.
5265If he could have moved he would have stretched out a hand and laid it on O'Brien's arm.
5266He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain.
5267The old feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back.
5268O'Brien was a person who could be talked to.
5269Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
5270O'Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was certain, he would send him to his death.
5271It made no difference.
5272In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates: somewhere or other, although the actual words might never be spoken, there was a place where they could meet and talk.
5273O'Brien was looking down at him with an expression which suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind.
5274When he spoke it was in an easy, conversational tone.
5275'Do you know where you are, Winston?
5276' he said.
5277'I don't know.
5278I can guess.
5279In the Ministry of Love.
5280'  'Do you know how long you have been here?
5281'  'I don't know.
5282Days, weeks, months--I think it is months.
5283'  'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?
5284'  'To make them confess.
5285'  'No, that is not the reason.
5286Try again.
5287'  'To punish them.
5288'  'No!
5289' exclaimed O'Brien.
5290His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated.
5291'No!
5292Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you.
5293Shall I tell you why we have brought you here?
5294To cure you!
5295To make you sane!
5296Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured?
5297We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed.
5298The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.
5299We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.
5300Do you understand what I mean by that?
5301'  He was bending over Winston.
5302His face looked enormous because of its nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below.
5303Moreover it was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity.
5304Again Winston's heart shrank.
5305If it had been possible he would have cowered deeper into the bed.
5306He felt certain that O'Brien was about to twist the dial out of sheer wantonness.
5307At this moment, however, O'Brien turned away.
5308He took a pace or two up and down.
5309Then he continued less vehemently:  'The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms.
5310You have read of the religious persecutions of the past.
5311In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisition.
5312It was a failure.
5313It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it.
5314For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up.
5315Why was that?
5316Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant.
5317Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs.
5318Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him.
5319Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called.
5320There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists.
5321The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done.
5322And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs.
5323Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity.
5324They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy.
5325And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again.
5326The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten.
5327Once again, why was it?
5328In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue.
5329We do not make mistakes of that kind.
5330All the confessions that are uttered here are true.
5331We make them true.
5332And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us.
5333You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston.
5334Posterity will never hear of you.
5335You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history.
5336We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere.
5337Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain.
5338You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future.
5339You will never have existed.
5340'  Then why bother to torture me?
5341thought Winston, with a momentary bitterness.
5342O'Brien checked his step as though Winston had uttered the thought aloud.
5343His large ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.
5344'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference--in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first?
5345That is what you were thinking, was it not?
5346'  'Yes,' said Winston.
5347O'Brien smiled slightly.
5348'You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston.
5349You are a stain that must be wiped out.
5350Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past?
5351We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission.
5352When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will.
5353We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him.
5354We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.
5355We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.
5356We make him one of ourselves before we kill him.
5357It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.
5358Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation.
5359In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it.
5360Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet.
5361But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.
5362The command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not".
5363The command of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt".
5364Our command is "THOU ART".
5365No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us.
5366Everyone is washed clean.
5367Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed--Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford--in the end we broke them down.
5368I took part in their interrogation myself.
5369I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping--and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence.
5370By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men.
5371There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother.
5372It was touching to see how they loved him.
5373They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean.
5374'  His voice had grown almost dreamy.
5375The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face.
5376He is not pretending, thought Winston, he is not a hypocrite, he believes every word he says.
5377What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority.
5378He watched the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision.
5379O'Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself.
5380There was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that O'Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected.
5381His mind CONTAINED Winston's mind.
5382But in that case how could it be true that O'Brien was mad?
5383It must be he, Winston, who was mad.
5384O'Brien halted and looked down at him.
5385His voice had grown stern again.
5386'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us.
5387No one who has once gone astray is ever spared.
5388And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us.
5389What happens to you here is for ever.
5390Understand that in advance.
5391We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back.
5392Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years.
5393Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling.
5394Everything will be dead inside you.
5395Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity.
5396You will be hollow.
5397We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.
5398'  He paused and signed to the man in the white coat.
5399Winston was aware of some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into place behind his head.
5400O'Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face was almost on a level with Winston's.
5401'Three thousand,' he said, speaking over Winston's head to the man in the white coat.
5402Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against Winston's temples.
5403He quailed.
5404There was pain coming, a new kind of pain.
5405O'Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.
5406'This time it will not hurt,' he said.
5407'Keep your eyes fixed on mine.
5408'  At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise.
5409There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light.
5410Winston was not hurt, only prostrated.
5411Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing happened, he had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that position.
5412A terrific painless blow had flattened him out.
5413Also something had happened inside his head.
5414As his eyes regained their focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.
5415'It will not last,' said O'Brien.
5416'Look me in the eyes.
5417What country is Oceania at war with?
5418'  Winston thought.
5419He knew what was meant by Oceania and that he himself was a citizen of Oceania.
5420He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not know.
5421In fact he had not been aware that there was any war.
5422'I don't remember.
5423'  'Oceania is at war with Eastasia.
5424Do you remember that now?
5425'  'Yes.
5426'  'Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
5427Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war.
5428Do you remember that?
5429'  'Yes.
5430'  'Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been condemned to death for treachery.
5431You pretended that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent.
5432No such piece of paper ever existed.
5433You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it.
5434You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it.
5435Do you remember that?
5436'  'Yes.
5437'  'Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you.
5438You saw five fingers.
5439Do you remember that?
5440'  'Yes.
5441'  O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
5442'There are five fingers there.
5443Do you see five fingers?
5444'  'Yes.
5445'  And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed.
5446He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity.
5447Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again.
5448But there had been a moment--he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps--of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed.
5449It had faded but before O'Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some period of one's life when one was in effect a different person.
5450'You see now,' said O'Brien, 'that it is at any rate possible.
5451'  'Yes,' said Winston.
5452O'Brien stood up with a satisfied air.
5453Over to his left Winston saw the man in the white coat break an ampoule and draw back the plunger of a syringe.
5454O'Brien turned to Winston with a smile.
5455In almost the old manner he resettled his spectacles on his nose.
5456'Do you remember writing in your diary,' he said, 'that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to?
5457You were right.
5458I enjoy talking to you.
5459Your mind appeals to me.
5460It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
5461Before we bring the session to an end you can ask me a few questions, if you choose.
5462'  'Any question I like?
5463'  'Anything.
5464' He saw that Winston's eyes were upon the dial.
5465'It is switched off.
5466What is your first question?
5467'  'What have you done with Julia?
5468' said Winston.
5469O'Brien smiled again.
5470'She betrayed you, Winston.
5471Immediately--unreservedly.
5472I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly.
5473You would hardly recognize her if you saw her.
5474All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness--everything has been burned out of her.
5475It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.
5476'  'You tortured her?
5477'  O'Brien left this unanswered.
5478'Next question,' he said.
5479'Does Big Brother exist?
5480'  'Of course he exists.
5481The Party exists.
5482Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.
5483'  'Does he exist in the same way as I exist?
5484'  'You do not exist,' said O'Brien.
5485Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him.
5486He knew, or he could imagine, the arguments which proved his own nonexistence; but they were nonsense, they were only a play on words.
5487Did not the statement, 'You do not exist', contain a logical absurdity?
5488But what use was it to say so?
5489His mind shrivelled as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments with which O'Brien would demolish him.
5490'I think I exist,' he said wearily.
5491'I am conscious of my own identity.
5492I was born and I shall die.
5493I have arms and legs.
5494I occupy a particular point in space.
5495No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.
5496In that sense, does Big Brother exist?
5497'  'It is of no importance.
5498He exists.
5499'  'Will Big Brother ever die?
5500'  'Of course not.
5501How could he die?
5502Next question.
5503'  'Does the Brotherhood exist?
5504'  'That, Winston, you will never know.
5505If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No.
5506As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.
5507'  Winston lay silent.
5508His breast rose and fell a little faster.
5509He still had not asked the question that had come into his mind the first.
5510He had got to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue would not utter it.
5511There was a trace of amusement in O'Brien's face.
5512Even his spectacles seemed to wear an ironical gleam.
5513He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows what I am going to ask!
5514At the thought the words burst out of him:  'What is in Room 101?
5515'  The expression on O'Brien's face did not change.
5516He answered drily:  'You know what is in Room 101, Winston.
5517Everyone knows what is in Room 101.
5518'  He raised a finger to the man in the white coat.
5519Evidently the session was at an end.
5520A needle jerked into Winston's arm.
5521He sank almost instantly into deep sleep.
5522Chapter 3    'There are three stages in your reintegration,' said O'Brien.
5523'There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance.
5524It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.
5525'  As always, Winston was lying flat on his back.
5526But of late his bonds were looser.
5527They still held him to the bed, but he could move his knees a little and could turn his head from side to side and raise his arms from the elbow.
5528The dial, also, had grown to be less of a terror.
5529He could evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever.
5530Sometimes they got through a whole session without use of the dial.
5531He could not remember how many sessions there had been.
5532The whole process seemed to stretch out over a long, indefinite time--weeks, possibly--and the intervals between the sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or two.
5533'As you lie there,' said O'Brien, 'you have often wondered--you have even asked me--why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble on you.
5534And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially the same question.
5535You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not its underlying motives.
5536Do you remember writing in your diary, "I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY"?
5537It was when you thought about "why" that you doubted your own sanity.
5538You have read THE BOOK, Goldstein's book, or parts of it, at least.
5539Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?
5540'  'You have read it?
5541' said Winston.
5542'I wrote it.
5543That is to say, I collaborated in writing it.
5544No book is produced individually, as you know.
5545'  'Is it true, what it says?
5546'  'As description, yes.
5547The programme it sets forth is nonsense.
5548The secret accumulation of knowledge--a gradual spread of enlightenment--ultimately a proletarian rebellion--the overthrow of the Party.
5549You foresaw yourself that that was what it would say.
5550It is all nonsense.
5551The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million.
5552They cannot.
5553I do not have to tell you the reason: you know it already.
5554If you have ever cherished any dreams of violent insurrection, you must abandon them.
5555There is no way in which the Party can be overthrown.
5556The rule of the Party is for ever.
5557Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.
5558'  He came closer to the bed.
5559'For ever!
5560' he repeated.
5561'And now let us get back to the question of "how" and "why".
5562You understand well enough HOW the Party maintains itself in power.
5563Now tell me WHY we cling to power.
5564What is our motive?
5565Why should we want power?
5566Go on, speak,' he added as Winston remained silent.
5567Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or two.
5568A feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him.
5569The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come back into O'Brien's face.
5570He knew in advance what O'Brien would say.
5571That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority.
5572That it sought power because men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves.
5573That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.
5574That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others.
5575The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O'Brien said this he would believe it.
5576You could see it in his face.
5577O'Brien knew everything.
5578A thousand times better than Winston he knew what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there.
5579He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified by the ultimate purpose.
5580What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
5581'You are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly.
5582'You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore----'  He started and almost cried out.
5583A pang of pain had shot through his body.
5584O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.
5585'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!
5586' he said.
5587'You should know better than to say a thing like that.
5588'  He pulled the lever back and continued:  'Now I will tell you the answer to my question.
5589It is this.
5590The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.
5591We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.
5592Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.
5593What pure power means you will understand presently.
5594We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing.
5595All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.
5596The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.
5597They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.
5598We are not like that.
5599We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
5600Power is not a means, it is an end.
5601One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
5602The object of persecution is persecution.
5603The object of torture is torture.
5604The object of power is power.
5605Now do you begin to understand me?
5606'  Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of O'Brien's face.
5607It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired.
5608There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones.
5609O'Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.
5610'You are thinking,' he said, 'that my face is old and tired.
5611You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body.
5612Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell?
5613The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.
5614Do you die when you cut your fingernails?
5615'  He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his pocket.
5616'We are the priests of power,' he said.
5617'God is power.
5618But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned.
5619It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means.
5620The first thing you must realize is that power is collective.
5621The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual.
5622You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery".
5623Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible?
5624Slavery is freedom.
5625Alone--free--the human being is always defeated.
5626It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.
5627But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.
5628The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings.
5629Over the body--but, above all, over the mind.
5630Power over matter--external reality, as you would call it--is not important.
5631Already our control over matter is absolute.
5632'  For a moment Winston ignored the dial.
5633He made a violent effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully.
5634'But how can you control matter?
5635' he burst out.
5636'You don't even control the climate or the law of gravity.
5637And there are disease, pain, death----'  O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand.
5638'We control matter because we control the mind.
5639Reality is inside the skull.
5640You will learn by degrees, Winston.
5641There is nothing that we could not do.
5642Invisibility, levitation--anything.
5643I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to.
5644I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it.
5645You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature.
5646We make the laws of Nature.
5647'  'But you do not!
5648You are not even masters of this planet.
5649What about Eurasia and Eastasia?
5650You have not conquered them yet.
5651'  'Unimportant.
5652We shall conquer them when it suits us.
5653And if we did not, what difference would it make?
5654We can shut them out of existence.
5655Oceania is the world.
5656'  'But the world itself is only a speck of dust.
5657And man is tiny--helpless!
5658How long has he been in existence?
5659For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.
5660'  'Nonsense.
5661The earth is as old as we are, no older.
5662How could it be older?
5663Nothing exists except through human consciousness.
5664'  'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.
5665'  'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston?
5666Of course not.
5667Nineteenth-century biologists invented them.
5668Before man there was nothing.
5669After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing.
5670Outside man there is nothing.
5671'  'But the whole universe is outside us.
5672Look at the stars!
5673Some of them are a million light-years away.
5674They are out of our reach for ever.
5675'  'What are the stars?
5676' said O'Brien indifferently.
5677'They are bits of fire a few kilometres away.
5678We could reach them if we wanted to.
5679Or we could blot them out.
5680The earth is the centre of the universe.
5681The sun and the stars go round it.
5682'  Winston made another convulsive movement.
5683This time he did not say anything.
5684O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:  'For certain purposes, of course, that is not true.
5685When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away.
5686But what of it?
5687Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy?
5688The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them.
5689Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that?
5690Have you forgotten doublethink?
5691'  Winston shrank back upon the bed.
5692Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon.
5693And yet he knew, he KNEW, that he was in the right.
5694The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind--surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false?
5695Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy?
5696There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten.
5697A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's mouth as he looked down at him.
5698'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong point.
5699The word you are trying to think of is solipsism.
5700But you are mistaken.
5701This is not solipsism.
5702Collective solipsism, if you like.
5703But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing.
5704All this is a digression,' he added in a different tone.
5705'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.
5706' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
5707'  Winston thought.
5708'By making him suffer,' he said.
5709'Exactly.
5710By making him suffer.
5711Obedience is not enough.
5712Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?
5713Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.
5714Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
5715Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?
5716It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined.
5717A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself.
5718Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain.
5719The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice.
5720Ours is founded upon hatred.
5721In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.
5722Everything else we shall destroy--everything.
5723Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution.
5724We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.
5725No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.
5726But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.
5727Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.
5728The sex instinct will be eradicated.
5729Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card.
5730We shall abolish the orgasm.
5731Our neurologists are at work upon it now.
5732There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party.
5733There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother.
5734There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.
5735There will be no art, no literature, no science.
5736When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science.
5737There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness.
5738There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life.
5739All competing pleasures will be destroyed.
5740But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.
5741Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
5742If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever.
5743'  He paused as though he expected Winston to speak.
5744Winston had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again.
5745He could not say anything.
5746His heart seemed to be frozen.
5747O'Brien went on:  'And remember that it is for ever.
5748The face will always be there to be stamped upon.
5749The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again.
5750Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands--all that will continue, and worse.
5751The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease.
5752It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph.
5753The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.
5754Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever.
5755Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive.
5756This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms.
5757Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible--and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord.
5758That is the world that we are preparing, Winston.
5759A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power.
5760You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like.
5761But in the end you will do more than understand it.
5762You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.
5763'  Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak.
5764'You can't!
5765' he said weakly.
5766'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?
5767'  'You could not create such a world as you have just described.
5768It is a dream.
5769It is impossible.
5770'  'Why?
5771'  'It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty.
5772It would never endure.
5773'  'Why not?
5774'  'It would have no vitality.
5775It would disintegrate.
5776It would commit suicide.
5777'  'Nonsense.
5778You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love.
5779Why should it be?
5780And if it were, what difference would that make?
5781Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster.
5782Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty.
5783Still what difference would it make?
5784Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death?
5785The party is immortal.
5786'  As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness.
5787Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again.
5788And yet he could not keep silent.
5789Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.
5790'I don't know--I don't care.
5791Somehow you will fail.
5792Something will defeat you.
5793Life will defeat you.
5794'  'We control life, Winston, at all its levels.
5795You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us.
5796But we create human nature.
5797Men are infinitely malleable.
5798Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us.
5799Put it out of your mind.
5800They are helpless, like the animals.
5801Humanity is the Party.
5802The others are outside--irrelevant.
5803'  'I don't care.
5804In the end they will beat you.
5805Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.
5806'  'Do you see any evidence that that is happening?
5807Or any reason why it should?
5808'  'No.
5809I believe it.
5810I KNOW that you will fail.
5811There is something in the universe--I don't know, some spirit, some principle--that you will never overcome.
5812'  'Do you believe in God, Winston?
5813'  'No.
5814'  'Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?
5815'  'I don't know.
5816The spirit of Man.
5817'  'And do you consider yourself a man?
5818'  'Yes.
5819'  'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.
5820Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors.
5821Do you understand that you are ALONE?
5822You are outside history, you are non-existent.
5823' His manner changed and he said more harshly: 'And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?
5824'  'Yes, I consider myself superior.
5825'  O'Brien did not speak.
5826Two other voices were speaking.
5827After a moment Winston recognized one of them as his own.
5828It was a sound-track of the conversation he had had with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood.
5829He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face.
5830O'Brien made a small impatient gesture, as though to say that the demonstration was hardly worth making.
5831Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped.
5832'Get up from that bed,' he said.
5833The bonds had loosened themselves.
5834Winston lowered himself to the floor and stood up unsteadily.
5835'You are the last man,' said O'Brien.
5836'You are the guardian of the human spirit.
5837You shall see yourself as you are.
5838Take off your clothes.
5839'  Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together.
5840The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them.
5841He could not remember whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time.
5842Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes.
5843As he slid them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room.
5844He approached it, then stopped short.
5845An involuntary cry had broken out of him.
5846'Go on,' said O'Brien.
5847'Stand between the wings of the mirror.
5848You shall see the side view as well.
5849'  He had stopped because he was frightened.
5850A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him.
5851Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself.
5852He moved closer to the glass.
5853The creature's face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage.
5854A forlorn, jailbird's face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful.
5855The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look.
5856Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside.
5857The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt.
5858He had gone partially bald.
5859For the first moment he had thought that he had gone grey as well, but it was only the scalp that was grey.
5860Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body was grey all over with ancient, ingrained dirt.
5861Here and there under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it.
5862But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body.
5863The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs.
5864He saw now what O'Brien had meant about seeing the side view.
5865The curvature of the spine was astonishing.
5866The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull.
5867At a guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease.
5868'You have thought sometimes,' said O'Brien, 'that my face--the face of a member of the Inner Party--looks old and worn.
5869What do you think of your own face?
5870'  He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing him.
5871'Look at the condition you are in!
5872' he said.
5873'Look at this filthy grime all over your body.
5874Look at the dirt between your toes.
5875Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg.
5876Do you know that you stink like a goat?
5877Probably you have ceased to notice it.
5878Look at your emaciation.
5879Do you see?
5880I can make my thumb and forefinger meet round your bicep.
5881I could snap your neck like a carrot.
5882Do you know that you have lost twenty-five kilograms since you have been in our hands?
5883Even your hair is coming out in handfuls.
5884Look!
5885' He plucked at Winston's head and brought away a tuft of hair.
5886'Open your mouth.
5887Nine, ten, eleven teeth left.
5888How many had you when you came to us?
5889And the few you have left are dropping out of your head.
5890Look here!
5891'  He seized one of Winston's remaining front teeth between his powerful thumb and forefinger.
5892A twinge of pain shot through Winston's jaw.
5893O'Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots.
5894He tossed it across the cell.
5895'You are rotting away,' he said; 'you are falling to pieces.
5896What are you?
5897A bag of filth.
5898Now turn around and look into that mirror again.
5899Do you see that thing facing you?
5900That is the last man.
5901If you are human, that is humanity.
5902Now put your clothes on again.
5903'  Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements.
5904Until now he had not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was.
5905Only one thought stirred in his mind: that he must have been in this place longer than he had imagined.
5906Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of pity for his ruined body overcame him.
5907Before he knew what he was doing he had collapsed on to a small stool that stood beside the bed and burst into tears.
5908He was aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh white light: but he could not stop himself.
5909O'Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly.
5910'It will not last for ever,' he said.
5911'You can escape from it whenever you choose.
5912Everything depends on yourself.
5913'  'You did it!
5914' sobbed Winston.
5915'You reduced me to this state.
5916'  'No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it.
5917This is what you accepted when you set yourself up against the Party.
5918It was all contained in that first act.
5919Nothing has happened that you did not foresee.
5920'  He paused, and then went on:  'We have beaten you, Winston.
5921We have broken you up.
5922You have seen what your body is like.
5923Your mind is in the same state.
5924I do not think there can be much pride left in you.
5925You have been kicked and flogged and insulted, you have screamed with pain, you have rolled on the floor in your own blood and vomit.
5926You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed everybody and everything.
5927Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?
5928'  Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still oozing out of his eyes.
5929He looked up at O'Brien.
5930'I have not betrayed Julia,' he said.
5931O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully.
5932'No,' he said; 'no; that is perfectly true.
5933You have not betrayed Julia.
5934'  The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy, flooded Winston's heart again.
5935How intelligent, he thought, how intelligent!
5936Never did O'Brien fail to understand what was said to him.
5937Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly that he HAD betrayed Julia.
5938For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under the torture?
5939He had told them everything he knew about her, her habits, her character, her past life; he had confessed in the most trivial detail everything that had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to her and she to him, their black-market meals, their adulteries, their vague plottings against the Party--everything.
5940And yet, in the sense in which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her.
5941He had not stopped loving her; his feelings towards her had remained the same.
5942O'Brien had seen what he meant without the need for explanation.
5943'Tell me,' he said, 'how soon will they shoot me?
5944'  'It might be a long time,' said O'Brien.
5945'You are a difficult case.
5946But don't give up hope.
5947Everyone is cured sooner or later.
5948In the end we shall shoot you.
5949'     Chapter 4    He was much better.
5950He was growing fatter and stronger every day, if it was proper to speak of days.
5951The white light and the humming sound were the same as ever, but the cell was a little more comfortable than the others he had been in.
5952There was a pillow and a mattress on the plank bed, and a stool to sit on.
5953They had given him a bath, and they allowed him to wash himself fairly frequently in a tin basin.
5954They even gave him warm water to wash with.
5955They had given him new underclothes and a clean suit of overalls.
5956They had dressed his varicose ulcer with soothing ointment.
5957They had pulled out the remnants of his teeth and given him a new set of dentures.
5958Weeks or months must have passed.
5959It would have been possible now to keep count of the passage of time, if he had felt any interest in doing so, since he was being fed at what appeared to be regular intervals.
5960He was getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day.
5961The food was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal.
5962Once there was even a packet of cigarettes.
5963He had no matches, but the never-speaking guard who brought his food would give him a light.
5964The first time he tried to smoke it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out for a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal.
5965They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied to the corner.
5966At first he made no use of it.
5967Even when he was awake he was completely torpid.
5968Often he would lie from one meal to the next almost without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries in which it was too much trouble to open his eyes.
5969He had long grown used to sleeping with a strong light on his face.
5970It seemed to make no difference, except that one's dreams were more coherent.
5971He dreamed a great deal all through this time, and they were always happy dreams.
5972He was in the Golden Country, or he was sitting among enormous glorious, sunlit ruins, with his mother, with Julia, with O'Brien--not doing anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things.
5973Such thoughts as he had when he was awake were mostly about his dreams.
5974He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed.
5975He was not bored, he had no desire for conversation or distraction.
5976Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying.
5977By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still felt no impulse to get off the bed.
5978All he cared for was to lie quiet and feel the strength gathering in his body.
5979He would finger himself here and there, trying to make sure that it was not an illusion that his muscles were growing rounder and his skin tauter.
5980Finally it was established beyond a doubt that he was growing fatter; his thighs were now definitely thicker than his knees.
5981After that, reluctantly at first, he began exercising himself regularly.
5982In a little while he could walk three kilometres, measured by pacing the cell, and his bowed shoulders were growing straighter.
5983He attempted more elaborate exercises, and was astonished and humiliated to find what things he could not do.
5984He could not move out of a walk, he could not hold his stool out at arm's length, he could not stand on one leg without falling over.
5985He squatted down on his heels, and found that with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he could just lift himself to a standing position.
5986He lay flat on his belly and tried to lift his weight by his hands.
5987It was hopeless, he could not raise himself a centimetre.
5988But after a few more days--a few more mealtimes--even that feat was accomplished.
5989A time came when he could do it six times running.
5990He began to grow actually proud of his body, and to cherish an intermittent belief that his face also was growing back to normal.
5991Only when he chanced to put his hand on his bald scalp did he remember the seamed, ruined face that had looked back at him out of the mirror.
5992His mind grew more active.
5993He sat down on the plank bed, his back against the wall and the slate on his knees, and set to work deliberately at the task of re-educating himself.
5994He had capitulated, that was agreed.
5995In reality, as he saw now, he had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision.
5996From the moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love--and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while the iron voice from the telescreen told them what to do--he had grasped the frivolity, the shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power of the Party.
5997He knew now that for seven years the Thought Police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass.
5998There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to infer.
5999Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary they had carefully replaced.
6000They had played sound-tracks to him, shown him photographs.
6001Some of them were photographs of Julia and himself.
6002Yes, even.
6003.
6004.
6005He could not fight against the Party any longer.
6006Besides, the Party was in the right.
6007It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken?
6008By what external standard could you check its judgements?
6009Sanity was statistical.
6010It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
6011Only----!
6012The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers.
6013He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head.
6014He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:   FREEDOM IS SLAVERY   Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:   TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE   But then there came a sort of check.
6015His mind, as though shying away from something, seemed unable to concentrate.
6016He knew that he knew what came next, but for the moment he could not recall it.
6017When he did recall it, it was only by consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not come of its own accord.
6018He wrote:   GOD IS POWER   He accepted everything.
6019The past was alterable.
6020The past never had been altered.
6021Oceania was at war with Eastasia.
6022Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
6023Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with.
6024He had never seen the photograph that disproved their guilt.
6025It had never existed, he had invented it.
6026He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of self-deception.
6027How easy it all was!
6028Only surrender, and everything else followed.
6029It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it.
6030Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case.
6031He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled.
6032Everything was easy, except----!
6033Anything could be true.
6034The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense.
6035The law of gravity was nonsense.
6036'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.
6037' Winston worked it out.
6038'If he THINKS he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously THINK I see him do it, then the thing happens.
6039' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen.
6040We imagine it.
6041It is hallucination.
6042' He pushed the thought under instantly.
6043The fallacy was obvious.
6044It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened.
6045But how could there be such a world?
6046What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds?
6047All happenings are in the mind.
6048Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
6049He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger of succumbing to it.
6050He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him.
6051The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself.
6052The process should be automatic, instinctive.
6053CRIMESTOP, they called it in Newspeak.
6054He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop.
6055He presented himself with propositions--'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water'--and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them.
6056It was not easy.
6057It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation.
6058The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make five' were beyond his intellectual grasp.
6059It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors.
6060Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
6061All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how soon they would shoot him.
6062'Everything depends on yourself,' O'Brien had said; but he knew that there was no conscious act by which he could bring it nearer.
6063It might be ten minutes hence, or ten years.
6064They might keep him for years in solitary confinement, they might send him to a labour-camp, they might release him for a while, as they sometimes did.
6065It was perfectly possible that before he was shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation would be enacted all over again.
6066The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.
6067The tradition--the unspoken tradition: somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said--was that they shot you from behind; always in the back of the head, without warning, as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell.
6068One day--but 'one day' was not the right expression; just as probably it was in the middle of the night: once--he fell into a strange, blissful reverie.
6069He was walking down the corridor, waiting for the bullet.
6070He knew that it was coming in another moment.
6071Everything was settled, smoothed out, reconciled.
6072There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more pain, no more fear.
6073His body was healthy and strong.
6074He walked easily, with a joy of movement and with a feeling of walking in sunlight.
6075He was not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love, he was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down which he had seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs.
6076He was in the Golden Country, following the foot-track across the old rabbit-cropped pasture.
6077He could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face.
6078At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring, and somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dace lay in the green pools under the willows.
6079Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror.
6080The sweat broke out on his backbone.
6081He had heard himself cry aloud:  'Julia!
6082Julia!
6083Julia, my love!
6084Julia!
6085'  For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence.
6086She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him.
6087It was as though she had got into the texture of his skin.
6088In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free.
6089Also he knew that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
6090He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself.
6091What had he done?
6092How many years had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness?
6093In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside.
6094They could not let such an outburst go unpunished.
6095They would know now, if they had not known before, that he was breaking the agreement he had made with them.
6096He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party.
6097In the old days he had hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity.
6098Now he had retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate.
6099He knew that he was in the wrong, but he preferred to be in the wrong.
6100They would understand that--O'Brien would understand it.
6101It was all confessed in that single foolish cry.
6102He would have to start all over again.
6103It might take years.
6104He ran a hand over his face, trying to familiarize himself with the new shape.
6105There were deep furrows in the cheeks, the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose flattened.
6106Besides, since last seeing himself in the glass he had been given a complete new set of teeth.
6107It was not easy to preserve inscrutability when you did not know what your face looked like.
6108In any case, mere control of the features was not enough.
6109For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.
6110You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name.
6111From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right.
6112And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.
6113One day they would decide to shoot him.
6114You could not tell when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess.
6115It was always from behind, walking down a corridor.
6116Ten seconds would be enough.
6117In that time the world inside him could turn over.
6118And then suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the changing of a line in his face--suddenly the camouflage would be down and bang!
6119would go the batteries of his hatred.
6120Hatred would fill him like an enormous roaring flame.
6121And almost in the same instant bang!
6122would go the bullet, too late, or too early.
6123They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it.
6124The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach for ever.
6125They would have blown a hole in their own perfection.
6126To die hating them, that was freedom.
6127He shut his eyes.
6128It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual discipline.
6129It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself.
6130He had got to plunge into the filthiest of filth.
6131What was the most horrible, sickening thing of all?
6132He thought of Big Brother.
6133The enormous face (because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as being a metre wide), with its heavy black moustache and the eyes that followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of its own accord.
6134What were his true feelings towards Big Brother?
6135There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage.
6136The steel door swung open with a clang.
6137O'Brien walked into the cell.
6138Behind him were the waxen-faced officer and the black-uniformed guards.
6139'Get up,' said O'Brien.
6140'Come here.
6141'  Winston stood opposite him.
6142O'Brien took Winston's shoulders between his strong hands and looked at him closely.
6143'You have had thoughts of deceiving me,' he said.
6144'That was stupid.
6145Stand up straighter.
6146Look me in the face.
6147'  He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:  'You are improving.
6148Intellectually there is very little wrong with you.
6149It is only emotionally that you have failed to make progress.
6150Tell me, Winston--and remember, no lies: you know that I am always able to detect a lie--tell me, what are your true feelings towards Big Brother?
6151'  'I hate him.
6152'  'You hate him.
6153Good.
6154Then the time has come for you to take the last step.
6155You must love Big Brother.
6156It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.
6157'  He released Winston with a little push towards the guards.
6158'Room 101,' he said.
6159Chapter 5    At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building.
6160Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure.
6161The cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level.
6162The room where he had been interrogated by O'Brien was high up near the roof.
6163This place was many metres underground, as deep down as it was possible to go.
6164It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in.
6165But he hardly noticed his surroundings.
6166All he noticed was that there were two small tables straight in front of him, each covered with green baize.
6167One was only a metre or two from him, the other was further away, near the door.
6168He was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not even his head.
6169A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of him.
6170For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O'Brien came in.
6171'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101.
6172I told you that you knew the answer already.
6173Everyone knows it.
6174The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.
6175'  The door opened again.
6176A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind.
6177He set it down on the further table.
6178Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing.
6179Winston could not see what the thing was.
6180'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to individual.
6181It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths.
6182There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.
6183'  He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table.
6184It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by.
6185Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards.
6186Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each.
6187They were rats.
6188'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.
6189'  A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage.
6190But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him.
6191His bowels seemed to turn to water.
6192'You can't do that!
6193' he cried out in a high cracked voice.
6194'You couldn't, you couldn't!
6195It's impossible.
6196'  'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams?
6197There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears.
6198There was something terrible on the other side of the wall.
6199You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open.
6200It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.
6201'  'O'Brien!
6202' said Winston, making an effort to control his voice.
6203'You know this is not necessary.
6204What is it that you want me to do?
6205'  O'Brien made no direct answer.
6206When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected.
6207He looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind Winston's back.
6208'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always enough.
6209There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death.
6210But for everyone there is something unendurable--something that cannot be contemplated.
6211Courage and cowardice are not involved.
6212If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope.
6213If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air.
6214It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed.
6215It is the same with the rats.
6216For you, they are unendurable.
6217They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to.
6218You will do what is required of you.
6219'  'But what is it, what is it?
6220How can I do it if I don't know what it is?
6221'  O'Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the nearer table.
6222He set it down carefully on the baize cloth.
6223Winston could hear the blood singing in his ears.
6224He had the feeling of sitting in utter loneliness.
6225He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances.
6226Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres away from him.
6227They were enormous rats.
6228They were at the age when a rat's muzzle grows blunt and fierce and his fur brown instead of grey.
6229'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience, 'although a rodent, is carnivorous.
6230You are aware of that.
6231You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town.
6232In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five minutes.
6233The rats are certain to attack it.
6234Within quite a small time they will strip it to the bones.
6235They also attack sick or dying people.
6236They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.
6237'  There was an outburst of squeals from the cage.
6238It seemed to reach Winston from far away.
6239The rats were fighting; they were trying to get at each other through the partition.
6240He heard also a deep groan of despair.
6241That, too, seemed to come from outside himself.
6242O'Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed something in it.
6243There was a sharp click.
6244Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself loose from the chair.
6245It was hopeless; every part of him, even his head, was held immovably.
6246O'Brien moved the cage nearer.
6247It was less than a metre from Winston's face.
6248'I have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien.
6249'You understand the construction of this cage.
6250The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit.
6251When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up.
6252These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets.
6253Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air?
6254They will leap on to your face and bore straight into it.
6255Sometimes they attack the eyes first.
6256Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.
6257'  The cage was nearer; it was closing in.
6258Winston heard a succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head.
6259But he fought furiously against his panic.
6260To think, to think, even with a split second left--to think was the only hope.
6261Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils.
6262There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness.
6263Everything had gone black.
6264For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal.
6265Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea.
6266There was one and only one way to save himself.
6267He must interpose another human being, the BODY of another human being, between himself and the rats.
6268The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else.
6269The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face.
6270The rats knew what was coming now.
6271One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air.
6272Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth.
6273Again the black panic took hold of him.
6274He was blind, helpless, mindless.
6275'It was a common punishment in Imperial China,' said O'Brien as didactically as ever.
6276The mask was closing on his face.
6277The wire brushed his cheek.
6278And then--no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope.
6279Too late, perhaps too late.
6280But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just ONE person to whom he could transfer his punishment--ONE body that he could thrust between himself and the rats.
6281And he was shouting frantically, over and over.
6282'Do it to Julia!
6283Do it to Julia!
6284Not me!
6285Julia!
6286I don't care what you do to her.
6287Tear her face off, strip her to the bones.
6288Not me!
6289Julia!
6290Not me!
6291'  He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats.
6292He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars--always away, away, away from the rats.
6293He was light years distant, but O'Brien was still standing at his side.
6294There was still the cold touch of wire against his cheek.
6295But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and not open.
6296Chapter 6    The Chestnut Tree was almost empty.
6297A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops.
6298It was the lonely hour of fifteen.
6299A tinny music trickled from the telescreens.
6300Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass.
6301Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall.
6302BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said.
6303Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork.
6304It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the cafe.
6305Winston was listening to the telescreen.
6306At present only music was coming out of it, but there was a possibility that at any moment there might be a special bulletin from the Ministry of Peace.
6307The news from the African front was disquieting in the extreme.
6308On and off he had been worrying about it all day.
6309A Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with Eurasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia) was moving southward at terrifying speed.
6310The mid-day bulletin had not mentioned any definite area, but it was probable that already the mouth of the Congo was a battlefield.
6311Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger.
6312One did not have to look at the map to see what it meant.
6313It was not merely a question of losing Central Africa: for the first time in the whole war, the territory of Oceania itself was menaced.
6314A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated excitement, flared up in him, then faded again.
6315He stopped thinking about the war.
6316In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time.
6317He picked up his glass and drained it at a gulp.
6318As always, the gin made him shudder and even retch slightly.
6319The stuff was horrible.
6320The cloves and saccharine, themselves disgusting enough in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell; and what was worst of all was that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him night and day, was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the smell of those----  He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as it was possible he never visualized them.
6321They were something that he was half-aware of, hovering close to his face, a smell that clung to his nostrils.
6322As the gin rose in him he belched through purple lips.
6323He had grown fatter since they released him, and had regained his old colour--indeed, more than regained it.
6324His features had thickened, the skin on nose and cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald scalp was too deep a pink.
6325A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of 'The Times', with the page turned down at the chess problem.
6326Then, seeing that Winston's glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it.
6327There was no need to give orders.
6328They knew his habits.
6329The chessboard was always waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him.
6330He never even bothered to count his drinks.
6331At irregular intervals they presented him with a dirty slip of paper which they said was the bill, but he had the impression that they always undercharged him.
6332It would have made no difference if it had been the other way about.
6333He had always plenty of money nowadays.
6334He even had a job, a sinecure, more highly-paid than his old job had been.
6335The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took over.
6336Winston raised his head to listen.
6337No bulletins from the front, however.
6338It was merely a brief announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.
6339In the preceding quarter, it appeared, the Tenth Three-Year Plan's quota for bootlaces had been overfulfilled by 98 per cent.
6340He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces.
6341It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.
6342'White to play and mate in two moves.
6343' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother.
6344White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism.
6345Always, without exception, it is so arranged.
6346In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won.
6347Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil?
6348The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power.
6349White always mates.
6350The voice from the telescreen paused and added in a different and much graver tone: 'You are warned to stand by for an important announcement at fifteen-thirty.
6351Fifteen-thirty!
6352This is news of the highest importance.
6353Take care not to miss it.
6354Fifteen-thirty!
6355' The tinkling music struck up again.
6356Winston's heart stirred.
6357That was the bulletin from the front; instinct told him that it was bad news that was coming.
6358All day, with little spurts of excitement, the thought of a smashing defeat in Africa had been in and out of his mind.
6359He seemed actually to see the Eurasian army swarming across the never-broken frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa like a column of ants.
6360Why had it not been possible to outflank them in some way?
6361The outline of the West African coast stood out vividly in his mind.
6362He picked up the white knight and moved it across the board.
6363THERE was the proper spot.
6364Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear, cutting their communications by land and sea.
6365He felt that by willing it he was bringing that other force into existence.
6366But it was necessary to act quickly.
6367If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if they had airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in two.
6368It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision of the world, the destruction of the Party!
6369He drew a deep breath.
6370An extraordinary medley of feeling--but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was undermost--struggled inside him.
6371The spasm passed.
6372He put the white knight back in its place, but for the moment he could not settle down to serious study of the chess problem.
6373His thoughts wandered again.
6374Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table:  2+2=5  'They can't get inside you,' she had said.
6375But they could get inside you.
6376'What happens to you here is FOR EVER,' O'Brien had said.
6377That was a true word.
6378There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover.
6379Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
6380He had seen her; he had even spoken to her.
6381There was no danger in it.
6382He knew as though instinctively that they now took almost no interest in his doings.
6383He could have arranged to meet her a second time if either of them had wanted to.
6384Actually it was by chance that they had met.
6385It was in the Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind.
6386He was hurrying along with frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw her not ten metres away from him.
6387It struck him at once that she had changed in some ill-defined way.
6388They almost passed one another without a sign, then he turned and followed her, not very eagerly.
6389He knew that there was no danger, nobody would take any interest in him.
6390She did not speak.
6391She walked obliquely away across the grass as though trying to get rid of him, then seemed to resign herself to having him at her side.
6392Presently they were in among a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for concealment or as protection from the wind.
6393They halted.
6394It was vilely cold.
6395The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional, dirty-looking crocuses.
6396He put his arm round her waist.
6397There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden microphones: besides, they could be seen.
6398It did not matter, nothing mattered.
6399They could have lain down on the ground and done THAT if they had wanted to.
6400His flesh froze with horror at the thought of it.
6401She made no response whatever to the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself.
6402He knew now what had changed in her.
6403Her face was sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that was not the change.
6404It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened.
6405He remembered how once, after the explosion of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone than flesh.
6406Her body felt like that.
6407It occurred to him that the texture of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been.
6408He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak.
6409As they walked back across the grass, she looked directly at him for the first time.
6410It was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike.
6411He wondered whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept squeezing from his eyes.
6412They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side but not too close together.
6413He saw that she was about to speak.
6414She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig.
6415Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.
6416'I betrayed you,' she said baldly.
6417'I betrayed you,' he said.
6418She gave him another quick look of dislike.
6419'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something something you can't stand up to, can't even think about.
6420And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so".
6421And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it.
6422But that isn't true.
6423At the time when it happens you do mean it.
6424You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way.
6425You WANT it to happen to the other person.
6426You don't give a damn what they suffer.
6427All you care about is yourself.
6428'  'All you care about is yourself,' he echoed.
6429'And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other person any longer.
6430'  'No,' he said, 'you don't feel the same.
6431'  There did not seem to be anything more to say.
6432The wind plastered their thin overalls against their bodies.
6433Almost at once it became embarrassing to sit there in silence: besides, it was too cold to keep still.
6434She said something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.
6435'We must meet again,' he said.
6436'Yes,' she said, 'we must meet again.
6437'  He followed irresolutely for a little distance, half a pace behind her.
6438They did not speak again.
6439She did not actually try to shake him off, but walked at just such a speed as to prevent his keeping abreast of her.
6440He had made up his mind that he would accompany her as far as the Tube station, but suddenly this process of trailing along in the cold seemed pointless and unbearable.
6441He was overwhelmed by a desire not so much to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree Cafe, which had never seemed so attractive as at this moment.
6442He had a nostalgic vision of his corner table, with the newspaper and the chessboard and the ever-flowing gin.
6443Above all, it would be warm in there.
6444The next moment, not altogether by accident, he allowed himself to become separated from her by a small knot of people.
6445He made a half-hearted attempt to catch up, then slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite direction.
6446When he had gone fifty metres he looked back.
6447The street was not crowded, but already he could not distinguish her.
6448Any one of a dozen hurrying figures might have been hers.
6449Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no longer recognizable from behind.
6450'At the time when it happens,' she had said, 'you do mean it.
6451' He had meant it.
6452He had not merely said it, he had wished it.
6453He had wished that she and not he should be delivered over to the----  Something changed in the music that trickled from the telescreen.
6454A cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came into it.
6455And then--perhaps it was not happening, perhaps it was only a memory taking on the semblance of sound--a voice was singing:     'Under the spreading chestnut tree   I sold you and you sold me----'   The tears welled up in his eyes.
6456A passing waiter noticed that his glass was empty and came back with the gin bottle.
6457He took up his glass and sniffed at it.
6458The stuff grew not less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank.
6459But it had become the element he swam in.
6460It was his life, his death, and his resurrection.
6461It was gin that sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every morning.
6462When he woke, seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids and fiery mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the bottle and teacup placed beside the bed overnight.
6463Through the midday hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the telescreen.
6464From fifteen to closing-time he was a fixture in the Chestnut Tree.
6465No one cared what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no telescreen admonished him.
6466Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of Truth and did a little work, or what was called work.
6467He had been appointed to a sub-committee of a sub-committee which had sprouted from one of the innumerable committees dealing with minor difficulties that arose in the compilation of the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
6468They were engaged in producing something called an Interim Report, but what it was that they were reporting on he had never definitely found out.
6469It was something to do with the question of whether commas should be placed inside brackets, or outside.
6470There were four others on the committee, all of them persons similar to himself.
6471There were days when they assembled and then promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to one another that there was not really anything to be done.
6472But there were other days when they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never finished--when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels--threats, even, to appeal to higher authority.
6473And then suddenly the life would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.
6474The telescreen was silent for a moment.
6475Winston raised his head again.
6476The bulletin!
6477But no, they were merely changing the music.
6478He had the map of Africa behind his eyelids.
6479The movement of the armies was a diagram: a black arrow tearing vertically southward, and a white arrow horizontally eastward, across the tail of the first.
6480As though for reassurance he looked up at the imperturbable face in the portrait.
6481Was it conceivable that the second arrow did not even exist?
6482His interest flagged again.
6483He drank another mouthful of gin, picked up the white knight and made a tentative move.
6484Check.
6485But it was evidently not the right move, because----  Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind.
6486He saw a candle-lit room with a vast white-counterpaned bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on the floor, shaking a dice-box, and laughing excitedly.
6487His mother was sitting opposite him and also laughing.
6488It must have been about a month before she disappeared.
6489It was a moment of reconciliation, when the nagging hunger in his belly was forgotten and his earlier affection for her had temporarily revived.
6490He remembered the day well, a pelting, drenching day when the water streamed down the window-pane and the light indoors was too dull to read by.
6491The boredom of the two children in the dark, cramped bedroom became unbearable.
6492Winston whined and grizzled, made futile demands for food, fretted about the room pulling everything out of place and kicking the wainscoting until the neighbours banged on the wall, while the younger child wailed intermittently.
6493In the end his mother said, 'Now be good, and I'll buy you a toy.
6494A lovely toy--you'll love it'; and then she had gone out in the rain, to a little general shop which was still sporadically open nearby, and came back with a cardboard box containing an outfit of Snakes and Ladders.
6495He could still remember the smell of the damp cardboard.
6496It was a miserable outfit.
6497The board was cracked and the tiny wooden dice were so ill-cut that they would hardly lie on their sides.
6498Winston looked at the thing sulkily and without interest.
6499But then his mother lit a piece of candle and they sat down on the floor to play.
6500Soon he was wildly excited and shouting with laughter as the tiddly-winks climbed hopefully up the ladders and then came slithering down the snakes again, almost to the starting-point.
6501They played eight games, winning four each.
6502His tiny sister, too young to understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against a bolster, laughing because the others were laughing.
6503For a whole afternoon they had all been happy together, as in his earlier childhood.
6504He pushed the picture out of his mind.
6505It was a false memory.
6506He was troubled by false memories occasionally.
6507They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were.
6508Some things had happened, others had not happened.
6509He turned back to the chessboard and picked up the white knight again.
6510Almost in the same instant it dropped on to the board with a clatter.
6511He had started as though a pin had run into him.
6512A shrill trumpet-call had pierced the air.
6513It was the bulletin!
6514Victory!
6515It always meant victory when a trumpet-call preceded the news.
6516A sort of electric drill ran through the cafe.
6517Even the waiters had started and pricked up their ears.
6518The trumpet-call had let loose an enormous volume of noise.
6519Already an excited voice was gabbling from the telescreen, but even as it started it was almost drowned by a roar of cheering from outside.
6520The news had run round the streets like magic.
6521He could hear just enough of what was issuing from the telescreen to realize that it had all happened, as he had foreseen; a vast seaborne armada had secretly assembled a sudden blow in the enemy's rear, the white arrow tearing across the tail of the black.
6522Fragments of triumphant phrases pushed themselves through the din: 'Vast strategic manoeuvre--perfect co-ordination--utter rout--half a million prisoners--complete demoralization--control of the whole of Africa--bring the war within measurable distance of its end--victory--greatest victory in human history--victory, victory, victory!
6523'  Under the table Winston's feet made convulsive movements.
6524He had not stirred from his seat, but in his mind he was running, swiftly running, he was with the crowds outside, cheering himself deaf.
6525He looked up again at the portrait of Big Brother.
6526The colossus that bestrode the world!
6527The rock against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain!
6528He thought how ten minutes ago--yes, only ten minutes--there had still been equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the news from the front would be of victory or defeat.
6529Ah, it was more than a Eurasian army that had perished!
6530Much had changed in him since that first day in the Ministry of Love, but the final, indispensable, healing change had never happened, until this moment.
6531The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little.
6532The waiters were turning back to their work.
6533One of them approached with the gin bottle.
6534Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up.
6535He was not running or cheering any longer.
6536He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow.
6537He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody.
6538He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back.
6539The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.
6540He gazed up at the enormous face.
6541Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache.
6542O cruel, needless misunderstanding!
6543O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!
6544Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose.
6545But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished.
6546He had won the victory over himself.
6547He loved Big Brother.
6548THE END    APPENDIX.
6549The Principles of Newspeak    Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.
6550In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing.
6551The leading articles in 'The Times' were written in it, but this was a TOUR DE FORCE which could only be carried out by a specialist.
6552It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.
6553Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech.
6554The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later.
6555It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.
6556The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.
6557It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.
6558Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.
6559This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.
6560To give a single example.
6561The word FREE still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as 'This dog is free from lice' or 'This field is free from weeds'.
6562It could not be used in its old sense of 'politically free' or 'intellectually free' since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.
6563Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive.
6564Newspeak was designed not to extend but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
6565Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly-created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day.
6566Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary.
6567It will be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.
6568THE A VOCABULARY.
6569The A vocabulary consisted of the words needed for the business of everyday life--for such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one's clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like.
6570It was composed almost entirely of words that we already possess words like HIT, RUN, DOG, TREE, SUGAR, HOUSE, FIELD--but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary their number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined.
6571All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them.
6572So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing ONE clearly understood concept.
6573It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion.
6574It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.
6575The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities.
6576The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech.
6577Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very abstract words such as IF or WHEN) could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb.
6578Between the verb and the noun form, when they were of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms.
6579The word THOUGHT, for example, did not exist in Newspeak.
6580Its place was taken by THINK, which did duty for both noun and verb.
6581No etymological principle was followed here: in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in other cases the verb.
6582Even where a noun and verb of kindred meaning were not etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed.
6583There was, for example, no such word as CUT, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verb KNIFE.
6584Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix -FUL to the noun-verb, and adverbs by adding -WISE.
6585Thus for example, SPEEDFUL meant 'rapid' and SPEEDWISE meant 'quickly'.
6586Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as GOOD, STRONG, BIG, BLACK, SOFT, were retained, but their total number was very small.
6587There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived at by adding -FUL to a noun-verb.
6588None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a very few already ending in -WISE: the -WISE termination was invariable.
6589The word WELL, for example, was replaced by GOODWISE.
6590In addition, any word--this again applied in principle to every word in the language--could be negatived by adding the affix UN-, or could be strengthened by the affix PLUS-, or, for still greater emphasis, DOUBLEPLUS-.
6591Thus, for example, UNCOLD meant 'warm', while PLUSCOLD and DOUBLEPLUSCOLD meant, respectively, 'very cold' and 'superlatively cold'.
6592It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ANTE-, POST-, UP-, DOWN-, etc.
6593By such methods it was found possible to bring about an enormous diminution of vocabulary.
6594Given, for instance, the word GOOD, there was no need for such a word as BAD, since the required meaning was equally well--indeed, better--expressed by UNGOOD.
6595All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress.
6596DARK, for example, could be replaced by UNLIGHT, or LIGHT by UNDARK, according to preference.
6597The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity.
6598Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned below all inflexions followed the same rules.
6599Thus, in all verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in -ED.
6600The preterite of STEAL was STEALED, the preterite of THINK was THINKED, and so on throughout the language, all such forms as SWAM, GAVE, BROUGHT, SPOKE, TAKEN, etc.
6601, being abolished.
6602All plurals were made by adding -S or -ES as the case might be.
6603The plurals OF MAN, OX, LIFE, were MANS, OXES, LIFES.
6604Comparison of adjectives was invariably made by adding -ER, -EST (GOOD, GOODER, GOODEST), irregular forms and the MORE, MOST formation being suppressed.
6605The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs.
6606All of these followed their ancient usage, except that WHOM had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the SHALL, SHOULD tenses had been dropped, all their uses being covered by WILL and WOULD.
6607There were also certain irregularities in word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech.
6608A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word; occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained.
6609But this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion with the B vocabulary.
6610WHY so great an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in this essay.
6611THE B VOCABULARY.
6612The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.
6613Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly.
6614In some cases they could be translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones.
6615The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.
6616The B words were in all cases compound words.
6617[Compound words such as SPEAKWRITE, were of course to be found in the A vocabulary, but these were merely convenient abbreviations and had no special ideological colour.
6618] They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form.
6619The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules.
6620To take a single example: the word GOODTHINK, meaning, very roughly, 'orthodoxy', or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, 'to think in an orthodox manner'.
6621This inflected as follows: noun-verb, GOODTHINK; past tense and past participle, GOODTHINKED; present participle, GOOD-THINKING; adjective, GOODTHINKFUL; adverb, GOODTHINKWISE; verbal noun, GOODTHINKER.
6622The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan.
6623The words of which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their derivation.
6624In the word CRIMETHINK (thoughtcrime), for instance, the THINK came second, whereas in THINKPOL (Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word POLICE had lost its second syllable.
6625Because of the great difficulty in securing euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A vocabulary.
6626For example, the adjective forms of MINITRUE, MINIPAX, and MINILUV were, respectively, MINITRUTHFUL, MINIPEACEFUL, and MINILOVELY, simply because -TRUEFUL, -PAXFUL, and -LOVEFUL were slightly awkward to pronounce.
6627In principle, however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.
6628Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole.
6629Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a 'Times' leading article as OLDTHINKERS UNBELLYFEEL INGSOC.
6630The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: 'Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.
6631' But this is not an adequate translation.
6632To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by INGSOC.
6633And in addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word BELLYFEEL, which implied a blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word OLDTHINK, which was inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence.
6634But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which OLDTHINK was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.
6635These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten.
6636The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.
6637As we have already seen in the case of the word FREE, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them.
6638Countless other words such as HONOUR, JUSTICE, MORALITY, INTERNATIONALISM, DEMOCRACY, SCIENCE, and RELIGION had simply ceased to exist.
6639A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them.
6640All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word CRIMETHINK, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word OLDTHINK.
6641Greater precision would have been dangerous.
6642What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'.
6643He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy.
6644He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods.
6645In somewhat the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible.
6646His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words SEXCRIME (sexual immorality) and GOODSEX (chastity).
6647SEXCRIME covered all sexual misdeeds whatever.
6648It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake.
6649There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death.
6650In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them.
6651He knew what was meant by GOODSEX--that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was SEXCRIME.
6652In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it WAS heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.
6653No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral.
6654A great many were euphemisms.
6655Such words, for instance, as JOYCAMP (forced-labour camp) or MINIPAX (Ministry of Peace, i.e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean.
6656Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society.
6657An example was PROLEFEED, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses.
6658Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation 'good' when applied to the Party and 'bad' when applied to its enemies.
6659But in addition there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideological colour not from their meaning, but from their structure.
6660So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary.
6661The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation.
6662In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called RECDEP, the Fiction Department was called FICDEP, the Teleprogrammes Department was called TELEDEP, and so on.
6663This was not done solely with the object of saving time.
6664Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations.
6665Examples were such words as NAZI, GESTAPO, COMINTERN, INPRECORR, AGITPROP.
6666In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose.
6667It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.
6668The words COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune.
6669The word COMINTERN, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine.
6670It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table.
6671COMINTERN is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily.
6672In the same way, the associations called up by a word like MINITRUE are fewer and more controllable than those called up by MINISTRY OF TRUTH.
6673This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable.
6674In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning.
6675Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary.
6676And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker's mind.
6677The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike.
6678Almost invariably these words--GOODTHINK, MINIPAX, PROLEFEED, SEXCRIME, JOYCAMP, INGSOC, BELLYFEEL, THINKPOL, and countless others--were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last.
6679The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous.
6680And this was exactly what was aimed at.
6681The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
6682For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets.
6683His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.
6684So did the fact of having very few words to choose from.
6685Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised.
6686Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year.
6687Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.
6688Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.
6689This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word DUCKSPEAK, meaning 'to quack like a duck'.
6690Like various other words in the B vocabulary, DUCKSPEAK was ambivalent in meaning.
6691Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when 'The Times' referred to one of the orators of the Party as a DOUBLEPLUSGOOD DUCKSPEAKER it was paying a warm and valued compliment.
6692THE C VOCABULARY.
6693The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms.
6694These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings.
6695They followed the same grammatical rules as the words in the other two vocabularies.
6696Very few of the C words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political speech.
6697Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other lists.
6698Only a very few words were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches.
6699There was, indeed, no word for 'Science', any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word INGSOC.
6700From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible.
6701It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy.
6702It would have been possible, for example, to say BIG BROTHER IS UNGOOD.
6703But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available.
6704Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so.
6705One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak.
6706For example, ALL MANS ARE EQUAL was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which ALL MEN ARE REDHAIRED is a possible Oldspeak sentence.
6707It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth--i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or strength.
6708The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word EQUAL.
6709In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings.
6710In practice it was not difficult for any person well grounded in DOUBLETHINK to avoid doing this, but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have vanished.
6711A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that EQUAL had once had the secondary meaning of 'politically equal', or that FREE had once meant 'intellectually free', than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to QUEEN and ROOK.
6712There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable.
6713And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced--its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.
6714When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed.
6715History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them.
6716In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable.
6717It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox (GOODTHINKFUL would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency.
6718In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole.
6719Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation--that is, alteration in sense as well as language.
6720Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:   WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL, THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS, THAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
6721THAT TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN, DERIVING THEIR POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.
6722THAT WHENEVER ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT BECOMES DESTRUCTIVE OF THOSE ENDS, IT IS THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT, AND TO INSTITUTE NEW GOVERNMENT.
6723.
6724.
6725It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original.
6726The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word CRIMETHINK.
6727A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.
6728A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way.
6729Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc.
6730Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed.
6731These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century.
6732There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature--indispensable technical manuals, and the like--that had to be treated in the same way.
6733It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.