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+<TITLE>George Orwell's 1984</TITLE>
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#1" title="Chapter 1">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#2" title="Chapter 2">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#3" title="Chapter 3">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#4" title="Chapter 4">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#5" title="Chapter 5">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#6" title="Chapter 6">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#7" title="Chapter 7">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#8" title="Chapter 8">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#9" title="Chapter 9">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#10" title="Chapter 10">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#11" title="Chapter 11">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#12" title="Chapter 12">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#13" title="Chapter 13">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#14" title="Chapter 14">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#15" title="Chapter 15">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#16" title="Chapter 16">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#17" title="Chapter 17">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#18" title="Chapter 18">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#19" title="Chapter 19">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#20" title="Chapter 20">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#21" title="Chapter 21">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#22" title="Chapter 22">
+<LINK rel="chapter" href="#23" title="Chapter 23">
+<LINK rel="appendix" href="#appendix" title="The Principles of Newspeak">
+<LINK rel="alternate" href="http://www.msxnet.org/orwell/print/1984.pdf"
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+<P>
+<H1><a name="1">I</a></H1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were
+striking thirteen. Winston 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+ The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At
+one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display,
+had been tacked to the wall. It 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. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the
+lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at
+present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours.
+It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week.
+The 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. On each landing, opposite the
+lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the
+wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that
+the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS
+WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of
+figures which had something to do with the production of
+pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a
+dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the
+right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank
+somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The
+instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but
+there was no way of shutting it off completely. He 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. His 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world
+looked cold. Down 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. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every
+commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately
+opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while
+the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at
+streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped
+fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the
+single word INGSOC. In 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. It was
+the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols
+did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was
+still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of
+the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and
+transmitted simultaneously. Any 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. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were
+being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what
+system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire
+was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
+everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your
+wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from
+habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every
+sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every
+movement scrutinized.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was
+safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A
+kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work,
+towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, 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. He tried to squeeze out some childhood
+memory that should tell him whether London had always been
+quite like this. Were 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? And 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? But 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+ The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak* -- was
+startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an
+enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete,
+soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air.
+From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked
+out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans
+of the Party:
+</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ WAR IS PEACE<br>
+ FREEDOM IS SLAVERY<br>
+ IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+ The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three
+thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding
+ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just
+three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So
+completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that
+from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of
+them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries
+between which the entire apparatus of government was divided.
+The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news,
+entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of
+Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love,
+which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty,
+which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in
+Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
+</p>
+<p>
+ The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There
+were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the
+Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It 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. Even
+the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by
+gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed
+truncheons.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features
+into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to
+wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the
+tiny kitchen. By 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. He
+took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a
+plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly,
+oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly
+a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down
+like a dose of medicine.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of
+his eyes. The 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. The next moment, however, the
+burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more
+cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked
+VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon
+the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more
+successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a
+small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+ For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in
+an unusual position. Instead 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. To 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. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well
+back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the
+telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course,
+but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not
+be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that
+had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
+</p>
+<p>
+ But it had also been suggested by the book that he had
+just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful
+book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of
+a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years
+past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older
+than that. He 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. Party
+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. He had given a quick glance up and down
+the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for
+two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting
+it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home
+in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a
+compromising possession.
+</p>
+<p>
+ The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary.
+This 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. Winston fitted a nib into the
+penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The 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. Actually he was not used to writing by
+hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate
+everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible
+for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and
+then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his
+bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy
+letters he wrote:
+</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ April 4th, 1984.
+</p>
+<p>
+ He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had
+descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any
+certainty that this was 1984. It 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+ For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he
+writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind
+hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and
+then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word
+doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he
+had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with
+the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+ For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The
+telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It 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. For weeks past he had been
+making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind
+that anything would be needed except courage. The actual
+writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to
+paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running
+inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however,
+even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer
+had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because
+if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were
+ticking by. He 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly
+aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish
+handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its
+capital letters and finally even its full stops:
+</p>
+<p>
+ April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war
+films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being
+bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience 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.
+then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter
+hovering over it. there 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. little 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. then the
+helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash
+and the boat went all to matchwood. then 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
+</p>
+<p>
+ Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering
+from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this
+stream of rubbish. But 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. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident
+that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary
+today.
+</p>
+<p>
+ It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything
+so nebulous could be said to happen.
+</p>
+<p>
+ It 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. Winston 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. One of them was a
+girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her
+name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department.
+Presumably -- 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. She was a bold-looking girl, of
+about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and
+swift, athletic movements. A 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. Winston had disliked her from the very
+first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It 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. He disliked nearly all women, and especially
+the young and pretty ones. It 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. But this particular girl gave him
+the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once 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. The idea had even crossed his
+mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it
+was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a
+peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as
+hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
+</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. A momentary
+hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they
+saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching.
+O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse,
+humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he
+had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his
+spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming -- in some
+indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which,
+if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled
+an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston
+had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years.
+He 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. Much 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.
+Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again,
+perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his
+face, but simply intelligence. But 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. Winston had
+never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed,
+there was no way of doing so. At 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. He took a chair in the same row as
+Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman
+who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The
+girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
+</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. It was a noise that set
+one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's
+neck. The Hate had started.
+</p>
+<p>
+ As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the
+People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here
+and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman
+gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein 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. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from
+day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the
+principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest
+defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against
+the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies,
+deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see
+the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It
+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. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too,
+had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein 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. He 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. And 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. The dull rhythmic tramp of
+the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's
+bleating voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds,
+uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half
+the people in the room. The 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. He 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.
+But 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.
+Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A
+day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his
+directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the
+commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of
+conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The
+Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There 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. It was a book without
+a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the
+book. But one knew of such things only through vague
+rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a
+subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there
+was a way of avoiding it.
+</p>
+<p>
+ In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People
+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. The little
+sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening
+and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy
+face was flushed. He 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. The dark-haired girl
+behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and
+suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it
+at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the
+voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found
+that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel
+violently against the rung of his chair. The 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. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always
+unnecessary. A 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. And 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. Thus, 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.
+And 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. At 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+ It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred
+this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, 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. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his
+mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He
+would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows
+like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at
+the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized
+why it was that he hated her. He 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+ The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had
+become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face
+changed into that of a sheep. Then 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. But 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. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It 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. Then the
+face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three
+slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
+</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ WAR IS PEACE<br>
+ FREEDOM IS SLAVERY<br>
+ IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH<br>
+</p>
+<p>
+ 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. The
+little sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward over the
+back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that
+sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms towards the
+screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent
+that she was uttering a prayer.
+</p>
+<p>
+ At this moment the entire group of people broke into a
+deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B! ... B-B!' -- 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. For perhaps as
+much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that
+was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly 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. Winston's
+entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could
+not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human
+chanting of 'B-B! ... B-B!' always filled him with horror.
+Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do
+otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to
+do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.
+But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the
+expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And
+it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing
+happened -- if, indeed, it did happen.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up.
+He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of
+resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture.
+But 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! -- that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as
+himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though
+their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from
+one into the other through their eyes. 'I am with you,' O'Brien
+seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you are
+feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your
+disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the
+flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as
+inscrutable as everybody else's.
+</p>
+<p>
+ That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had
+happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they
+did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others
+besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the
+rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all --
+perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in
+spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to
+be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days
+he believed in it, some days not. There 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. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined
+everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at
+O'Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact
+hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably
+dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a
+second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance,
+and that was the end of the story. But even that was a
+memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to
+live.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a
+belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
+</p>
+<p>
+ His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while
+he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by
+automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped,
+awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously
+over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals
+</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER<br>
+ DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER<br>
+ DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER<br>
+ DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER<br>
+ DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER<br>
+</p>
+<p>over and over again, filling half a page.
+</p>
+<p>
+ He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+ He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was
+useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he
+refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went
+on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no
+difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He
+had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had
+never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained
+all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.
+Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever.
+You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but
+sooner or later they were bound to get you.
+</p>
+<p>
+ It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened
+at night. The 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. In the vast majority of cases there
+was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply
+disappeared, always during the night. Your 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. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized
+was the usual word.
+</p>
+<p>
+ For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began
+writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
+</p>
+<p>
+ 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
+</p>
+<p>
+ He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and
+laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There
+was a knocking at the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+ Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope
+that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But
+no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be
+to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face,
+from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and
+moved heavily towards the door.
+</p>
+<H1><a name="2">II</a></H1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he
+had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was
+written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible
+across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have
+done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to
+smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was
+wet.</p>
+<p>
+ He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a
+warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colourless,
+crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face, was
+standing outside.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of
+voice, 'I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you could
+come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It's got
+blocked up and-'</p>
+<p>
+ It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same
+floor. ('Mrs' was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party
+-- you were supposed to call everyone 'comrade' -- but with
+some women one used it instinctively.) She was a woman of about
+thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that
+there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her
+down the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost
+daily irritation. Victory Mansions were old flats, built in
+1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The 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. Repairs,
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs
+Parsons vaguely.</p>
+<p>
+ The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in
+a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look,
+as though the place had just been visited by some large violent
+animal. Games 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. On the walls were
+scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a
+full-sized poster of Big Brother. There 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. In 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a
+half-apprehensive glance at the door. 'They haven't been out today.
+And of course-'</p>
+<p>
+ She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the
+middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with
+filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.
+Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. He
+hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was
+always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons looked on
+helplessly.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,'
+she said. 'He loves anything like that. He's ever so good with
+his hands, Tom is.'</p>
+<p>
+ Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of
+Truth. He 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. At
+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. At 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. He 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. An
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Have you got a spanner?' said Winston, fiddling with the
+nut on the angle-joint.</p>
+<p>
+ 'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming
+invertebrate. 'I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children -'</p>
+<p>
+ There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the
+comb as the children charged into the living-room. Mrs Parsons
+brought the spanner. Winston let out the water and disgustedly
+removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe. He
+cleaned his fingers as best he could in the cold water from the
+tap and went back into the other room.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.</p>
+<p>
+ A 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. Both of them were
+dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs
+which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought-criminal!
+You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize
+you, I'll send you to the salt mines!'</p>
+<p>
+ Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting
+'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating
+her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly
+frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon
+grow up into man-eaters. There 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. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he
+was holding, Winston thought.</p>
+<p>
+ Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the
+children, and back again. In the better light of the
+living-room he noticed with interest that there actually
+was dust in the creases of her face.</p>
+<p>
+ 'They do get so noisy,' she said. 'They're disappointed
+because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is.
+I'm too busy to take them. and Tom won't be back from work in
+time.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in
+his huge voice.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!'
+chanted the little girl, still capering round.</p>
+<p>
+ Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be
+hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This
+happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle.
+Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He took his
+leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he had not gone
+six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his
+neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot
+wire had been jabbed into him. He spun round just in time to
+see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while
+the boy pocketed a catapult.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Goldstein!' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him.
+But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on
+the woman's greyish face.</p>
+<p>
+ Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen
+and sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck. The
+music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, 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 lceland and the Faroe lslands.</p>
+<p>
+ With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must
+lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would
+be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy.
+Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What 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. On the contrary, they
+adored the Party and everything connected with it. The 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. All
+their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the
+State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs,
+thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty
+to be frightened of their own children. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked
+up his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find
+something more to write in the diary. Suddenly he began
+thinking of O'Brien again.</p>
+<p>
+ Years ago -- how long was it? Seven years it must be -- he
+had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And
+someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: 'We
+shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.' It was
+said very quietly, almost casually -- a statement, not a
+command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was
+that at the time, in the dream, the words had not made much
+impression on him. It was only later and by degrees that they
+had seemed to take on significance. He 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. But at any rate
+the identification existed. It was O'Brien who had spoken to
+him out of the dark.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston 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. Nor did it even
+seem to matter greatly. There was a link of understanding
+between them, more important than affection or partisanship.
+'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' he had
+said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way
+or another it would come true.</p>
+<p>
+ The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call,
+clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice
+continued raspingly:</p>
+<p>
+ 'Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this
+moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South
+India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that
+the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within
+measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash -'</p>
+<p>
+ Bad news coming, thought Winston. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a
+deflated feeling. The telescreen -- perhaps to celebrate the
+victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate --
+crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thee'. You were supposed to
+stand to attention. However, in his present position he was
+invisible.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Oceania, 'tis for thee' gave way to lighter music.
+Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the
+telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far
+away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar.
+About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at
+present.</p>
+<p>
+ Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and
+fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished.
+Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink,
+the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering
+in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world
+where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was
+dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a
+single human creature now living was on his side? And what way
+of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure
+for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white
+face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ WAR IS PEACE<br>
+ FREEDOM IS SLAVERY<br>
+ IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH</p>
+<p>
+
+ He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There,
+too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed,
+and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even
+from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the
+covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings
+of a cigarette Packet -- everywhere. Always the eyes watching
+you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or
+eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed -- no
+escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres
+inside your skull.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. His heart quailed
+before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too strong, it
+could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter
+it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary.
+For the future, for the past -- for an age that might be
+imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but
+annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself
+to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had
+written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of
+memory. How 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?</p>
+<p>
+ The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten
+minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.</p>
+<p>
+ Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new
+heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that
+nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some
+obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making
+yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the
+human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and
+wrote:</p>
+<p>
+ 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:</p>
+<p>
+ From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude,
+from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink --
+greetings!</p>
+<p>
+ He was already dead, he reflected. It 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. The consequences
+of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:</p>
+<p>
+ Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS
+death.</p>
+<p>
+ Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became
+important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his
+right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail
+that might betray you. Some 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. He
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless
+to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether
+or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across
+the page-ends was too obvious. With 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.</p>
+<H1><a name="3">III</a></H1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ Winston was dreaming of his mother.</p>
+<p>
+ He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old
+when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque,
+rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair
+hair. His 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. The two of them must evidently have been
+swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the fifties.</p>
+<p>
+ At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep
+down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms. He did not
+remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby,
+always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were
+looking up at him. They 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. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking
+up at him through the darkening water. There 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. He 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.
+He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in
+their faces. There 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.</p>
+<p>
+ He 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. It 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. The 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. Tragedy, 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. His 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. Such things, he saw,
+could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and
+pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.
+All 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a
+summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the
+ground. The 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. In his waking thoughts he called
+it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture,
+with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and
+there. In 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. Somewhere 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the
+field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her
+clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white
+and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely
+looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was
+admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her
+clothes aside. With 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. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time.
+Winston woke up with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips.</p>
+<p>
+ The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle
+which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was
+nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers.
+Winston 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. The Physical
+Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he was
+doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always
+attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so
+completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on
+his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had
+swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer
+had started itching.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. '
+Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to
+forties!'</p>
+<p>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Arms bending and stretching!' she rapped out. 'Take your
+time by me. One, two, three, four! One, two,
+three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it!
+One, two, three four! One two, three, four! . .
+.'</p>
+<p>
+ 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. As 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. It was
+extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late fifties everything
+faded. When there were no external records that you could refer
+to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You
+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. Everything had been
+different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes
+on the map, had been different. Airstrip 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston 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. Perhaps it was the time
+when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He 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. His
+mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way
+behind them. She 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. Finally they had
+emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be
+a Tube station.</p>
+<p>
+ There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged
+floor, and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting
+on metal bunks, one above the other. Winston 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.
+The 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. He reeked of gin. It 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. But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some
+grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way
+Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was
+beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just
+happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was.
+Someone whom the old man loved -- a little granddaughter,
+perhaps had been killed. Every few minutes the old man kept
+repeating:</p>
+<p>
+ 'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma,
+didn't I? That's what comes of trusting 'em. I said so all
+along. We didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers.</p>
+<p>
+ But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted
+Winston could not now remember.</p>
+<p>
+ Since about that time, war had been literally continuous,
+though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.
+For several months during his childhood there had been confused
+street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered
+vividly. But 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. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was
+1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with
+Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever
+admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped
+along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was
+only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and
+in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of
+furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his
+memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the
+change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with
+Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
+The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and
+it followed that any past or future agreement with him was
+impossible.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. If 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?</p>
+<p>
+ The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance
+with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in
+alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But
+where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness,
+which in any case must soon be annihilated. And 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. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls
+the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And
+yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been
+altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to
+everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an
+unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality
+control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more
+genially.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his
+lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world
+of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of
+complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies,
+to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out,
+knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,
+to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying
+claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that
+the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it
+was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again
+at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget
+it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the
+process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to
+induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become
+unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even
+to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of
+doublethink.</p>
+<p>
+ The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And
+now let's see which of us can touch our toes!' she said
+enthusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades.
+One-two! One-two! ...'</p>
+<p>
+ 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. The half-pleasant quality
+went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not
+merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how
+could you establish even the most obvious fact when there
+existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember
+in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He
+thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but it
+was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of
+course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the
+Revolution since its very earliest days. His 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. There was no knowing how much
+of this legend was true and how much invented. Winston could
+not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into
+existence. He 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. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you
+could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for
+example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the
+Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since
+his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was
+never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in
+his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification
+of an historical fact. And on that occasion</p>
+<p>
+ 'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen.
+'6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do
+better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please!
+That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole
+squad, and watch me.'</p>
+<p>
+ A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body.
+His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay!
+Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give
+you away. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'There, comrades! That's how I want to see
+you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four
+children. Now look.' She bent over again. 'You see my knees
+aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added as
+she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty-five is
+perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't all have the
+privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can
+all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the
+sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they
+have to put up with. Now try again. That'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.</p>
+<H1><a name="4">IV</a></H1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ 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. Then 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.</p>
+<p>
+ In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To
+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. This last was for the
+disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or
+tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every
+room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason
+they were nicknamed memory holes. When 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had
+unrolled. Each 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. They ran:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify<br>
+ times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints
+verify current issue<br>
+ times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify<br>
+ times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
+unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling</p>
+<p>
+ With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the
+fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job
+and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine
+matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious
+wading through lists of figures.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston 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.
+The 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. For
+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. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had
+launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa
+alone. It 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. Or 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. Today's issue contained a statement of
+the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts
+were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston's job was to
+rectify the original figures by making them agree with the
+later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very
+simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes.
+As 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. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate
+ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the
+end of the present week. All 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.</p>
+<p>
+ As 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. Then, 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.</p>
+<p>
+ What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the
+pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know
+in general terms. As 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. This 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. Day by day and almost minute by
+minute the past was brought up to date. In 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. All history was a
+palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as
+was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the
+deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
+The 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. A 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.
+Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and
+were invariably reissued without any admission that any
+alteration had been made. Even 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.</p>
+<p>
+ But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of
+Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the
+substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most 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. Statistics were just as much a
+fantasy in their original version as in their rectified
+version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make
+them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's
+forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at
+145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two
+millions. Winston, 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. In any case,
+sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven
+millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been
+produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been
+produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter
+astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while
+perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it
+was with every class of recorded fact, great or small.
+Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally,
+even the date of the year had become uncertain.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston glanced across the hall. In 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. He had the air of trying to keep
+what he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen.
+He looked up, and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in
+Winston's direction.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work
+he was employed on. People in the Records Department did not
+readily talk about their jobs. In 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. He 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. There was a certain fitness
+in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of
+years earlier. And 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. And 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. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers
+engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were the
+huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography
+experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking
+of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its
+engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors specially
+chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the
+armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up
+lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There
+were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were
+stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were
+destroyed. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ And 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. And 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. There was a whole chain of
+separate departments dealing with proletarian literature,
+
+music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here 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. There 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Three 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.
+When 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most
+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. Winston was good at this kind
+of thing. On occasion he had even been entrusted with the
+rectification of The Times leading articles, which were
+written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he
+had set aside earlier. It ran:</p>
+<p>
+
+ times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
+unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling</p>
+<p>
+
+ 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. Rewrite it in full and
+submit your draft to higher authority before filing.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston read through the offending article. Big 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. A 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with
+no reasons given. One 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. That was to be
+expected, since it was unusual for political offenders to be
+put on trial or even publicly denounced. The 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. More
+commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party
+simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had
+the smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some
+cases they might not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people
+personally known to Winston, not counting his parents, had
+disappeared at one time or another.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip. In the
+cubicle across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching
+secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his head for a
+moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston wondered
+whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged on the same job as
+himself. It was perfectly possible. So 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. Very likely as many as a
+dozen people were now working away on rival versions of what
+Big Brother had actually said. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced.
+Perhaps it was for corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big
+Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordinate.
+Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had been suspected of
+heretical tendencies. Or perhaps -- what was likeliest of all
+-- the thing had simply happened because purges and
+vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of
+government. The only real clue lay in the words 'refs
+unpersons', which indicated that Withers was already dead. You
+could not invariably assume this to be the case when people
+were arrested. Sometimes they were released and allowed to
+remain at liberty for as much as a year or two years before
+being executed. Very 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. Withers,
+however, was already an unperson. He did not exist: he
+had never existed. Winston decided that it would not be enough
+simply to reverse the tendency of Big Brother's speech. It was
+better to make it deal with something totally unconnected with
+its original subject.</p>
+<p>
+ He 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. What was needed was a piece of
+pure fantasy. Suddenly 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. There 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. Today
+he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston 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? The
+lesson -- which is also one of the fundamental principles of
+Ingsoc -- that,' etc., etc.), easy to imitate.</p>
+<p>
+ At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys
+except a drum, a sub-machine gun, and a model helicopter. At
+six -- a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules -- he
+had joined the Spies, at nine he had been a troop leader. At
+eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after
+overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have
+criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district
+organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nine teen 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. At twenty-three he had
+perished in action. Pursued 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. Big Brother added a few remarks on the purity
+and single-mindedness of Comrade Ogilvy's life. He 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. He 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, thoughtcriminals, and
+traitors generally.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Once again he glanced at his rival in the opposite
+cubicle. Something seemed to tell him with certainty that
+Tillotson was busy on the same job as himself. There was no way
+of knowing whose job would finally be adopted, but he felt a
+profound conviction that it would be his own. Comrade Ogilvy,
+unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck him as
+curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.
+Comrade 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.</p>
+<H1><a name="5">V</a></H1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch
+queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and
+deafeningly noisy. From 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. On 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at
+Winston's back.</p>
+<p>
+ He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the
+Research Department. Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right
+word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but
+there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that
+of others. Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak.
+Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged
+in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
+He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,'
+he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Not one!' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've
+tried all over the place. They don't exist any longer.'</p>
+<p>
+ Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had
+two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There had been a
+famine of them for months past. At any given moment there was
+some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to
+supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning
+wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor
+blades. You could only get hold of them, if at all, by
+scrounging more or less furtively on the 'free' market.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added
+untruthfully.</p>
+<p>
+ The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he
+turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal
+tray from a pile at the end of the counter.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?' said
+Syme.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see
+it on the flicks, I suppose.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.</p>
+<p>
+ His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know you,'
+the eyes seemed to say, 'I see through you. I know very well
+why you didn't go to see those prisoners hanged.' In an
+intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He 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. Talking 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. Winston turned his head a little
+aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently. 'I think
+it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see
+them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking
+right out, and blue a quite bright blue. That's the detail that
+appeals to me.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Nex', please!' yelled the white-aproned prole with the
+ladle.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said
+Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin on the way.'</p>
+<p>
+ The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs.
+They 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. Winston took up his mug of
+gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the
+oily-tasting stuff down. When he had winked the tears out of
+his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He 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. Neither of them spoke again
+till they had emptied their pannikins. From 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising
+his voice to overcome the noise.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's
+fascinating.'</p>
+<p>
+ He had brightened up immediately at the mention of
+Newspeak. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said.
+'We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape
+it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've
+finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all
+over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is
+inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying
+words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're
+cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition
+won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before
+the year 2050.'</p>
+<p>
+ He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of
+mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's
+passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had
+lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of
+course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but
+there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It
+isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After
+all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the
+opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in
+itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like
+"good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will
+do just as well -- better, because it's an exact opposite,
+which the other is not. Or 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? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "
+doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course
+we use those forms already. but in the final version of
+Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion
+of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in
+reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that,
+Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as
+an afterthought.</p>
+<p>
+ A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at
+the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately
+detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he
+said almost sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still
+thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those pieces that you
+write in The Times occasionally. They're good
+enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to
+stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless
+shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the
+destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only
+language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every
+year?'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston did know that, of course. He smiled,
+sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme
+bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it
+briefly, and went on:</p>
+<p>
+ 'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow
+the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime
+literally impossible, because there will be no words in which
+to express it. Every 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. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from
+that point. But the process will still be continuing long after
+you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the
+range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of
+course, there's no reason or excuse for committing
+thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline,
+reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even
+for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is
+perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added
+with a sort of mystical satisfaction. '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?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Except-' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.</p>
+<p>
+ It 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. Syme, however, had
+divined what he was about to say.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly. '
+By 2050 earlier, probably -- all real knowledge of Oldspeak
+will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will
+have been destroyed. Chaucer, 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. Even the literature of
+the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could
+you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of
+freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will
+be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we
+understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing
+to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'</p>
+<p>
+ One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep
+conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He
+sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not
+like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in
+his face.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a
+little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the
+table on his left the man with the strident voice was still
+talking remorselessly away. A 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. From 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. But the other voice never stopped for an
+instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man
+by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held
+some important post in the Fiction Department. He was a man of
+about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth.
+His 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. What 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. Just 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. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking.
+And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was
+saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature.
+He 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. Whatever it was, you could be
+certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc.
+As 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. It was not the man's
+brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle
+of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The
+voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible
+in spite of the surrounding din.</p>
+<p>
+ 'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know
+whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It
+is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory
+meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to
+someone you agree with, it is praise.'</p>
+<p>
+ Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought
+again. He 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. There was something subtly
+wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked:
+discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could
+not say that he was unorthodox. He 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. Yet a faint
+air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that
+would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he
+frequented the Chestnut Tree Café, haunt of painters and
+musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against
+frequenting the Chestnut Tree Café, yet the place was somehow
+ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been
+used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein
+himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and
+decades ago. Syme's fate was not difficult to foresee. And 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. So would anybody else, for
+that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough.
+Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.</p>
+<p>
+ Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that
+bloody fool'. Parsons, 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. At
+thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and
+waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His 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. In
+visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and
+sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed,
+invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other
+physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted
+them both with a cheery 'Hullo, hullo!' and sat down at the
+table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture
+stood out all over his pink face. His powers of sweating were
+extraordinary. At the Community Centre you could always tell
+when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the
+bat handle. Syme 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Look at him working away in the lunch hour,' said
+Parsons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that you've got
+there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect.
+Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm chasing you. It's that
+sub you forgot to give me.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Which sub is that? said Winston, automatically feeling
+for money. About 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'For Hate Week. You know -- the house-by-house fund. I'm
+treasurer for our block. We're making an all-out effort --
+going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won't be my
+fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the biggest outfit
+of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy
+notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat
+handwriting of the illiterate.</p>
+<p>
+ 'By the way, old boy,' he said. 'I hear that little beggar
+of mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him
+a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told him I'd take the
+catapult away if he does it again.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I think he was a little upset at not going to the
+execution,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ ' Ah, well -- what I mean to say, shows the right spirit,
+doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them,
+but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and
+the war, of course. D'you know what that little girl of mine
+did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted
+way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from
+the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange
+man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the
+woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over
+to the patrols.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'What did they do that for?' said Winston, somewhat taken
+aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:</p>
+<p>
+ 'My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent -- might
+have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But here's the
+point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the
+first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes
+-- said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before.
+So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a
+nipper of seven, eh?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'What happened to the man?' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Ah, that I couldn't say, of course. But I wouldn't be
+altogether surprised if-' Parsons made the motion of aiming a
+rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from
+his strip of paper.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Of course we can't afford to take chances,' agreed
+Winston dutifully.</p>
+<p>
+ 'What I mean to say, there is a war on,' said Parsons.</p>
+<p>
+ As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated
+from the telescreen just above their heads. However, it was not
+the proclamation of a military victory this time, but merely an
+announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Comrades!' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention,
+comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle
+for production! Returns 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. All
+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. Here are some of the
+completed figures. Foodstuffs-'</p>
+<p>
+ The phrase 'our new, happy life' recurred several times.
+It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty.
+Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat
+listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified
+boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that
+they were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged
+out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of
+charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week
+it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was
+smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal.
+The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four
+cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the
+remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out
+of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been
+demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate
+ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he
+reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be
+reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that
+they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes,
+they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the
+stupidity of an animal. The 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. Syme, too-in
+some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed
+it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?</p>
+<p>
+ The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the
+telescreen. As 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. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and
+everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As 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. He meditated resentfully
+on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this?
+Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen.
+A 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. Always 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. It was true that he had no memories of anything
+greatly different. In 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. And 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? Why should one
+feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral
+memory that things had once been different?</p>
+<p>
+ He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was
+ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise
+than in the uniform blue overalls. On 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. How 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. Actually, so far as
+he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were
+small, dark, and ill-favoured. It 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. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the
+dominion of the Party.</p>
+<p>
+ The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on
+another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music. Parsons,
+stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took
+his pipe out of his mouth.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a good job this
+year,' he said with a knowing shake of his head. 'By the way,
+Smith old boy, I suppose you haven't got any razor blades you
+can let me have?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Not one,' said Winston. 'I've been using the same blade
+for six weeks myself.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Ah, well -- just thought I'd ask you, old boy.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Sorry,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily
+silenced during the Ministry's announcement, had started up
+again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly found
+himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair and the
+dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those
+children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs
+Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston
+would be vaporized. O'Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the
+other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with
+the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little
+beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine
+corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized.
+And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction
+Department -- she would never be vaporized either. It 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.</p>
+<p>
+ At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a
+violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly
+round and was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair.
+She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious
+intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away
+again.</p>
+<p>
+ The sweat started out on Winston's backbone. A horrible
+pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at once,
+but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she
+watching him? Why did she keep following him about?
+Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already
+been at the table when he arrived, or had come there
+afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes
+Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no
+apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been
+to listen to him and make sure whether he was shouting loudly
+enough.</p>
+<p>
+ His 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.
+He 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. It was
+terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in
+any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest
+thing could give you away. A 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. In 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. There was even a
+word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.</p>
+<p>
+ The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after
+all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was
+coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running.
+His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on the
+edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, if he
+could keep the tobacco in it. Quite 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. Syme had folded
+up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket. Parsons
+had begun talking again.</p>
+<p>
+ '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.? Sneaked up behind
+her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite
+badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard!
+That's a first-rate training they give them in the Spies
+nowadays -- better than in my day, even. What d'you think's the
+latest thing they've served them out with? Ear trumpets for
+listening through keyholes! My 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. Of course it's only a toy, mind you. Still, gives 'em the
+right idea, eh?'</p>
+<p>
+ At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle.
+It was the signal to return to work. All three men sprang to
+their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the
+remaining tobacco fell out of Winston's cigarette.</p>
+<h1><a name="6">VI</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ Winston was writing in his diary:</p>
+<p>
+ It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a
+narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. She
+was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp
+that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very
+thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the
+whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party
+women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the
+street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I</p>
+<p>
+ For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his
+eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze
+out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost
+overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at
+the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to
+kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window --
+to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black
+out the memory that was tormenting him.</p>
+<p>
+ Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous
+system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to
+translate itself into some visible symptom. He 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. They were a few
+metres apart when the left side of the man's face was suddenly
+contorted by a sort of spasm. It 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. He
+remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for.
+And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly
+unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your
+sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he
+could see.</p>
+<p>
+ He drew his breath and went on writing:</p>
+<p>
+ I went with her through the doorway and across a
+backyard into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against the
+wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She</p>
+<p>
+ His teeth were set on edge. He would have liked to spit.
+Simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen he
+thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married -- had been
+married, at any rate: probably he still was married, so far as
+he knew his wife was not dead. He 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. Only the proles used
+scent. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up
+with fornication.</p>
+<p>
+ When he had gone with that woman it had been his first
+lapse in two years or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes
+was forbidden, of course, but it was one of those rules that
+you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was
+dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be caught
+with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour
+camp: not more, if you had committed no other offence. And it
+was easy enough, provided that you could avoid being caught in
+the act. The poorer quarters swarmed with women who were ready
+to sell themselves. Some could even be purchased for a bottle
+of gin, which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly
+the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an
+outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed.
+Mere 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. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity
+between Party members. But -- 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and
+women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to
+control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all
+pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was
+the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All 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. The only recognized purpose of
+marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party.
+Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting
+minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put
+into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into
+every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even
+organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which
+advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were
+to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it
+was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions.
+This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously,
+but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the
+Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it
+could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did
+not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should
+be so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party's
+efforts were largely successful.</p>
+<p>
+ He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten --
+nearly eleven years since they had parted. It was curious how
+seldom he thought of her. For days at a time he was capable of
+forgetting that he had ever been married. They had only been
+together for about fifteen months. The Party did not permit
+divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases where
+there were no children.</p>
+<p>
+ Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight,
+with splendid movements. She 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. Very 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. She 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. 'The human sound-track' he
+nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have endured living
+with her if it had not been for just one thing -- sex.</p>
+<p>
+ As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen.
+To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And
+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. The rigidlty of her
+muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there
+with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but
+submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and,
+after a while, horrible. But even then he could have borne
+living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain
+celibate. But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused
+this. They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So
+the performance continued to happen, once a week quite
+regulariy, whenever it was not impossible. She 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. She had two
+names for it. One was 'making a baby', and the other was 'our
+duty to the Party' (yes, she had actually used that phrase).
+Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the
+appointed day came round. But luckily no child appeared, and in
+the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they
+parted.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and
+wrote:</p>
+<p>
+ 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. I</p>
+<p>
+ 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. Why did it
+always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of
+his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years?
+But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The
+women of the Party were all alike. Chastity was as deep
+ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By 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. His
+reason told him that there must be exceptions, but his heart
+did not believe it. They were all impregnable, as the Party
+intended that they should be. And 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. The sexual act,
+successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.
+Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it,
+would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.</p>
+<p>
+ But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He
+wrote:</p>
+<p>
+ I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light</p>
+<p>
+ After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp
+had seemed very bright. For the first time he could see the
+woman properly. He had taken a step towards her and then
+halted, full of lust and terror. He was painfully conscious of
+the risk he had taken in coming here. It 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.
+If he went away without even doing what he had come here to do
+-- !</p>
+<p>
+ It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed.
+What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman
+was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face
+that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask.
+There 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. She had no teeth at all.</p>
+<p>
+ He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:</p>
+<p>
+ When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman,
+fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the
+same.</p>
+<p>
+ He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had
+written it down at last, but it made no difference. The therapy
+had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of
+his voice was as strong as ever.</p>
+<h1><a name="7">VII</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the
+proles.</p>
+<p>
+ 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. The Party could not be overthrown
+from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of
+coming together or even of identifying one another. Even 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. Rebellion meant a look in
+the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional
+whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow
+become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to
+conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like
+a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the
+Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it
+must occur to them to do it? And yet-!</p>
+<p>
+ He 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. It
+was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud
+'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went humming on like the reverberation of a
+bell. His heart had leapt. It's started! he had thought. A
+riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When 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. But at this moment the general despair broke down
+into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one
+of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were
+wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were
+always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given
+out. The 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.
+There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two 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.
+For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came
+off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a
+moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry
+from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could
+never shout like that about anything that mattered?</p>
+<p>
+ He wrote:</p>
+<p>
+ Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and
+until after they have rebelled they cannot become
+conscious.</p>
+<p>
+ That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription
+from one of the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course,
+to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before 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. But 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. In reality
+very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to
+know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their
+other activities were without importance. Left 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. They 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. Heavy 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. To keep them in control was not
+difficult. A 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. It was not desirable that
+the proles should have strong political feelings. All 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. And 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. The larger evils
+invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles
+did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil
+police interfered with them very little. There 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. In all questions of
+morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The
+sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them.
+Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that
+matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the
+proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were
+beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and
+animals are free.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose
+ulcer. It had begun itching again. The thing you invariably
+came back to was the impossibility of knowing what life before
+the Revolution had really been like. He 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:</p>
+<p>
+ In the old days (it ran), before the glorious
+Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know
+today. It 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. Children 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.</p>
+<p>
+ But 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. These
+rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with
+wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page.
+You 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. This was the uniform of
+the capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear it.
+The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone
+else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses,
+all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them
+they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job
+away and starve him to death. When 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'. The chief of all the capitalists
+was called the King. and</p>
+<p>
+ But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There 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. There was also something called the
+jus primae noctis, which would probably not be mentioned
+in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every
+capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one
+of his factories.</p>
+<p>
+ How could you tell how much of it was lies? It
+might be true that the average human being was better
+off now than he had been before the Revolution. The 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. It struck him that the truly characteristic
+thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but
+simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, 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. Great 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. The 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. The
+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. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day 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. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The
+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. The 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. It
+was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very
+well be that literally every word in the history books, even
+the things that one accepted without question, was pure
+fantasy. For 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the
+erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his
+life he had possessed -- after the event: that was what
+counted -- concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of
+falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long
+as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been -- at any rate,
+
+
+it was at about the time when he and Katharine had parted. But
+the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. By 1970 none of
+them was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by
+that time been exposed as traitors and counter-
+revolutionaries. Goldstein 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. Among the last
+survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
+It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested.
+As 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. They 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.
+After confessing to these things they had been pardoned,
+reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact
+sinecures but which sounded important. All three had written
+long, abject articles in The Times, analysing the
+reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.</p>
+<p>
+ Some time after their release Winston had actually seen
+all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Café. He remembered the
+sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them
+out of the corner of his eye. They 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. The
+glamour of the underground struggle and the civil war still
+faintly clung to them. He 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. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables,
+doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or
+two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought
+Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be
+sent back to the grave.</p>
+<p>
+ There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It
+was not wise even to be seen in the neighbourhood of such
+people. They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin
+flavoured with cloves which was the speciality of the café. Of
+the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most
+impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous
+caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame
+popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now, at
+long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in The
+Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner,
+and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always 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.
+He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his
+face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one time
+he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was
+sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He
+seemed to be breaking up before one's eyes, like a mountain
+crumbling.</p>
+<p>
+ It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now
+
+remember how he had come to be in the café at such a time. The
+place was almost empty. A tinny music was trickling from the
+telescreens. The three men sat in their corner almost
+motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought
+fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on the table
+beside them, with the pieces set out but no game started. And
+then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to
+the telescreens. The tune that they were playing changed, and
+the tone of the music changed too. There came into it -- but it
+was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked,
+braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow
+note. And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ Under the spreading chestnut tree<br>
+ I sold you and you sold me:<br>
+ There lie they, and here lie we<br>
+ Under the spreading chestnut tree.</p>
+<p>
+
+ The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced
+again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were
+full of tears. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ A little later all three were re-arrested. It appeared
+that they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very
+moment of their release. At their second trial they confessed
+to all their old crimes over again, with a whole string of new
+ones. They were executed, and their fate was recorded in the
+Party histories, a warning to posterity. About 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. The instant he had
+flattened it out he saw its significance. It 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. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones,
+Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, in any
+case their names were in the caption at the bottom.</p>
+<p>
+ The point was that at both trials all three men had
+confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil.
+They 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. The 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. There was
+only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.</p>
+<p>
+ Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even 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. But 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. It
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what
+the photograph was, and what it meant, he had covered it up
+with another sheet of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it
+had been upside-down from the point of view of the telescreen.</p>
+<p>
+ He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his
+chair so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible.
+To 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. He 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. Then, without uncovering it
+again, he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along
+with some other waste papers. Within another minute, perhaps,
+it would have crumbled into ashes.</p>
+<p>
+ That was ten -- eleven years ago. Today, probably, he
+would have kept that photograph. It 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. Was the Party's hold upon
+the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence
+which existed no longer had once existed?</p>
+<p>
+ But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected
+from its ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence.
+Already, 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.
+Since then there had been other changes -- two, three, he could
+not remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been
+rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no
+longer had the smallest significance. The past not only
+changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with
+the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood
+why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages
+of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive
+was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:</p>
+<p>
+ I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.</p>
+<p>
+ He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether
+he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a
+minority of one. At 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 inalterable. He might be alone in
+holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the
+thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the
+horror was that he might also be wrong.</p>
+<p>
+ He picked up the children's history book and looked at the
+portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The
+hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It 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. In the end the Party would announce
+that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.
+It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or
+later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the
+validity of experience, but the very existence of external
+reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of
+heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that
+they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might
+be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make
+four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is
+unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist
+only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what
+then?</p>
+<p>
+ But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own
+accord. The face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious
+association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with more
+certainty than before, that O'Brien was on his side. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and
+ears. It was their final, most essential command. His 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. And yet he was in the right! They
+were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the
+true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that!
+The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are
+hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the
+earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to
+O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom,
+he wrote:</p>
+<p>
+ Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make
+four. If that is granted, all else follows.</p>
+<h1><a name="8">VIII</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of
+roasting coffee -- real coffee, not Victory Coffee -- came
+floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For
+perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of
+his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell
+as abruptly as though it had been a sound.</p>
+<p>
+ He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his
+varicose ulcer was throbbing. This 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. In principle a
+Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in
+bed. It 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. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife,
+it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this
+evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the
+April air had tempted him. The 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. On
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies
+in the proles.' The words kept coming back to him, statement of
+a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in
+the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what
+had once been Saint Pancras Station. He 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. There were puddles of
+filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In 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. Perhaps a quarter
+of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most
+of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with
+a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red
+forearms folded across thelr aprons were talking outside a
+doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he
+approached.</p>
+<p>
+ ' "Yes," I says to 'er, "that's all very well," I says.
+"But if you'd of been in my place you'd of done the same as
+what I done. It's easy to criticize," I says, "but you ain't
+got the same problems as what I got." '</p>
+<p>
+ 'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where
+it is.'</p>
+<p>
+ The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied
+him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not
+hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary
+stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The
+blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a
+street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such
+places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols
+might stop you if you happened to run into them. 'May I see
+your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time did
+you leave work? Is this your usual way home?' -- and so on and
+so forth. Not 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were
+yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the
+doorways like rabbits. A 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. At 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Steamer!' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead!
+Lay down quick!'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the
+proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself
+on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave
+you a warning of this kind. They 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. Winston clasped his forearms above his head.
+There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a
+shower of light objects pattered on to his back. When he stood
+up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from
+the nearest window.</p>
+<p>
+ He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses
+200 metres up the street. A 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. There 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. When he got up to it he
+saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from
+the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to
+resemble a plaster cast.</p>
+<p>
+ He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid
+the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within 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. It was nearly twenty hours,
+and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ('pubs',
+they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy
+swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a
+smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In 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. Even
+before he was near enough to make out the expression on their
+faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of their
+bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they
+were reading. He was a few paces away from them when suddenly
+the group broke up and two of the men were in violent
+altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of
+blows.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you
+no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, it 'as, then!'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for
+over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down
+reg'lar as the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in
+seven-'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, a seven 'as won! I could pretty near tell you
+the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in
+February -- second week in February.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and
+white. An' I tell you, no number-'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Oh, pack it in!' said the third man.</p>
+<p>
+ They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back
+when he had gone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with
+vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out
+of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the
+proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were
+some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal
+if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their
+delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual
+stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who
+could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate
+calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole
+tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems,
+forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston 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. Only small sums
+were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being
+non-existent persons. In the absence of any real
+intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another,
+this was not difficult to arrange.</p>
+<p>
+ But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to
+cling on to that. When 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. The street
+into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he
+had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was a
+main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead there came
+a din of shouting voices. The 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.
+At this moment Winston remembered where he was. The 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. And in a small stationer's shop
+not far away he had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.</p>
+<p>
+ He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On 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. A 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. As 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. He and a few others like him were the last links that
+now existed with the vanished world of capitalism. In the Party
+itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been
+formed before the Revolution. The 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. If 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.
+Suddenly 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. He would go into the pub, he would
+scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him. He
+would say to him: 'Tell me about your life when you were a boy.
+What was it like in those days? Were things better than they
+are now, or were they worse?'</p>
+<p>
+ Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened,
+he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It was
+madness of course. As 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. If the patrols
+appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it was not
+likely that they would believe him. He pushed open the door,
+and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in the face. As
+he entered the din of voices dropped to about half its volume.
+Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his blue
+overalls. A game of darts which was going on at the other end
+of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty
+seconds. The 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. A knot of
+others, standing round with glasses in their hands, were
+watching the scene.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I arst you civil enough, didn't I?' said the old man,
+straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me you
+ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'And what in hell's name is a pint?' said the barman,
+leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a
+pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four
+quarts to the gallon. 'Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and
+half litre -- that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the
+shelf in front of you.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I likes a pint,' persisted the old man. 'You could 'a
+drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding
+litres when I was a young man.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'When you were a young man we were all living in the
+treetops,' said the barman, with a glance at the other
+customers.</p>
+<p>
+ There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused
+by Winston's entry seemed to disappear. The old man's
+whitestubbled face had flushed pink. He turned away, muttering
+to himself, and bumped into Winston. Winston caught him gently
+by the arm.</p>
+<p>
+ 'May I offer you a drink?' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening his
+shoulders again. He appeared not to have noticed Winston's blue
+overalls. 'Pint!' he added aggressively to the barman. 'Pint of
+wallop.'</p>
+<p>
+ The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into
+thick glasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the
+counter. Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs.
+The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice
+they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of darts was
+in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun
+talking about lottery tickets. Winston's presence was forgotten
+for a moment. There was a deal table under the window where he
+and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ "E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as
+he settled down behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It
+don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It starts my
+bladder running. Let alone the price.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You must have seen great changes since you were a young
+man,' said Winston tentatively.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The beer was better,' he said finally. 'And cheaper! When
+I was a young man, mild beer -- wallop we used to call it --
+was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Which war was that?' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's all wars,' said the old man vaguely. He took up his
+glass, and his shoulders straightened again. "Ere's wishing you
+the very best of 'ealth!'</p>
+<p>
+ In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam's apple made a
+surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished.
+Winston went to the bar and came back with two more
+half-litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten his
+prejudice against drinking a full litre.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are very much older than I am,' said Winston. 'You
+must have been a grown man before I was born. You can remember
+what it was like in the old days, before the Revolution. People
+of my age don't really know anything about those times. We can
+only read about them in books, and what it says in the books
+may not be true. I should like your opinion on that. The
+history books say that life before the Revolution was
+completely different from what it is now. There was the most
+terrible oppression, injustice, poverty worse than anything we
+can imagine. Here in London, the great mass of the people never
+had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them hadn't even
+boots on their feet. They worked twelve hours a day, they left
+school at nine, they slept ten in a room. And at the same time
+there were a very few people, only a few thousands -- the
+capitalists, they were called -- who were rich and powerful.
+They owned everything that there was to own. They 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-'</p>
+<p>
+ The old man brightened suddenly.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Top 'ats!' he said. 'Funny you should mention 'em. The
+same thing come into my 'ead only yesterday, I dono why. I was
+jest thinking, I ain't seen a top 'at in years. Gorn right out,
+they 'ave. The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law's
+funeral. And that was -- well, I couldn't give you the date,
+but it must'a been fifty years ago. Of course it was only 'ired
+for the occasion, you understand.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It isn't very important about the top hats,' said Winston
+patiently. '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. Everything existed for their benefit. You
+-- the ordinary people, the workers -- were their slaves. They
+could do what they liked with you. They could ship you off to
+Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your daughters if
+they chose. They could order you to be flogged with something
+called a cat-o'-nine tails. You had to take your cap off when
+you passed them. Every capitalist went about with a gang of
+lackeys who-'</p>
+<p>
+ The old man brightened again.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Lackeys!' he said. 'Now there's a word I ain't 'eard
+since ever so long. Lackeys! That reg'lar takes me back, that
+does. I recollect oh, donkey's years ago -- I used to sometimes
+go to 'Yde Park of a Sunday afternoon to 'ear the blokes making
+speeches. Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews, Indians -- all
+sorts there was. And there was one bloke -- well, I couldn't
+give you 'is name, but a real powerful speaker 'e was. 'E
+didn't 'alf give it 'em! "Lackeys!" 'e says, "lackeys of the
+bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class!" Parasites -- that
+was another of them. And 'yenas -- 'e definitely called 'em
+'yenas. Of course 'e was referring to the Labour Party, you
+understand.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston had the feeling that they were talking at
+cross-purposes.</p>
+<p>
+ 'What I really wanted to know was this,' he said. 'Do you
+feel that you have more freedom now than you had in those days?
+Are you treated more like a human being? In the old days, the
+rich people, the people at the top-'</p>
+<p>
+ 'The 'Ouse of Lords,' put in the old man reminiscently.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is,
+were these people able to treat you as an inferior, simply
+because they were rich and you were poor? Is it a fact, for
+instance, that you had to call them "Sir" and take off your cap
+when you passed them?'</p>
+<p>
+ The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off about a
+quarter of his beer before answering.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes,' he said. 'They liked you to touch your cap to 'em.
+It showed respect, like. I didn't agree with it, myself, but I
+done it often enough. Had to, as you might say.'</p>
+<p>
+ '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?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'One of 'em pushed me once,' said the old man. 'I
+recollect it as if it was yesterday. It was Boat Race night --
+terribly rowdy they used to get on Boat Race night -- and I
+bumps into a young bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue. Quite a gent,
+'e was -- dress shirt, top 'at, black overcoat. 'E was kind of
+zig-zagging across the pavement, and I bumps into 'im
+accidental-like. 'E says, "Why can't you look where you're
+going?" 'e says. I say, "Ju think you've bought the bleeding
+pavement?" 'E says, "I'll twist your bloody 'ead off if you get
+fresh with me." I says, "You're drunk. I'll give you in charge
+in 'alf a minute," I says. An' 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. Well, I was young in them days,
+and I was going to 'ave fetched 'im one, only-'</p>
+<p>
+ A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old
+man's memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One
+could question him all day without getting any real
+information. The party histories might still be true, after a
+fashion: they might even be completely true. He made a last
+attempt.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Perhaps I have not made myself clear,' he said. 'What I'm
+trying to say is this. You have been alive a very long time;
+you lived half your life before the Revolution. In 1925, for
+instance, you were already grown up. Would you say from what
+you can remember, that life in 1925 was better than it is now,
+or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to live then or
+now?'</p>
+<p>
+ The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He
+finished up his beer, more slowly than before. When he spoke it
+was with a tolerant philosophical air, as though the beer had
+mellowed him.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I know what you expect me to say,' he said. 'You expect
+me to say as I'd sooner be young again. Most people'd say
+they'd sooner be young, if you arst' 'em. You got your 'ealth
+and strength when you're young. When you get to my time of life
+you ain't never well. I suffer something wicked from my feet,
+and my bladder's jest terrible. Six and seven times a night it
+'as me out of bed. On the other 'and, there's great advantages
+in being a old man. You ain't got the same worries. No truck
+with women, and that's a great thing. I ain't 'ad a woman for
+near on thirty year, if you'd credit it. Nor wanted to, what's
+more.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston sat back against the window-sill. It was no use
+going on. He 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. The extra half-litre was already
+working on him. Winston sat for a minute or two gazing at his
+empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out
+into the street again. Within twenty years at the most, he
+reflected, the huge and simple question, 'Was life better
+before the Revolution than it is now?' would have ceased once
+and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable
+even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient
+world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They
+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. They were like the ant, which can see small
+objects but not large ones. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He
+halted and looked up. He was in a narrow street, with a few
+dark little shops, interspersed among dwelling-houses.
+Immediately above his head there hung three discoloured metal
+balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He seemed
+to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside the
+junk-shop where he had bought the diary.</p>
+<p>
+ A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a
+sufficiently rash act to buy the book in the beginning, and he
+had sworn never to come near the place again. And yet the
+instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had
+brought him back here of their own accord. It was precisely
+against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped to
+guard himself by opening the diary. At the same time he noticed
+that although it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still
+open. With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside
+than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the
+doorway. If questioned, he could plausibly say that he was
+trying to buy razor blades.</p>
+<p>
+ The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which
+gave off an unclean but friendly smell. He was a man of perhaps
+sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild
+eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white,
+but his eyebrows were bushy and still black. His 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. His voice was soft, as though
+faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of
+proles.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I recognized you on the pavement,' he said immediately.
+'You're the gentleman that bought the young lady's keepsake
+album. That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was. Cream-
+laid, it used to be called. There's been no paper like that
+made for -- oh, I dare say fifty years.' He peered at Winston
+over the top of his spectacles. 'Is there anything special I
+can do for you? Or did you just want to look round?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I was passing,' said Winston vaguely. 'I just looked in.
+I don't want anything in particular.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's just as well,' said the other, 'because I don't
+suppose I could have satisfied you.' He made an apologetic
+gesture with his softpalmed hand. 'You see how it is; an empty
+shop, you might say. Between you and me, the antique trade's
+just about finished. No demand any longer, and no stock either.
+Furniture, china, glass it's all been broken up by degrees. And
+of course the metal stuff's mostly been melted down. I haven't
+seen a brass candlestick in years.'</p>
+<p>
+ The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably
+full, but there was almost nothing in it of the slightest
+value. The floorspace was very restricted, because all round
+the walls were stacked innumerable dusty picture-frames. In 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. Only 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. As 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.</p>
+<p>
+ It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on
+the other, making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar
+softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture
+of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved
+surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that
+recalled a rose or a sea anemone.</p>
+<p>
+ 'What is it?' said Winston, fascinated.</p>
+<p>
+ 'That's coral, that is,' said the old man. 'It must have
+come from the Indian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in
+the glass. That wasn't made less than a hundred years ago.
+More, by the look of it.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It is a beautiful thing,' said the other appreciatively.
+'But there's not many that'd say so nowadays.' He coughed.
+'Now, if it so happened that you wanted to buy it, that'd cost
+you four dollars. I 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. But who cares
+about genuine antiques nowadays even the few that's left?'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid
+the coveted thing into his pocket. What 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.
+The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any glass that he had
+ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its
+apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once
+have been intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in his
+pocket, but fortunately it did not make much of a bulge. It was
+a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to
+have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter
+anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. The old man had
+grown noticeably more cheerful after receiving the four
+dollars. Winston realized that he would have accepted three or
+even two.</p>
+<p>
+ 'There's another room upstairs that you might care to take
+a look at,' he said. 'There's not much in it. Just a few
+pieces. We'll do with a light if we're going upstairs.'</p>
+<p>
+ 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. Winston noticed
+that the furniture was still arranged as though the room were
+meant to be lived in. There 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. An old-fashioned glass clock with a
+twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the
+window, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an
+enormous bed with the mattress still on it.</p>
+<p>
+ 'We lived here till my wife died,' said the old man half
+apologetically. 'I'm selling the furniture off by little and
+little. Now that's a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it
+would be if you could get the bugs out of it. But I dare say
+you'd find it a little bit cumbersome.</p>
+<p>
+ He was holdlng the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the
+whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked
+curiously inviting. The 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. It 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. It 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'There's no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things.
+Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it,
+somehow. Now that's a nice gateleg table in the corner there.
+Though of course you'd have to put new hinges on it if you
+wanted to use the flaps.'</p>
+<p>
+ There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and
+Winston had already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing
+but rubbish. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been
+done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as
+everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed
+anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960.
+The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all
+-' he began delicately.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steel
+engraving of an oval building with rectangular windows, and a
+small tower in front. There was a railing running round the
+building, and at the rear end there was what appeared to be a
+statue. Winston gazed at it for some moments. It seemed vaguely
+familiar, though he did not remember the statue.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The frame's fixed to the wall,' said the old man, 'but I
+could unscrew it for you, I dare say.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I know that building,' said Winston finally. 'It's a ruin
+now. It's in the middle of the street outside the Palace of
+Justice.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'That's right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in --
+oh, many years ago. It was a church at one time, St Clement's
+Danes, its name was.' He smiled apologetically, as though
+conscious of saying something slightly ridiculous, and added:
+'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's!'</p>
+<p>
+ 'What's that?' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Oh-"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's."
+That was a rhyme we had when I was a little boy. How 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." It was a kind of a dance. They 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. It was just names of churches. All the London
+churches were in it -- all the principal ones, that is.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church
+belonged. It was always difficult to determine the age of a
+London building. Anything 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. The centuries of capitalism were held
+to have produced nothing of any value. One could not learn
+history from architecture any more than one could learn it from
+books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of
+streets -- anything that might throw light upon the past had
+been systematically altered.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I never knew it had been a church,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'There's a lot of them left, really,' said the old man,
+'though they've been put to other uses. Now, how did that rhyme
+go? Ah! I've got it!</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,<br>
+ You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's</p>
+<p>
+ -- "there, now, that's as far as I can get.
+ A farthing, that was a small copper coin,
+ looked something like a cent.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Where was St Martin's?' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'St Martin's ? That's still standing. It's in Victory
+Square, alongside the picture gallery. A building with a kind
+of a triangular porch and pillars in front, and a big flight of
+steps.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston knew the place well. It 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.</p>
+<p>
+ '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.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston did not buy the picture. It 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. But 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. Mr Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged
+sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years.
+Throughout that time he had been intending to alter the name
+over the window, but had never quite got to the point of doing
+it. All the while that they were talking the half-remembered
+rhyme kept running through Winston's head. Oranges and lemons
+say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say
+the bells of St Martin's! It 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. From one ghostly steeple after another
+he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could
+remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.</p>
+<p>
+ He 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. He had already made up
+his mind that after a suitable interval -- a month, say -- he
+would take the risk of visiting the shop again. It was perhaps
+not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Centre. The
+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. However-!</p>
+<p>
+ Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy
+further scraps of beautiful rubbish. He 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. He would drag
+the rest of that poem out of Mr Charrington's memory. Even the
+lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed
+momentarily through his mind again. For 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. He had even started humming to an improvised tune</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
+ You owe me three farthings, say the</p>
+<p>
+ Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels
+to water. A figure in blue overalls was coming down the
+pavement, not ten metres away. It was the girl from the Fiction
+Department, the girl with dark hair. The light was failing, but
+there was no difficulty in recognizing her. She looked him
+straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had
+not seen him.</p>
+<p>
+ For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move. Then
+he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing
+for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction. At any
+rate, one question was settled. There was no doubting any
+longer that the girl was spying on him. She 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. It was too great a coincidence.
+Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or
+simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly
+mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she
+had seen him go into the pub as well.</p>
+<p>
+ It was an effort to walk. The 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. The worst thing was the pain
+in his belly. For a couple of minutes he had the feeling that
+he would die if he did not reach a lavatory soon. But there
+would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this. Then the
+spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.</p>
+<p>
+ The street was a blind alley. Winston halted, stood for
+several seconds wondering vaguely what to do, then turned round
+and began to retrace his steps. As 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. He could keep on
+her track till they were in some quiet place, and then smash
+her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of glass in his
+pocket would be heavy enough for the job. But he abandoned the
+idea immediately, because even the thought of making any
+physical effort was unbearable. He could not run, he could not
+strike a blow. Besides, she was young and lusty and would
+defend herself. He 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. But that too was
+impossible. A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him. All he
+wanted was to get home quickly and then sit down and be quiet.</p>
+<p>
+ It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the
+flat. The lights would be switched off at the main at
+twenty-three thirty. He went into the kitchen and swallowed
+nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin. Then he went to the table in
+the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out of the drawer. But
+he did not open it at once. From the telescreen a brassy female
+voice was squalling a patriotic song. He sat staring at the
+marbled cover of the book, trying without success to shut the
+voice out of his consciousness.</p>
+<p>
+ It was at night that they came for you, always at night.
+The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you.
+Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were
+actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill
+yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain
+poison, were completely unprocurable. He 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.
+He 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. It struck him that in
+moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external
+enemy, but always against one's own body. Even now, in spite of
+the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought
+impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly
+heroic or tragic situations. On 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.</p>
+<p>
+ He opened the diary. It was important to write something
+down. The woman on the telescreen had started a new song. Her
+voice seemed to stick into his brain like jagged splinters of
+glass. He 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. It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be
+killed was what you expected. But before death (nobody spoke of
+such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine
+of confession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on
+the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones,
+the smashed teeth, and bloody clots of hair.</p>
+<p>
+ Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always
+the same? Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks
+out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody
+ever failed to confess. When once you had succumbed to
+thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be
+dead. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to
+lie embedded in future time?</p>
+<p>
+ He tried with a little more success than before to summon
+up the image of O'Brien. 'We shall meet in the place where
+there is no darkness,' O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it
+meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness
+was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which,
+by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. But with the
+voice from the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not
+follow the train of thought further. He put a cigarette in his
+mouth. Half the tobacco promptly fell out on to his tongue, a
+bitter dust which was difficult to spit out again. The face of
+Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that of O'Brien.
+Just as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of
+his pocket and looked at it. The face gazed up at him, heavy,
+calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the
+dark moustache? Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ WAR IS PEACE<br>
+ FREEDOM IS SLAVERY<br>
+ IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH</p>
+<H1><a name="9">IX</a></H1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the
+cubicle to go to the lavatory.</p>
+<p>
+ A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other
+end of the long, brightly-lit corridor. It was the girl with
+dark hair. Four days had gone past since the evening when he
+had run into her outside the junk-shop. As 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.
+Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of
+the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were
+'roughed in'. It was a common accident in the Fiction
+Department.</p>
+<p>
+ They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled
+and fell almost flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was wrung
+out of her. She must have fallen right on the injured arm.
+Winston stopped short. The girl had risen to her knees. Her
+face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her mouth
+stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an
+appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.</p>
+<p>
+ A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart. In 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. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her.
+In 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You're hurt?' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's nothing. My arm. It'll be all right in a second.'</p>
+<p>
+ She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had
+certainly turned very pale.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You haven't broken anything?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No, I'm all right. It hurt for a moment, that's all.'</p>
+<p>
+ She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up.
+She had regained some of her colour, and appeared very much
+better.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly. 'I only gave my
+wrist a bit of a bang. Thanks, comrade!'</p>
+<p>
+ And with that she walked on in the direction in which she
+had been going, as briskly as though it had really been
+nothing. The whole incident could not have taken as much as
+half a minute. Not 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. Nevertheless 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. There was no question that she
+had done it intentionally. It was something small and flat. As
+he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his
+pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap
+of paper folded into a square.</p>
+<p>
+ While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little
+more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a
+message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted
+to take it into one of the water-closets and read it at once.
+But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no
+place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were
+watched continuously.</p>
+<p>
+ He 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. 'five
+minutes,' he told himself, 'five minutes at the very least!'
+His heart bumped in his breast with frightening loudness.
+Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was mere
+routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not
+needing close attention.</p>
+<p>
+ Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind
+of political meaning. So far as he could see there were two
+possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was
+an agent of the Thought Police, just as he had feared. He did
+not know why the Thought Police should choose to deliver their
+messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons.
+The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a
+summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some
+description. But there was another, wilder possibility that
+kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it.
+This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police
+at all, but from some kind of underground organization. Perhaps
+the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the girl was part of
+it! No 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. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other,
+more probable explanation had occurred to him. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into
+the pneumatic tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He 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. He
+flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed
+handwriting:</p>
+<p>
+ I love you.</p>
+<p>
+ For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the
+incriminating thing into the memory hole. When 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.</p>
+<p>
+ For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work.
+What 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. He felt as though a fire were burning in his belly.
+Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise-filled canteen was torment.
+He 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. He was particularly enthusiastic
+about a papier-mâché model of Big Brother's head, two metres
+wide, which was being made for the occasion by his daughter's
+troop of Spies. The 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. Just once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table
+with two other girls at the far end of the room. She appeared
+not to have seen him, and he did not look in that direction
+again.</p>
+<p>
+ The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch
+there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would
+take several hours and necessitated putting everything else
+aside. It 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. This 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. Then the memory of her face came back,
+and with it a raging, intolerable desire to be alone. Until he
+could be alone it was impossible to think this new development
+out. Tonight was one of his nights at the Community Centre. He
+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'. His soul writhed with
+boredom, but for once he had had no impulse to shirk his
+evening at the Centre. At 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. It 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.</p>
+<p>
+ It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to
+get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting. He did not
+consider any longer the possibility that she might be laying
+some kind of trap for him. He knew that it was not so, because
+of her unmistakable agitation when she handed him the note.
+Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, as well she
+might be. Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross
+his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her
+skull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance. He
+thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his
+dream. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them,
+her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A
+kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her,
+the white youthful body might slip away from him! What he
+feared more than anything else was that she would simply change
+her mind if he did not get in touch with her quickly. But the
+physical difficulty of meeting was enormous. It was like trying
+to make a move at chess when you were already mated. Whichever
+way you turned, the telescreen faced you. Actually, 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this
+morning could not be repeated. If 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
+Departrnent lay, and he had no pretext for going there. If 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. As for sending a letter through the mails, it was out
+of the question. By a routine that was not even secret, all
+letters were opened in transit. Actually, few people ever wrote
+letters. For 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. In any case
+he did not know the girl's name, let alone her address. Finally
+he decided that the safest place was the canteen. If 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.</p>
+<p>
+ For a week after this, life was like a restless dream. On
+the next day she did not appear in the canteen until he was
+leaving it, the whistle having already blown. Presumably she
+had been changed on to a later shift. They passed each other
+without a glance. On the day after that she was in the canteen
+at the usual time, but with three other girls and immediately
+under a telescreen. Then for three dreadful days she did not
+appear at all. His 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. Even in sleep he
+could not altogether escape from her image. He did not touch
+the diary during those days. If there was any relief, it was in
+his work, in which he could sometimes forget himself for ten
+minutes at a stretch. He had absolutely no clue as to what had
+happened to her. There was no enquiry he could make. She 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The next day she reappeared. Her arm was out of the sling
+and she had a band of sticking-plaster round her wrist. The
+relief of seeing her was so great that he could not resist
+staring directly at her for several seconds. On the following
+day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her. When he came
+into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the
+wall, and was quite alone. It was early, and the place was not
+very full. The 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. But the girl was still alone when Winston secured
+his tray and began to make for her table. He walked casually
+towards her, his eyes searching for a place at some table
+beyond her. She was perhaps three metres away from him. Another
+two seconds would do it. Then a voice behind him called,
+'Smith!' He pretended not to hear. 'Smith!' repeated the
+voice, more loudly. It was no use. He turned round. A
+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. It was not safe to refuse. After having been
+recognized, he could not go and sit at a table with an
+unattended girl. It was too noticeable. He sat down with a
+friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston
+had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into
+the middle of it. The girl's table filled up a few minutes
+later.</p>
+<p>
+ But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps
+she would take the hint. Next day he took care to arrive early.
+Surely enough, she was at a table in about the same place, and
+again alone. The person immediately ahead of him in the queue
+was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like man with a flat face
+and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winston turned away from the
+counter with his tray, he saw that the little man was making
+straight for the girl's table. His hopes sank again. There 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. With
+ice at his heart Winston followed. It was no use unless he
+could get the girl alone. At this moment there was a tremendous
+crash. The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had
+gone flying, two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across
+the floor. He started to his feet with a malignant glance at
+Winston, whom he evidently suspected of having tripped him up.
+But it was all right. Five seconds later, with a thundering
+heart, Winston was sitting at the girl's table.</p>
+<p>
+ He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and promptly
+began eating. It was all-important to speak at once, before
+anyone else came, but now a terrible fear had taken possession
+of him. A week had gone by since she had first approached him.
+She would have changed her mind, she must have changed her
+mind! It was impossible that this affair should end
+successfully; such things did not happen in real life. He 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. In
+his vague way Ampleforth was attached to Winston, and would
+certainly sit down at his table if he caught sight of him.
+There was perhaps a minute in which to act. Both Winston and
+the girl were eating steadily. The stuff they were eating was a
+thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans. In a low murmur
+Winston began speaking. Neither 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'What time do you leave work?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Eighteen-thirty.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Where can we meet?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Victory Square, near the monument.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's full of telescreens.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It doesn't matter if there's a crowd.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Any signal?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No. Don't come up to me until you see me among a lot of
+people. And don't look at me. Just keep somewhere near me.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'What time?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Nineteen hours.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'All right.'</p>
+<p>
+ Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another
+table. They 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. The girl finished her lunch
+quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to smoke a
+cigarette.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time.
+He 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. In the street in front of it there was
+a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent
+Oliver Cromwell. At five minutes past the hour the girl had
+still not appeared. Again the terrible fear seized upon
+Winston. She was not coming, she had changed her mind! He
+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.' 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. It was not safe to go near her until
+some more people had accumulated. There were telescreens all
+round the pediment. But at this moment there was a din of
+shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the
+left. Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square.
+The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the
+monument and joined in the rush. Winston followed. As he ran,
+he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian
+prisoners was passing.</p>
+<p>
+ Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side
+of the square. Winston, 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.
+Soon 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. Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a
+violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them. For 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. He was next to the girl. They were shoulder
+to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them.</p>
+<p>
+ A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with
+sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing
+slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in
+shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together.
+Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the
+trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted
+there was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing
+leg-irons. Truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces passed.
+Winston knew they were there but he saw them only
+intermittently. The girl's shoulder, and her arm right down to
+the elbow, were pressed against his. Her cheek was almost near
+enough for him to feel its warmth. She had immediately taken
+charge of the situation, just as she had done in the canteen.
+She 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Can you hear me?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Can you get Sunday afternoon off?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Then listen carefully. You'll have to remember this. Go
+to Paddington Station-'</p>
+<p>
+ With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she
+outlined the route that he was to follow. A 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. It was as though she had a map inside her
+head. 'Can you remember all that?' she murmured finally.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You turn left, then right, then left again. And the
+gate's got no top bar.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes. What time?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'About fifteen. You may have to wait. I'll get there by
+another way. Are you sure you remember everything?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Then get away from me as quick as you can.'</p>
+<p>
+ She need not have told him that. But for the moment they
+could not extricate themselves from the crowd. The trucks were
+still filing post, the people still insatiably gaping. At 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.
+The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners,
+whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange
+animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of
+prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a
+momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of
+them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: te
+others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps.
+The round Mogol faces had given way to faces of a more European
+type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby
+cheekbones eyes looked into Winston's, sometimes with strange
+intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an
+end. In 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. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part.
+But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in,
+her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.</p>
+<p>
+ It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a
+long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time
+to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long
+fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row
+of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from
+feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the same instant
+it occurred to him that he did not know what colour the girl's
+eyes were. They were probably brown, but people with dark hair
+sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her would
+have been inconceivable folly. With 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.</p>
+<h1><a name="10">X</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled light
+and shade, stepping out into pools of gold wherever the boughs
+parted. Under the trees to the left of him the ground was misty
+with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss one's skin. It was the
+second of May. From somewhere deeper in the heart of the wood
+came the droning of ring doves.</p>
+<p>
+ He was a bit early. There 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.
+Presumably she could be trusted to find a safe place. In
+general you could not assume that you were much safer in the
+country than in London. There 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. For 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. However, 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. The train was full of
+proles, in holiday mood because of the summery weather. The
+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
+blackmarket butter.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. He had no watch, but it could not be fifteen yet.
+The bluebells were so thick underfoot that it was impossible
+not to tread on them. He 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. He 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. He went on picking
+bluebells. It was the best thing to do. It might be the girl,
+or he might have been followed after all. To look round was to
+show guilt. He picked another and another. A hand fell lightly
+on his shoulder.</p>
+<p>
+ He looked up. It was the girl. She 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. Obviously she had been that way before, for she
+dodged the boggy bits as though by habit. Winston followed,
+still clasping his bunch of flowers. His 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. Even now it seemed quite likely
+that when she turned round and looked at him she would draw
+back after all. The sweetness of the air and the greenness of
+the leaves daunted him. Already 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. It occurred to him that till now she had probably
+never seen him in broad daylight in the open. They came to the
+fallen tree that she had spoken of. The girl hopped over and
+forced apart the bushes, in which there did not seem to be an
+opening. When 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. The girl stopped and
+turned.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Here we are,' she said.</p>
+<p>
+ He was facing her at several paces' distance. As yet he
+did not dare move nearer to her.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I didn't want to say anything in the lane,' she went on,
+'in case there's a mike hidden there. I don't suppose there is,
+but there could be. There's always the chance of one of those
+swine recognizing your voice. We're all right here.'</p>
+<p>
+ He still had not the courage to approach her. 'We're all
+right here?' he repeated stupidly.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes. Look at the trees.' 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.
+'There's nothing big enough to hide a mike in. Besides, I've
+been here before.'</p>
+<p>
+ They were only making conversation. He had managed to move
+closer to her now. She 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. The bluebells had
+cascaded on to the ground. They seemed to have fallen of their
+own accord. He took her hand.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Would you believe,' he said, 'that till this moment I
+didn't know what colour your eyes were?' They were brown, he
+noted, a rather light shade of brown, with dark lashes. 'Now
+that you've seen what I'm really like, can you still bear to
+look at me?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, easily.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that I can't
+get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false
+teeth.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I couldn't care less,' said the girl.</p>
+<p>
+ The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was
+in his his arms. At the beginning he had no feeling except
+sheer incredulity. The youthful body was strained against his
+own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes!
+actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide
+red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was
+calling him darling, precious one, loved one. He had pulled her
+down on to the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do
+what he liked with her. But the truth was that he had no
+physical sensation, except that of mere contact. All he felt
+was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening,
+but he had no physical desire. It 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. The girl picked
+herself up and pulled a bluebell out of her hair. She sat
+against him, putting her arm round his waist.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Never mind, dear. There's no hurry. We've got the whole
+afternoon. Isn't this a splendid hide-out? I found it when I
+got lost once on a community hike. If anyone was coming you
+could hear them a hundred metres away.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'What is your name?' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Julia. I know yours. It's Winston -- Winston Smith.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'How did you find that out?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I expect I'm better at finding things out than you are,
+dear. Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave
+you the note?'</p>
+<p>
+ He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was
+even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I hated the sight of you,' he said. 'I wanted to rape you
+and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought
+seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you
+really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do
+with the Thought Police.'</p>
+<p>
+ The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a
+tribute to the excellence of her disguise.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Not the Thought Police! You didn't honestly think that?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Well, perhaps not exactly that. But from your general
+appearance -- merely because you're young and fresh and
+healthy, you understand -- I thought that probably-'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You thought I was a good Party member. Pure in word and
+deed. Banners, processions, slogans, games, community hikes all
+that stuff. And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance
+I'd denounce you as a thought-criminal and get you killed off?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, something of that kind. A great many young girls are
+like that, you know.'</p>
+<p>
+ '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. Then, 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. She broke it
+in half and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even before he
+had taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual
+chocolate. It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver
+paper. Chocolate normally was dull-brown crumbly stuff that
+tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a
+rubbish fire. But at some time or another he had tasted
+chocolate like the piece she had given him. The first whiff of
+its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin
+down, but which was powerful and troubling.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Where did you get this stuff?' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Black market,' she said indifferently. 'Actually I am
+that sort of girl, to look at. I'm good at games. I was a
+troop-leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a
+week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I've spent
+pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one
+end of a banner in the processions. I always Iook cheerful and
+I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what
+I say. It's the only way to be safe.'</p>
+<p>
+ The first fragment of chocolate had melted on Winston's
+tongue. The taste was delightful. But 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. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are very young,' he said. 'You are ten or fifteen
+years younger than I am. What could you see to attract you in a
+man like me?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It was something in your face. I thought I'd take a
+chance. I'm good at spotting people who don't belong. As soon
+as I saw you I knew you were against them.'</p>
+<p>
+ 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. A thing
+that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her
+language. Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston
+himself very seldom did swear, aloud, at any rate. Julia,
+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. He did not dislike it. It
+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. They 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. He noticed how much softer her
+waist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone. They did not
+speak above a whisper. Outside the clearing, Julia said, it was
+better to go quietly. Presently they had reached the edge of
+the little wood. She stopped him.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Don't go out into the open. There might be someone
+watching. We're all right if we keep behind the boughs.'</p>
+<p>
+ They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes. The
+sunlight, filtering through innumerable leaves, was still hot
+on their faces. Winston looked out into the field beyond, and
+underwent a curious, slow shock of recognition. He knew it by
+sight. An old, closebitten pasture, with a footpath wandering
+across it and a molehill here and there. In 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. Surely somewhere nearby, but
+out of sight, there must be a stream with green pools where
+dace were swimming?</p>
+<p>
+ 'Isn't there a stream somewhere near here?' he whispered.</p>
+<p>
+ 'That's right, there is a stream. It's at the edge of the
+next field, actually. There are fish in it, great big ones. You
+can watch them lying in the pools under the willow trees,
+waving their tails.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's the Golden Country -- almost,' he murmured.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The Golden Country?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's nothing, really. A landscape I've seen sometimes in
+a dream.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Look!' whispered Julia.</p>
+<p>
+ A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away,
+almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen
+them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It 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. In the
+afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and
+Julia clung together, fascinated. The 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. Sometimes it stopped for a few
+seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its
+speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it
+with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that
+bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it
+sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into
+nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a
+microphone hidden somewhere near. He 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. Perhaps at the other end of
+the instrument some small, beetle-like man was listening
+intently -- listening to that. But by degrees the flood
+of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It 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. He stopped thinking and merely felt. The girl's waist
+in the bend of his arm was soft and warm. He pulled her round
+so that they were breast to breast; her body seemed to melt
+into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as
+water. Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from
+the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved
+their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply. The bird
+took fright and fled with a clatter of wings.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston put his lips against her ear. 'Now,' he
+whispered.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Not here,' she whispered back. 'Come back to the hide-
+out. It's safer.'</p>
+<p>
+ Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they
+threaded their way back to the clearing. When they were once
+inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him. They were
+both breathing fast. but the smile had reappeared round the
+corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant,
+then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was
+almost as in his dream. Almost 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. Her body gleamed white
+in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his
+eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold
+smile. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his</p>
+<p>
+ 'Have you done this before?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Of course. Hundreds of times -- well scores of times
+anyway
+ 'With Party members.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, always with Party members.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'With members of the Inner Party?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Not with those swine, no. But there's plenty that
+would if they got half a chance. They're not so holy as
+they make out.'</p>
+<p>
+ His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he
+wished it had been hundreds -- thousands. Anything that hinted
+at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew,
+perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of
+strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.
+If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or
+syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to
+weaken, to undermine! He pulled her down so that they were
+kneeling face to face.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Listen. The more men you've had, the more I love you. Do
+you understand that?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, perfectly.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue
+to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I'm corrupt to the
+bones.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You like doing this? I don't mean simply me: I mean the
+thing in itself?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I adore it.'</p>
+<p>
+ That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not 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. He pressed her down upon the grass, among the
+fallen bluebells. This time there was no difficulty. Presently
+the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed,
+and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The sun
+seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reached
+out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her.
+Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an
+hour.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled
+face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her
+hand. Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful.
+There was a line or two round the eyes, if you looked closely.
+The short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and soft. It
+occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where
+she lived.</p>
+<p>
+ The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in
+him a pitying, protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness
+that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was
+singing, had not quite come back. He pulled the overalls aside
+and studied her smooth white flank. In 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. But you could not
+have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure,
+because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their
+embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow
+struck against the Party. It was a political act.</p>
+<h1><a name="11">XI</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ 'We can come here once again,' said Julia. 'It's generally
+safe to use any hide-out twice. But not for another month or
+two, of course.'</p>
+<p>
+ As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed. She
+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. It seemed natural to leave this to her.
+She 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. The route she gave him was quite different
+from the one by which he had come, and brought him out at a
+different railway station. 'Never go home the same way as you
+went out,' she said, as though enunciating an important general
+principle. She would leave first, and Winston was to wait half
+an hour before following her.</p>
+<p>
+ She had named a place where they could meet after work,
+four evenings hence. It was a street in one of the poorer
+quarters, where there was an open market which was generally
+crowded and noisy. She would be hanging about among the stalls,
+pretending to be in search of shoelaces or sewing-thread. If
+she judged that the coast was clear she would blow her nose
+when he approached; otherwise he was to walk past her without
+recognition. But with luck, in the middle of the crowd, it
+would be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange
+another meeting.</p>
+<p>
+ 'And now I must go,' she said as soon as he had mastered
+his instructions. 'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty. I've got to
+put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out
+leaflets, or something. Isn't it bloody? Give me a brush-down,
+would you? Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then
+good-bye, my love, good-bye!'</p>
+<p>
+ 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.
+Even now he had not found out her surname or her address.
+However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that
+they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written
+communication.</p>
+<p>
+ As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in
+the wood. During the month of May there was only one further
+occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love. That
+was in another hidlng-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. It was a good
+hiding-place when once you got there, but the getting there was
+very dangerous. For 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. In the street it was usually
+possible to talk, after a fashion. As 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. Julia appeared to be quite
+used to this kind of conversation, which she called 'talking by
+instalments'. She was also surprisingly adept at speaking
+without moving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly
+meetings they managed to exchange a kiss. They 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. A rocket bomb
+must have dropped quite near at hand. Suddenly he became aware
+of Julia's face a few centimetres from his own, deathly white,
+as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! He
+clasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live
+warm face. But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way
+of his lips. Both of their faces were thickly coated with
+plaster.</p>
+<p>
+ There 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. Even if it had been less dangerous, it would
+still have been difficult to find time to meet. Winston'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. Julia, in any case, seldom had an
+evening completely free. She 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. It paid, she said, it was camouflage. If
+you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She
+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. So, 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.</p>
+<p>
+ When they met in the church tower the gaps in their
+fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was a blazing
+afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the bells
+was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung.
+They 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with
+thirty other girls ('Always in the stink of women! How I hate
+women!' she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had
+guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction
+Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in
+running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She
+was 'not clever', but was fond of using her hands and felt at
+home with machinery. She 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. But she was not interested in the finished product. She
+'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a
+commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.</p>
+<p>
+ She 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. At school she had been captain
+of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years
+running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch
+secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior
+Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character.
+She 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. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who
+worked in it, she remarked. There 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only
+have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was
+only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad.
+I'm not literary, dear -- not even enough for that.'</p>
+<p>
+ He learned with astonishment that all the workers in
+Pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were girls. The
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'They don't even like having married women there,' she
+added. Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who
+isn't, anyway.</p>
+<p>
+ She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen,
+with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to
+avoid arrest. 'And a good job too,' said Julia, 'otherwise
+they'd have had my name out of him when he confessed.' Since
+then there had been various others. Life as she saw it was
+quite simple. You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the
+Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as
+best you couId. She 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. She hated the Party, and
+said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism
+of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no
+interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used
+Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday
+use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to
+believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against
+the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as
+stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive
+all the same. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ They did not discuss the possibility of getting married.
+It was too remote to be worth thinking about. No imaginable
+committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if
+Katharine, Winston's wife, could somehow have been got rid of.
+It was hopeless even as a daydream.</p>
+<p>
+ 'What was she like, your wife?' said Julia.</p>
+<p>
+ 'She was -- do you know the Newspeak word
+goodthinkful? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of
+thinking a bad thought?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of
+person, right enough.'</p>
+<p>
+ He began telling her the story of his married life, but
+curiously enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it
+already. She 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. With 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,'
+he said. He toId her about the frigid little ceremony that
+Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every
+week. 'She hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it.
+She used to call it -- but you'll never guess.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.</p>
+<p>
+ 'How did you know that?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I've been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for
+the over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into
+you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of
+course you can never tell; people are such hypocrites.'</p>
+<p>
+ She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia,
+everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was
+touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness.
+Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the
+Party's sexual puritanism. It 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. What was more important was that sexual privation
+induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be
+transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put
+it was:</p>
+<p>
+ 'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards
+you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't
+bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with
+energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering
+and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If 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?'</p>
+<p>
+ That was very true, he thought. There was a direct
+intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy.
+For 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? The sex impulse was dangerous to the
+Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played
+a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family
+could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were
+encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the
+old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were
+systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy
+on them and report their deviations. The family had become in
+effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by
+means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by
+informers who knew him intimately.</p>
+<p>
+ Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine 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. But 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. He began telling Julia
+of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen,
+on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.</p>
+<p>
+ It was three or four months after they were married. They
+had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They
+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. It was a
+sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the
+bottom. There was nobody of whom they could ask the way. As
+soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very
+uneasy. To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a
+moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing. She wanted to hurry
+back by the way they had come and start searching in the other
+direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of
+loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them.
+One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently
+growing on the same root. He had never seen anything of the
+kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and look at it.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Look, Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump down
+near the bottom. Do you see they're two different colours?'</p>
+<p>
+ She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully
+come back for a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face
+to see where he was pointing. He was standing a little behind
+her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this
+moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they
+were. There was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf
+stirring, not even a bird awake. In 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. It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon. The
+sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face. And the
+thought struck him ...</p>
+<p>
+ 'Why didn't you give her a good shove?' said Julia. 'I
+would have.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I'd been the same
+person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would -- I'm not
+certain.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Are you sorry you didn't?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes. On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.'</p>
+<p>
+ They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He
+pulled her closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder,
+the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. She
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Actually it would have made no difference,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this
+game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure
+are better than other kinds, that's all.'</p>
+<p>
+ He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She
+always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She
+would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is
+always defeated. In 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. All you needed was luck and
+cunning and boldness. She 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'We are the dead,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Not physically. Six months, a year -- five years,
+conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably
+you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it
+off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So
+long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same
+thing.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a
+skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling:
+This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm
+solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?'</p>
+<p>
+ She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against
+him. He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her
+overalls. Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and
+vigour into his.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, I like that,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear,
+we've got to fix up about the next time we meet. We may as well
+go back to the place in the wood. We've given it a good long
+rest. But you must get there by a different way this time. I've
+got it all planned out. You take the train -- but look, I'll
+draw it out for you.'</p>
+<p>
+ 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.</p>
+<h1><a name="12">XII</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr
+Charrington's shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made
+up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The
+old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away
+on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the
+glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed
+softly out of the half-darkness.</p>
+<p>
+ In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and
+two cups, provided by Mr Charrington. Winston lit the burner
+and set a pan of water to boil. He had brought an envelope full
+of Victory Coffee and some saccharine tablets. The clock's
+hands said seventeen-twenty: it was nineteen-twenty really.
+She was coming at nineteen-thirty.</p>
+<p>
+ Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious,
+gratuitous, suicidal folly. Of all the crimes that a Party
+member could commit, this one was the least possible to
+conceal. Actually 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. As he had foreseen, Mr
+Charrington had made no difficulty about letting the room. He
+was obviously glad of the few dollars that it would bring him.
+Nor 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. Instead 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. Privacy, he
+said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where
+they could be alone occasionally. And when they had such a
+place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of
+it to keep his knowledge to himself. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out,
+secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The 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. Whenever her mouth was not
+corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful
+contralto:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ It was only an 'opeless fancy.<br>
+ It passed like an Ipril dye,<br>
+ But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!<br>
+ They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!</p>
+<p>
+
+ The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was
+one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the
+proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of
+these songs were composed without any human intervention
+whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the
+woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an
+almost pleasant sound. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Folly, folly, folly! he thought again. It was
+inconceivable that they could frequent this place for more than
+a few weeks without being caught. But 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. For some time after
+their visit to the church belfry it had been impossible to
+arrange meetings. Working hours had been drastically increased
+in anticipation of Hate Week. It was more than a month distant,
+but the enormous, complex preparations that it entailed were
+throwing extra work on to everybody. Finally both of them
+managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day. They had
+agreed to go back to the clearing in the wood. On the evening
+beforehand they met briefly in the street. As 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's all off,' she murmured as soon as she judged it safe
+to speak. 'Tomorrow, I mean.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'What?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Tomorrow afternoon. I can't come.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Why not?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Oh, the usual reason. It's started early this time.'</p>
+<p>
+ For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that
+he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed.
+At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it.
+Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will. But
+after the second time it was different. The 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. She had become a
+physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt
+that he had a right to. When she said that she could not come,
+he had the feeling that she was cheating him. But just at this
+moment the crowd pressed them together and their hands
+accidentally met. She gave the tips of his fingers a quick
+squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection. It
+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. He wished that they were a married couple of
+ten years' standing. He 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. He 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. It 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. When he suggested it to Julia she had agreed with
+unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that it was lunacy. It
+was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their
+graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought
+again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It was curious
+how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's
+consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding
+death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One 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.</p>
+<p>
+ At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia
+burst into the room. She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse
+brown canvas, such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and
+fro at the Ministry. He started forward to take her in his
+arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly
+because she was still holding the tool-bag.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Half a second,' she said. 'Just let me show you what I've
+brought. Did you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee? I
+thought you would. You can chuck it away again, because we
+shan't be needing it. Look here.'</p>
+<p>
+ She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out
+some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it.
+Underneath were a number of neat paper packets. The first
+packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely
+
+
+familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of heavy,
+sand-like stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It isn't sugar?' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here's a loaf of
+bread proper white bread, not our bloody stuff -- and a little
+pot of jam. And here's a tin of milk -- but look! This is the
+one I'm really proud of. I had to wrap a bit of sacking round
+it, because-'</p>
+<p>
+ But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it
+up. The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's coffee,' he murmured, 'real coffee.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's Inner Party coffee. There's a whole kilo here, she
+said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'How did you manage to get hold of all these things?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's all Inner Party stuff. There's nothing those swine
+don't have, nothing. But of course waiters and servants and
+people pinch things, and -- look, I got a little packet of tea
+as well.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a
+corner of the packet.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's real tea. Not blackberry leaves.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'There's been a lot of tea about lately. They've captured
+India, or something,' she said vaguely. 'But listen, dear. I
+want you to turn your back on me for three minutes. Go and sit
+on the other side of the bed. Don't go too near the window. And
+don't turn round till I tell you.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain.
+Down in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and
+fro between the washtub and the line. She took two more pegs
+out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ They sye that time 'eals all things,<br>
+ They sye you can always forget;<br>
+ But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years<br>
+ They twist my 'eart-strings yet!</p>
+<p>
+
+ She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed.
+Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very
+tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One 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. It struck him as a curious
+fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing
+alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly
+unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself.
+Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the
+starvation level that they had anything to sing about.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You can turn round now,' said Julia.</p>
+<p>
+ He turned round, and for a second almost failed to
+recognize her. What he had actually expected was to see her
+naked. But she was not naked. The transformation that had
+happened was much more surprising than that. She had painted
+her face.</p>
+<p>
+ She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian
+quarters and bought herself a complete set of make-up
+materials. Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged,
+her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under
+the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done,
+but Winston's standards in such matters were not high. He had
+never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with
+cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was
+startling. With just a few dabs of colour in the right places
+she had become not only very much prettier, but, above all, far
+more feminine. Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added
+to the effect. As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic
+violets flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half-darkness
+of a basement kitchen, and a woman's cavernous mouth. It was
+the very same scent that she had used; but at the moment it did
+not seem to matter.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Scent too!' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, dear, scent too. And do you know what I'm going to
+do next? I'm going to get hold of a real woman's frock from
+somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers. I'll
+wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I'm
+going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.'</p>
+<p>
+ They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge
+mahogany bed. It was the first time that he had stripped
+himself naked in her presence. Until 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. There 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. 'It's sure to be full of bugs, but who
+cares?' said Julia. One never saw a double bed nowadays, except
+in the homes of the proles. Winston had occasionally slept in
+one in his boyhood: Julia had never been in one before, so far
+as she could remember.</p>
+<p>
+ Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When
+Winston woke up the hands of the clock had crept round to
+nearly nine. He did not stir, because Julia was sleeping with
+her head in the crook of his arm. Most 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. A
+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. Down in the yard the woman had stopped singing,
+but the faint shouts of children floated in from the street. He
+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. Surely there could never have been a
+time when that seemed ordinary? Julia woke up, rubbed her eyes,
+and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Half that water's boiled away,' she said. 'I'll get up
+and make some coffee in another moment. We've got an hour. What
+time do they cut the lights off at your flats?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Twenty-three thirty.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in
+earlier than that, because -- Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!'</p>
+<p>
+ 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'What was it?' he said in surprise.</p>
+<p>
+ 'A rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the
+wainscoting. There's a hole down there. I gave him a good
+fright, anyway.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Rats!' murmured Winston. 'In this room!'</p>
+<p>
+ 'They're all over the place,' said Julia indifferently as
+she lay down again. 'We've even got them in the kitchen at the
+hostel. Some parts of London are swarming with them. Did you
+know they attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these
+streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes.
+It's the great huge brown ones that do it. And the nasty thing
+is that the brutes always-'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Don't go on!' said Winston, with his eyes tightly
+shut.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Dearest! You've gone quite pale. What's the matter? Do
+they make you feel sick?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Of all horrors in the world -- a rat!'</p>
+<p>
+ She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round
+him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He
+did not reopen his eyes immediately. For several moments he had
+had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred
+from time to time throughout his life. It was always very much
+the same. He 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. In the dream his deepest
+feeling was always one of self-deception, because he did in
+fact know what was behind the wall of darkness. With a deadly
+effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could
+even have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke up
+without discovering what it was: but somehow it was connected
+with what Julia had been saying when he cut her short.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'it's nothing. I don't like rats,
+that's all.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Don't worry, dear, we're not going to have the filthy
+brutes in here. I'll stuff the hole with a bit of sacking
+before we go. And next time we come here I'll bring some
+plaster and bung it up properly.'</p>
+<p>
+ Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten.
+Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the
+bedhead. Julia got out of bed, pulled on her overalls, and made
+the coffee. The 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. What 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. With 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. She brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to
+have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her
+hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance
+of the glass.</p>
+<p>
+ 'What is it, do you think?' said Julia.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I don't think it's anything-I mean, I don't think it was
+ever put to any use. That's what I like about it. It's a little
+chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter. It's a
+message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'And that picture over there' -- she nodded at the
+engraving on the opposite wall-'would that be a hundred years
+old?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's
+impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.'</p>
+<p>
+ She went over to look at it. 'Here's where that brute
+stuck his nose out,' she said, kicking the wainscoting
+immediately below the picture. 'What is this place? I've seen
+it before somewhere.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It's a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement's
+Danes its name was.' 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!"</p>
+<p>
+ To his astonishment she capped the line:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ 'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,<br>
+ When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey -- '</p>
+<p>
+
+ 'I can't remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I
+remember it ends up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
+here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"</p>
+<p>
+ It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there
+must be another line after 'the bells of Old Bailey'. Perhaps
+it could be dug out of Mr Charrington's memory, if he were
+suitably prompted.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Who taught you that?' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a
+little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight -- at any rate,
+he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,' she added
+inconsequently. 'I've seen oranges. They're a kind of round
+yellow fruit with a thick skin.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I can remember lemons,' said Winston. 'They were quite
+common in the fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth
+on edge even to smell them.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I bet that picture's got bugs behind it,' said Julia.
+'I'll take it down and give it a good clean some day. I suppose
+it's almost time we were leaving. I must start washing this
+paint off. What a bore! I'll get the lipstick off your face
+afterwards.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room
+was darkening. He turned over towards the light and lay gazing
+into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing
+was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass
+itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as
+transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass
+had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its
+atmosphere complete. He 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. The 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.</p>
+<h1><a name="13">XIII</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from
+work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the
+next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went
+into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the
+notice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the
+members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It
+looked almost exactly as it had looked before -- nothing had
+been crossed out -- but it was one name shorter. It was enough.
+Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.</p>
+<p>
+ The weather was baking hot. In 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. The
+preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs
+of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions,
+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. Julia's unit in
+the Fiction Department had been taken off the production of
+novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets.
+Winston, 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. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles roamed the
+streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. It had a
+savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music,
+but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by hundreds of
+voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The
+proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it
+competed with the still-popular 'It was only a hopeless
+fancy'. The Parsons children played it at all hours of the
+night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet
+paper. Winston's evenings were fuller than ever. Squads 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. Parsons boasted that
+Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred metres of
+bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark.
+The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for
+reverting to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It 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. From whatever angle you
+looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the
+foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing
+had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even
+outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally
+apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their
+periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with
+the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger
+numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film
+theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the
+ruins. The whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for
+a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in
+effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece of
+waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen
+children were blown to pieces. There 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.</p>
+<p>
+ In 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. The rat
+had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in
+the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the room
+was paradise. As 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Four, five, six -- seven times they met during the month
+of June. Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all
+hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He 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. The 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. Now 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. What mattered was that the room
+over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there,
+inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a
+world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.
+Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He
+usually stopped to talk with Mr Charrington for a few minutes
+on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom or never to go
+out of doors, and on the other hand to have almost no
+customers. He 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. He seemed glad of the
+opportunity to talk. Wandering 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. With 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. To talk to him was like listening to the
+tinkling of a worn-out musical-box. He had dragged out from the
+corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes.
+There 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. 'It just occurred to me you might be
+interested,' he would say with a deprecating little laugh
+whenever he produced a new fragment. But he could never recall
+more than a few lines of any one rhyme.</p>
+<p>
+ Both of them knew-in a way, it was never out of their
+minds that what was now happening could not last long. There
+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. But there were also times when they had
+the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as
+they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could
+come to them. Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but
+the room itself was sanctuary. It 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. Often they gave
+themselves up to daydreams of escape. Their luck would hold
+indefinitely, and they would carry on their intrigue, just like
+this, for the remainder of their natural lives. Or Katharine
+would die, and by subtle manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would
+succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide
+together. Or 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. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality
+there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable,
+suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active
+rebellion against the Party, but with no notion of how to take
+the first step. Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a reality,
+there still remained the difficulty of finding one's way into
+it. He 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. Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an
+impossibly rash thing to do. She 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. Moreover 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. But she
+refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition
+existed or could exist. The 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. Times 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. When 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!' During the Two Minutes Hate she always
+excelled all others in shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she
+had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what
+doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since
+the Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological
+battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an
+independent political movement was outside her imagination: and
+in any case the Party was invincible. It would always exist,
+and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against
+it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of
+violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.</p>
+<p>
+ In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far
+less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once 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. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were
+probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to
+keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally
+never occurred to him. She 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. But she only
+questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way
+touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the
+official mythology, simply because the difference between truth
+and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for
+instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had
+invented aeroplanes. (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.) 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. After all, what
+did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It 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. It 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. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she
+said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The 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. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of
+an hour. In 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. But the issue still struck her as
+unimportant. 'Who cares?' she said impatiently. 'It's always
+one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all
+lies anyway.</p>
+<p>
+ Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and
+the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such things did
+not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening
+beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths. He
+told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and the
+momentous slip of paper which he had once held between his
+fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first,
+indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Were they friends of yours?' she said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members.
+Besides, they were far older men than I was. They belonged to
+the old days, before the Revolution. I barely knew them by
+sight.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Then what was there to worry about? People are being
+killed off all the time, aren't they?'</p>
+<p>
+ He tried to make her understand. 'This was an exceptional
+case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do
+you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been
+actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few
+solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of
+glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the
+Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every 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. And
+that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
+History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present
+in which the Party is always right. I 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. After
+the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence
+is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that
+any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one
+instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete
+evidence after the event -- years after it.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'And what good was that?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes
+later. But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Well, I wouldn't!' said Julia. 'I'm quite ready to take
+risks, but only for something worth while, not for bits of old
+newspaper. What could you have done with it even if you had
+kept it?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have
+planted a few doubts here and there, supposing that I'd dared
+to show it to anybody. I don't imagine that we can alter
+anything in our own lifetime. But 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.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm
+interested in us.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told
+her.</p>
+<p>
+ She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms
+round him in delight.</p>
+<p>
+ In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the
+faintest interest. Whenever 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. One knew that it was all
+rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to
+cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he
+persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting
+habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go
+to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her, he
+realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy
+while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a
+way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most
+successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They
+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. By lack of
+understanding they remained sane. They 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.</p>
+<h1><a name="14">XIV</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ It had happened at last. The expected message had come.
+All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to
+happen.</p>
+<p>
+ He 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. The person, whoever it was, gave a
+small cough, evidently as a prelude to speaking. Winston
+stopped abruptly and turned. It was O'Brien.</p>
+<p>
+ At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his
+only impulse was to run away. His heart bounded violently. He
+would have been incapable of speaking. O'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. He began speaking with the peculiar grave
+courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner
+Party members.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,'
+he said. 'I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in The
+Times the other day. You take a scholarly interest in
+Newspeak, I believe?'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. 'Hardly
+scholarly,' he said. 'I'm only an amateur. It's not my subject.
+I have never had anything to do with the actual construction of
+the language.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien. 'That is
+not only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of
+yours who is certainly an expert. His name has slipped my
+memory for the moment.'</p>
+<p>
+ Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was
+inconceivable that this was anything other than a reference to
+Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an
+unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have
+been mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must obviously have
+been intended as a signal, a codeword. By sharing a small act
+of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices.
+They had continued to stroll slowly down the corridor, but now
+O'Brien halted. With the curious, disarming friendliness that
+he always managed to put in to the gesture he resettled his
+spectacles on his nose. Then he went on:</p>
+<p>
+ 'What I had really intended to say was that in your
+article I noticed you had used two words which have become
+obsolete. But they have only become so very recently. Have you
+seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued
+yet. We are still using the ninth in the Records Department.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I
+believe. But a few advance copies have been circulated. I have
+one myself. It might interest you to look at it, perhaps?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where
+this tended.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The
+reduction in the number of verbs -- that is the point that will
+appeal to you, I think. Let me see, shall I send a messenger to
+you with the dictionary? But I am afraid I invariably forget
+anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick it up at my flat
+at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you my
+address.'</p>
+<p>
+ They were standing in front of a telescreen. Somewhat
+absentmindedly O'Brien felt two of his pockets and then
+produced a small leather-covered notebook and a gold
+ink-pencil. Immediately 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said. 'If not,
+my servant will give you the dictionary.'</p>
+<p>
+ He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper,
+which this time there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless 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.</p>
+<p>
+ They had been talking to one another for a couple of
+minutes at the most. There was only one meaning that the
+episode could possibly have. It had been contrived as a way of
+letting Winston know O'Brien's address. This was necessary,
+because except by direct enquiry it was never possible to
+discover where anyone lived. There were no directories of any
+kind. 'If you ever want to see me, this is where I can be
+found,' was what O'Brien had been saying to him. Perhaps there
+would even be a message concealed somewhere in the dictionary.
+But at any rate, one thing was certain. The conspiracy that he
+had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of
+it.</p>
+<p>
+ He knew that sooner or later he would obey O'Brien's
+summons. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay -- he was
+not certain. What was happening was only the working-out of a
+process that had started years ago. The first step had been a
+secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of
+the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from
+words to actions. The last step was something that would happen
+in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was
+contained in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more
+exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little
+less alive. Even 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. He 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.</p>
+<h1><a name="15">XV</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia
+rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might
+have been 'What's the matter?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I dreamt-' he began, and stopped short. It was too
+complex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and
+there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his
+mind in the few seconds after waking.</p>
+<p>
+ He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the
+atmosphere of the dream. It 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. It 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. The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed
+I had murdered my mother?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Why did you murder her?' said Julia, almost asleep.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I didn't murder her. Not physically.'</p>
+<p>
+ 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. It was a memory that
+he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over
+many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not
+have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had
+happened.</p>
+<p>
+ His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much
+earlier he could not remember. He 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. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any
+surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over
+her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was
+evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something that
+she knew must happen. She 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. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse
+naturally into stillness. For 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. Very occasionally she would take Winston in
+her arms and press him against her for a long time without
+saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and
+selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the
+never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.</p>
+<p>
+ He remembered the room where they lived, a dark,
+closesmelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a
+white counterpane. There 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. He
+remembered his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas
+ring to stir at something in a saucepan. Above all he
+remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles
+at mealtimes. He 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. His mother was quite
+ready to give him more than his share. She took it for granted
+that he, 'the boy', should have the biggest portion; but
+however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At 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. He 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. He 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. The clamorous hunger
+in his belly seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his
+mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the
+wretched store of food on the shelf.</p>
+<p>
+ One day a chocolate-ration was issued. There had been no
+such issue for weeks or months past. He remembered quite
+clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate. It was a
+two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days)
+between the three of them. It was obvious that it ought to be
+divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, 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.
+His mother told him not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging
+argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears,
+remonstrances, bargainings. His 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. In the end
+his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave
+it to Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The
+little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not
+knowing what it was. Winston stood watching her for a moment.
+Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of
+chocolate out of his sister's hand and was fleeing for the
+door.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Winston, Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come
+back! Give your sister back her chocolate!'</p>
+<p>
+ He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anxious
+eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking about the
+thing, he did not know what it was that was on the point of
+happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed of
+something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm
+round the child and pressed its face against her breast.
+Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He
+turned and fled down the stairs. with the chocolate growing
+sticky in his hand.</p>
+<p>
+ He never saw his mother again. After 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.
+When he came back his mother had disappeared. This was already
+becoming normal at that time. Nothing was gone from the room
+except his mother and his sister. They had not taken any
+clothes, not even his mother's overcoat. To this day he did not
+know with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was
+perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a
+forced-labour camp. As 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the
+enveloping protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole
+meaning seemed to be contained. His mind went back to another
+dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother had sat on the
+dingy whitequilted 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.</p>
+<p>
+ He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance.
+Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself
+into a more comfortable position.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,'
+she said indistinctly. 'All children are swine.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes. But the real point of the story-'</p>
+<p>
+ From her breathing it was evident that she was going off
+to sleep again. He would have liked to continue talking about
+his mother. He 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. Her feelings were her own, and could not be
+altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an
+action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you
+loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to
+give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate
+was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It 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. The 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. The 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. When 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. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor
+your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean
+out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two
+generations ago this would not have seemed all-important,
+because they were not attempting to alter history. They were
+governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What
+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. The proles, it suddenly
+occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not
+loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to
+one another. For 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. The
+proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside.
+They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had
+to re-learn by conscious effort. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud. 'We are not
+human.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Why not?' said Julia, who had woken up again.</p>
+<p>
+ He thought for a little while. '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?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm
+not going to do it, all the same.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'We've been lucky,' he said 'but it can't last much
+longer. You're young. You look normal and innocent. If you keep
+clear of people like me, you might stay alive for another fifty
+years.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to
+do. And don't be too downhearted. I'm rather good at staying
+alive.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'We may be together for another six months -- a year --
+there's no knowing. At the end we're certain to be apart. Do
+you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get
+hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that
+either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot
+you, and if I refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the
+same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying,
+will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of
+us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall
+be utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that
+matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although even
+that can't make the slightest difference.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that,
+right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it.
+They torture you.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What
+you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they
+could make me stop loving you -- that would be the real
+betrayal.'</p>
+<p>
+ She thought it over. 'They can't do that,' she said
+finally. 'It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you
+say anything -- anything -- but they can't make you believe it.
+They can't get inside you.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite
+true. They can't get inside you. If you can feel that
+staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any
+result whatever, you've beaten them.'</p>
+<p>
+ He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear.
+They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your
+head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness
+they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another
+human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true when you
+were actually in their hands. One 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. Facts, at any rate, could
+not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they
+could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was
+not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it
+ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that
+matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted
+to. They 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.</p>
+<h1><a name="16">XVI</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ They had done it, they had done it at last!</p>
+<p>
+ The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly
+lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of
+the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on
+velvet. At 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. He had not bothered to look up when the
+servant showed Julia and Winston in.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted
+whether he would be able to speak. They had done it, they had
+done it at last, was all he could think. It 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. But merely to walk into such a place
+needed an effort of the nerve. It 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. The 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. Although 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. O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of
+them without demur. He 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. The passage down which
+he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and
+white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was
+intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a
+passageway whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human
+bodies.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed
+to be studying it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that
+one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and
+intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without
+stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite towards him and rapped
+out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:</p>
+<p>
+ '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.'</p>
+<p>
+ He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them
+across the soundless carpet. A 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. The terror that
+Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of
+ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he
+had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in
+reality that O'Brien was any kind of political conspirator?
+Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark:
+beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a
+dream. He 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. As O'Brien passed the
+telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned
+aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap.
+The voice had stopped.</p>
+<p>
+ Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise.
+Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken
+aback to be able to hold his tongue.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You can turn it off!' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that
+privilege.'</p>
+<p>
+ He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the
+pair of them, and the expression on his face was still
+indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston
+to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivable
+that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he had
+been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the
+telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched
+past, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his
+eyes fixed on O'Brien's. Then suddenly the grim face broke down
+into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his
+characteristic gesture O'Brien resettled his spectacles on his
+nose.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Shall I say it, or will you?' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing is
+really turned off?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'We have come here because-'</p>
+<p>
+ He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of
+his own motives. Since 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. He went on, conscious that what he was saying
+must sound both feeble and pretentious:</p>
+<p>
+ '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. We want to join it and work for it. We
+are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of
+Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers. I
+tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy.
+If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we
+are ready.'</p>
+<p>
+ He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling
+that the door had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced
+servant had come in without knocking. Winston saw that he was
+carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Martin is one of us,' said O'Brien impassively. 'Bring
+the drinks over here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have
+we enough chairs? Then we may as well sit down and talk in
+comfort. Bring a chair for yourself, Martin. This is business.
+You can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 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. Winston regarded him out of the corner of his eye.
+It 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. O'Brien took the decanter by the neck and
+filled up the glasses with a dark-red liquid. It 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.
+Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the
+decanter it gleamed like a ruby. It had a sour-sweet smell. He
+saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at it with frank
+curiosity.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile. 'You
+will have read about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets
+to the Outer Party, I am afraid.' His face grew solemn again,
+and he raised his glass: 'I think it is fitting that we should
+begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To Emmanuel
+Goldstein.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine
+was a thing he had read and dreamed about. Like 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. For some reason he had
+always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like
+that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect.
+Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly
+disappointing. The truth was that after years of gin-drinking
+he could barely taste it. He set down the empty glass.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do
+not know.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'And the conspiracy -- the organization? Is it real? It is
+not simply an invention of the Thought Police?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will
+never learn much more about the Brotherhood than that it exists
+and that you belong to it. I will come back to that presently.'
+He looked at his wrist-watch. 'It is unwise even for members of
+the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half
+an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and you will
+have to leave separately. You, comrade' -- he bowed his head to
+Julia -- 'will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our
+disposal. You will understand that I must start by asking you
+certain questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to
+do?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Anything that we are capable of,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that
+he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take
+it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment
+the lids flitted down over his eyes. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are prepared to give your lives?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are prepared to commit murder?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of
+hundreds of innocent people?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'To betray your country to foreign powers?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ '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?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to
+throw sulphuric acid in a child's face -- are you prepared to
+do that?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the
+rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-worker?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order
+you to do so?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never
+see one another again?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No!' broke in Julia.</p>
+<p>
+ It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he
+answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of
+the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the
+opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over
+and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know which
+word he was going to say. 'No,' he said finally.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You did well to tell me,' said O'Brien. 'It is necessary
+for us to know everything.'</p>
+<p>
+ He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with
+somewhat more expression in it:</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as
+a different person? We may be obliged to give him a new
+identity. His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the
+colour of his hair -- even his voice would be different. And
+you yourself might have become a different person. Our surgeons
+can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary.
+Sometimes we even amputate a limb.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance
+at Martin's Mongolian face. There were no scars that he could
+see. Julia had turned a shade paler, so that her freckles were
+showing, but she faced O'Brien boldly. She murmured something
+that seemed to be assent.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Good. Then that is settled.'</p>
+<p>
+ There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With 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.
+They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed,
+with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. O'Brien looked at
+his wrist-watch again.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You had better go back to your Pantry, Martin,' he said.
+'I shall switch on in a quarter of an hour. Take a good look at
+these comrades' faces before you go. You will be seeing them
+again. I may not.</p>
+<p>
+ Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little
+man's dark eyes flickered over their faces. There was not a
+trace of friendliness in his manner. He was memorizing their
+appearance, but he felt no interest in them, or appeared to
+feel none. It occurred to Winston that a synthetic face was
+perhaps incapable of changing its expression. Without speaking
+or giving any kind of salutation, Martin went out, closing the
+door silently behind him. O'Brien was strolling up and down,
+one hand in the pocket of his black overalls, the other holding
+his cigarette.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You understand,' he said, 'that you will be fighting in
+the dark. You will always be in the dark. You will receive
+orders and you will obey them, without knowing why. Later 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. When you have read the book, you will be full
+members of the Brotherhood. But between the general aims that
+we are fighting for and the immediate tasks of the moment, you
+will never know anything. I tell you that the Brotherhood
+exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers a hundred
+members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge you will
+never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen.
+You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from
+time to time as they disappear. As this was your first contact,
+it will be preserved. When you receive orders, they will come
+from me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you, it
+will be through Martin. When you are finally caught, you will
+confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very little to
+confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to
+betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you
+will not even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or I shall
+have become a different person, with a different face.'</p>
+<p>
+ He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In
+spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace
+in his movements. It came out even in the gesture with which he
+thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More
+even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and
+of an understanding tinged by irony. However much in earnest he
+might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that belongs
+to a fanatic. When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal
+disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a
+faint air of persiflage. 'This is unavoidable,' his voice
+seemed to say; 'this is what we have got to do, unflinchingly.
+But this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth
+living again.' A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed
+out from Winston towards O'Brien. For the moment he had
+forgotten the shadowy figure of Goldstein. When 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. There was no stratagem that he was not equal
+to, no danger that he could not foresee. Even Julia seemed to
+be impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was
+listening intently. O'Brien went on:</p>
+<p>
+ 'You will have heard rumours of the existence of the
+Brotherhood. No doubt you have formed your own picture of it.
+You 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. Nothing of the kind exists. The 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. Goldstein 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. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be
+wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary
+sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is
+indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you,
+except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no
+encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no
+help. We never help our members. At 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. You will
+have to get used to living without results and without hope.
+You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will
+confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that
+you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible
+change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead.
+Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it
+as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away
+that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand
+years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area
+of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can
+only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to
+individual, generation after generation. In the face of the
+Thought Police there is no other way.'</p>
+<p>
+ He halted and looked for the third time at his
+wrist-watch.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,' he said to
+Julia. 'Wait. The decanter is still half full.'</p>
+<p>
+ He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the
+stem.</p>
+<p>
+ 'What shall it be this time?' he said, still with the same
+faint suggestion of irony. 'To the confusion of the Thought
+Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the
+future?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'To the past,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The past is more important,' agreed O'Brien gravely.</p>
+<p>
+ They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood
+up to go. O'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. It was important, he said, not to go out
+smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very observant. As
+soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared to forget her
+existence. He took another pace or two up and down, then
+stopped.</p>
+<p>
+ 'There are details to be settled,' he said. 'I assume that
+you have a hiding-place of some kind?'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston explained about the room over Mr Charrington's
+shop.</p>
+<p>
+ 'That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange
+something else for you. It is important to change one's
+hiding-place frequently. Meanwhile 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. It may
+be some days before I can get hold of one. There are not many
+in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought Police hunt them
+down and destroy them almost as fast as we can produce them. It
+makes very little difference. The book is indestructible. If
+the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for
+word. Do you carry a brief-case to work with you?' he added.</p>
+<p>
+ 'As a rule, yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'What is it like?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Black, very shabby. With two straps.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Black, two straps, very shabby -- good. One 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. On the following day you
+will go to work without your brief-case. At 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." The one he gives
+you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book. You will return it
+within fourteen days.'</p>
+<p>
+ They were silent for a moment.</p>
+<p>
+ 'There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said
+O'Brien. 'We shall meet again -- if we do meet again-'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston looked up at him. 'In the place where there is no
+darkness?' he said hesitantly.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. 'In the
+place where there is no darkness,' he said, as though he had
+recognized the allusion. 'And in the meantime, is there
+anything that you wish to say before you leave? Any message?
+Any question?.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston thought. There 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. Instead 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.
+Almost at random he said:</p>
+<p>
+ 'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins
+"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's"?'</p>
+<p>
+ Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he
+completed the stanza:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ 'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,<br>
+ You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,<br>
+ When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey<br>
+ When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You knew the last line!' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is
+time for you to go. But wait. You had better let me give you
+one of these tablets.'</p>
+<p>
+ As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His powerful
+grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm. At the door Winston
+looked back, but O'Brien seemed already to be in process of
+putting him out of mind. He was waiting with his hand on the
+switch that controlled the telescreen. Beyond him Winston could
+see the writing-table with its green- shaded lamp and the
+speakwrite and the wire baskets deep- laden with papers. The
+incident was closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him,
+O'Brien would be back at his interrupted and important work on
+behalf of the Party.</p>
+<h1><a name="17">XVII</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the
+right word. It had come into his head spontaneously. His body
+seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its
+translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be
+able to see the light through it. All 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. All
+sensations seemed to be magnified. His 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.</p>
+<p>
+ He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had
+everyone else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had
+literally nothing to do, no Party work of any description,
+until tomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in the
+hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, 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. The 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. Inside it was the book, which he had now had in his
+possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked
+at.</p>
+<p>
+ On 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. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an
+ally.</p>
+<p>
+ There was, of course, no admission that any change had
+taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness
+and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the
+enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the
+central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was
+night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly
+floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people,
+including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the
+uniform of the Spies. On 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. A 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. His
+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. It was almost
+impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and
+then maddened. At 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. The most savage yells of all came from the
+schoolchildren. The 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. He
+unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing
+altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he
+was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without
+words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd.
+Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a
+tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the
+square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the
+wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein
+had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters
+were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled
+underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in
+clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that
+fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it
+was all over. The 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. One
+minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting
+from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except
+that the target had been changed.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. But at the moment he had other things to
+preoccupy him. It 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.' He took the brief-case
+abstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days
+before he had an opportunity to look inside it. The instant
+that the demonstration was over he went straight to the
+Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three
+hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise. The
+orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to
+their posts, were hardly necessary.</p>
+<p>
+ Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been
+at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature
+of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records
+of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films,
+sound-tracks, photographs -- all had to be rectified at
+lightning speed. Although 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. The work
+was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it
+involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in
+the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the
+twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses
+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. Each
+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, halfburying 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. What was worst of
+all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often
+it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but
+any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination.
+Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring
+the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
+</p>
+ <p>By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his
+spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It 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. In 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. He was as anxious as anyone else in the
+Department that the forgery should be perfect. On the morning
+of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as
+much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube; then one
+more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time
+the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went
+through the Department. A mighty deed, which could never be
+mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible for any
+human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with
+Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was
+unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were
+free till tomorrow morning. Winston, 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.</p>
+<p>
+ With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he
+climbed the stair above Mr Charrington's shop. He was tired,
+but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit the dirty
+little oilstove and put on a pan of water for coffee. Julia
+would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book. He
+sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the
+brief-case.</p>
+<p>
+ A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or
+title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular.
+The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as
+though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription
+on the title-page ran:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
+ OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM<br>
+ by<br>
+ Emmanuel Goldstein</p>
+<p>
+
+ Winston began reading:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ Chapter I
+ Ignorance is Strength</p>
+<p>
+
+ 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. They 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. Even 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...</p>
+<p>
+ Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate
+the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He
+was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous
+impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his
+hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From
+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. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his
+feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was etemity. Suddenly,
+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. He went on
+reading:</p>
+<p>
+
+ Chapter III<br>
+ War is Peace</p>
+<p>
+
+ 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. With 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. The third,
+Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade
+of confused fighting. The 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. Eurasia comprises the whole of the
+northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from
+Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas,
+the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia,
+and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, 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.</p>
+<p>
+ In one combination or another, these three super-states
+are permanently at war, and have been so for the past
+twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate,
+annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the
+twentieth centary. It 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. This is not to say that either the
+conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has
+become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On 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. But in a
+physical sense war involves very small numbers of people,
+mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few
+casualties. The 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. In 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. War has in fact changed
+its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged
+have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were
+already present to some small extent in the great wars of the
+early twentieth centuary have now become dominant and are
+consciously recognized and acted upon.</p>
+<p>
+ To 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. None of the three
+super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other
+two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their
+natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia 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. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material
+sense, anything to fight about. With 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. In 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. In so far as the war has a direct
+economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between 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. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated
+regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are
+constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls
+the whole of the disputed area. Portions 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.</p>
+<p>
+ All 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. But above all they contain
+a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever 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. The 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.
+It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond
+the edges of the disputed areas. The 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 unihabited 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.
+Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator
+is not really necessary to the world's economy. They 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.
+By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of
+continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist,
+the structure of world society, and the process by which it
+maintains itself, would not be essentially different.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. Ever 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. At 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. The 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. In 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.
+Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed,
+and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on
+developing. This 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. As a whole the world is more
+primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain 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. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in
+the machine are still there. From 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. If the machine
+were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt,
+illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few
+generations. And 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
+humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at
+the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
+centuries.</p>
+<p>
+ But 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. In 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. If it once became general, wealth would confer no
+distinction. It 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. But in
+practice such a society could not long remain stable. For 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. In the long run, a hierarchical society
+was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To
+return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the
+beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a
+practicable solution. It 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in
+poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a
+great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly
+between 1920 and 1940. The 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.
+But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the
+privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made
+opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels
+of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the
+world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be
+distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was
+by continuous warfare.</p>
+<p>
+ The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily
+of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War 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. Even 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. A Floating Fortress, for
+example, has locked up in it the labour that would build
+several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as
+obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody,
+and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is
+built. In 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. In 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. It 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. By the standards of
+the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party
+lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, 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'. The social atmosphere is that
+of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of
+horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary
+destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically
+acceptable way. In 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. But this would provide only the economic and not the
+emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What 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. Even 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. In other words it is
+necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a
+state of war. It 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. All that is
+needed is that a state of war should exist. The 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. It is precisely in the Inner Party that
+war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In 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. Meanwhile 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.</p>
+<p>
+ All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming
+conquest as an article of faith. It 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. The 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. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in
+the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is
+no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on
+which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded,
+is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And
+even technological progress only happens when its products can
+in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all
+the useful arts the world is either standing still or going
+backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while
+books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital
+importance -- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage --
+the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least
+tolerated. The 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. There are therefore two
+great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One 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. In
+so far as scientific research still continues, this is its
+subject matter. The 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. In 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. Some
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near
+realization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a
+significant lead on the others. What 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. Although 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. At that time some hundreds of
+bombs were dropped on industrial centres, chiefly in European
+Russia, Western Europe, and North America. The 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. Thereafter, although no formal agreement
+was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All
+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. And meanwhile the art of war has
+remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years.
+Helicopters 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. The tank, the submarine, the
+torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade
+are still in use. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre
+which involves the risk of serious defeat. When any large
+operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack
+against an ally. The strategy that all three powers are
+following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is
+the same. The 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. During 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. It will then be time to sign
+a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power, in
+preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly
+necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of
+realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the
+disputed areas round the Equator and the Pole: no invasion of
+enemy territory is ever undertaken. This explains the fact that
+in some places the frontiers between the superstates are
+arbitrary. Eurasia, 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. But this would
+violate the principle, followed on all sides though never
+formulated, of cultural integrity. If 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.
+The problem is the same for all three super-states. It 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. Even the official ally of the
+moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. War
+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. If 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. The sealed world in which he lives would be
+broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which
+his morale depends might evaporate. It 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Under 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. In 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. The 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. Actually the
+three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social
+systems which they support are not distinguishable at all.
+Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same
+worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and
+for continuous warfare. It follows that the three super-states
+not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no
+advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain
+in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of
+corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are
+simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their
+lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that
+it is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and
+without victory. Meanwhile 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. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said
+earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally
+changed its character.</p>
+<p>
+ In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something
+that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable
+victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main
+instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with
+physical reality. All 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. So 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.
+Physical facts could not be ignored. In 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. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or
+later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to
+illusions. Moreover, 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. Newspapers and
+history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but
+falsification of the kind that is practised today would have
+been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far
+as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most
+important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost,
+no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.</p>
+<p>
+ But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases
+to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing
+as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the
+most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As 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. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer
+needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought
+Police. Since 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. Reality 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. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure
+and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is
+all. Cut 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. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the
+Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of
+previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles
+between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an
+angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But
+though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the
+surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the
+special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.
+War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In 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. In our own day they are
+not fighting against one another at all. The 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. The very word 'war',
+therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate
+to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The
+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. The 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. For in that case each
+would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from
+the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was
+truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This --
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote
+distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being
+alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen,
+had not worn off. Solitude 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. The book fascinated him, or more
+exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that
+was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he
+would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his
+scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind
+similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more
+systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are
+those that tell you what you know already. He 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. She dumped her brown
+tool-bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was
+more than a week since they had seen one another.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I've got the book,' he said as they disentangled
+themselves.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Oh, you've got it? Good,' she said without much interest,
+and almost immediately knelt down beside the oilstove to make
+the coffee.</p>
+<p>
+ They did not return to the subject until they had been in
+bed for half an hour. The evening was just cool enough to make
+it worth while to pull up the counterpane. From below came the
+familiar sound of singing and the scrape of boots on the
+flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman whom Winston had seen
+there on his first visit was almost a fixture in the yard.
+There 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. Julia had settled down on her side and
+seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He reached
+out for the book, which was lying on the floor, and sat up
+against the bedhead.</p>
+<p>
+ 'We must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the
+Brotherhood have to read it.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You read it,' she said with her eyes shut. 'Read it
+aloud. That's the best way. Then you can explain it to me as
+you go.'</p>
+<p>
+ The clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had
+three or four hours ahead of them. He propped the book against
+his knees and began reading:</p>
+<p>
+
+ Chapter I<br>
+ Ignorance is Strength</p>
+<p>
+
+ 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. They 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. Even after
+enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same
+pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will
+always return to equilibnum, however far it is pushed one way
+or the other</p>
+<p>
+ 'Julia, are you awake?' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous.'</p>
+<p>
+ He continued reading:</p>
+<p>
+ The aims of these three groups are entirely
+irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they
+are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High.
+The 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. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in
+its main outlines recurs over and over again. For 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.
+They 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. As soon as they have reached their
+objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old
+position of servitude, and themselves become the High.
+Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other
+groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over
+again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even
+temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an
+exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no
+progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of
+decline, the average human being is physically better off than
+he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no
+softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought
+human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of
+the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a
+change in the name of their masters.</p>
+<p>
+ By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this
+pattern had become obvious to many observers. There 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. This doctrine, of course, had always had its
+adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put forward
+there was a significant change. In the past the need for a
+hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically
+of the High. It 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. The
+Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made
+use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now,
+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. In 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.
+The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny
+beforehand. Socialism, 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. But in each
+variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the
+aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more
+openly abandoned. The 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. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old
+ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to
+their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest
+progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar
+pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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.
+The cyclical movement of history was now intelligible, or
+appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was
+alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as
+early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality
+had become technically possible. It 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. In earlier
+ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but
+desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the
+development of machine production, however, the case was
+altered. Even 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. Therefore, 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. In more primitive
+ages, when a just and peaceful society was in fact not
+possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The 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. And this
+vision had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually
+profited by each historical change. The 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. But by
+the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main
+currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly
+paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it
+became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name
+it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ It 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. But 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. What kind of people would control this world had
+been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the
+most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union
+organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers,
+journalists, and professional politicians. These 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. As 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. This
+last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing
+today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and
+inefficient. The 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. Even the Catholic Church
+of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of
+the reason for this was that in the past no government had the
+power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The
+invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate
+public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process
+further. With 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. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough
+to be worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour hours a day
+under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official
+propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.
+The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties,
+society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and
+Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did
+not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its
+position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis
+for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most
+easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The 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. Individually, no member of the Party owns
+anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the
+Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls
+everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit. In
+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. It had
+always been assumed that if the capitalist class were
+expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the
+capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, 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. Ingsoc, 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.</p>
+<p>
+ But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go
+deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling
+group can fall from power. Either 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. These causes do not operate singly, and
+as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling
+class which could guard against all of them would remain in
+power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the
+mental attitude of the ruling class itself.</p>
+<p>
+ After the middle of the present century, the first danger
+had in reality disappeared. Each 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. The second
+danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never
+revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely
+because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not
+permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even
+become aware that they are oppressed. The 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. As
+fcr the problem of overproduction, 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. From 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. The
+problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of
+continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing
+group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately
+below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be
+influenced in a negative way.</p>
+<p>
+ Given this background, one could infer, if one did not
+know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At
+the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is
+infallible and all-powerful. Every 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. Nobody has ever seen Big
+Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the
+telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die,
+and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was
+born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to
+exhibit itself to the world. His 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. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. its
+numbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per
+cent of the population of Oceania. Below 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. Below
+that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the
+proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population. In
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ In principle, membership of these three groups is not
+hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not
+born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the
+Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is
+there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of
+one province by another. Jews, 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. In no part of Oceania do the
+inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial
+population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no
+capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts
+nobody knows. Except that English is its chief lingua
+franca and Newspeak its official language, it is not
+centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by
+blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true
+that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on
+
+what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far
+less to- and-fro movement between the different groups than
+happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrial age.
+Between 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.
+Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the
+Party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become
+nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought
+Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not
+necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The
+Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It 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. In the crucial
+years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a
+great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of
+Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something
+called 'class privilege' assumed that what is not hereditary
+cannot be permanent. He 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. The
+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. A ruling group is
+a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The
+Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with
+perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important,
+provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the
+same.</p>
+<p>
+ All 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. Physical
+rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at
+present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be
+feared. Left 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.
+They 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. What
+opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a
+matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual
+liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on
+the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on
+the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.</p>
+<p>
+ A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of
+the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure
+that he is alone. Wherever 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. Nothing
+that he does is indifferent. His 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. Not 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. He has no freedom of
+choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand his actions
+are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of
+behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts 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. A Party member is required to
+have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many
+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. If 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. But 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.</p>
+<p>
+ A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and
+no respites from enthusiasm. He 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. The 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. The first and simplest stage in the
+discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is
+called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the
+faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the
+threshold of any dangerous thought. It 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.
+Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But
+stupidity is not enough. On 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. Oceanic
+society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is
+omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But 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. The keyword here is
+blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has
+two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it
+means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in
+contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it
+means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party
+discipline demands this. But 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. This 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons,
+one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The
+subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the
+proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he
+has no standards of comparison. He 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. But by far the more important
+reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to
+safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It 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. It is also
+that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever
+be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is
+a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia
+(whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country
+must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise
+then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously
+rewritten. This 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc.
+Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but
+survive only in written records and in human memories. The past
+is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And 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. It also follows that
+though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any
+specific instance. For 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. This
+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. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute
+truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different
+from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of the
+past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure
+that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment
+is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to
+remember that events happened in the desired manner. And
+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. The trick of doing this can be learned
+like any other mental technique. It is learned by the
+majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are
+intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called,
+quite frankly, 'reality control'. In Newspeak it is called
+doublethink, though doublethink comprises much
+else as well.</p>
+<p>
+ Doublethink means the power of holding two
+contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and
+accepting both of them. The 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. The 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. Doublethink 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. To 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. Even in using the word
+doublethink it is necessary to exercise
+doublethink. For 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. Ultimately 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.</p>
+<p>
+ All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because
+they ossified or because they grew soft. Either 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. They fell, that is to say,
+either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is
+the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of
+thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And
+upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the
+Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue
+ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For
+the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own
+infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.</p>
+<p>
+ It 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. In 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.
+In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the
+delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear
+illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in
+intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose
+attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the
+subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people
+the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro
+over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a
+matter of complete indifference to them. They 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. The slightly more favoured workers whom
+we call 'the proles' are only intermittently conscious of the
+war. When 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. It is
+in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party,
+that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is
+believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible.
+This peculiar linking-together of opposites -- knowledge with
+ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism-is one of the chief
+distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology
+abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical
+reason for them. Thus, 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. It 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. It
+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. Even the names of the four
+Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence
+in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The 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. These contradictions are not
+accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they
+are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only
+by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained
+indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be
+broken. If 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.</p>
+<p>
+ But there is one question which until this moment we have
+almost ignored. It is; why should human equality be
+averted? Supposing 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?</p>
+<p>
+ Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen. the
+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. This motive really
+consists ... Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes
+aware of a new sound. It seemed to him that Julia had been very
+still for some time past. She 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. Her breast rose and fell
+slowly and regularly.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Julia.</p>
+<p>
+ No answer.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Julia, are you awake?'</p>
+<p>
+ No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it
+carefully on the floor, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over
+both of them.</p>
+<p>
+ He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate
+secret. He understood how; he did not understand
+why. Chapter 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. But after reading it
+he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a
+minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There
+was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth
+even against the whole world, you were not mad. A yellow beam
+from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell
+across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face and
+the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong,
+sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all
+right. He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,'
+with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound
+wisdom. 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. He lay dozing for a while;
+then the usual deep-lunged singing struck up from the yard
+below;</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ 'It was only an 'opeless fancy,<br>
+ It passed like an Ipril dye,<br>
+ But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred<br>
+ They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!'</p>
+<p>
+ The driveling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You
+still heard it all over the place. It had outlived the Hate
+Song. Julia woke at the sound, stretched herself luxuriously,
+and got out of bed.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I'm hungry,' she said. 'Let's make some more coffee.
+Damn! The stove's gone out and the water's cold.' She picked
+the stove up and shook it. 'There's no oil in it.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'The funny thing is I made sure it was full. I'm going to
+put my clothes on,' she added. 'It seems to have got colder.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable
+voice sang on:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ 'They sye that time 'eals all things,<br>
+ They sye you can always forget;<br>
+ But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years<br>
+ They twist my 'eart-strings yet!'</p>
+<p>
+
+ As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across
+to the window. The sun must have gone down behind the houses;
+it was not shining into the yard any longer. The 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. Tirelessly the woman marched
+to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling
+silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He
+wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely
+the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come
+across to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of
+fascination at the sturdy figure below. As 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. It 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. But it was so,
+and after all, he thought, why not? The 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. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?</p>
+<p>
+ 'She's beautiful,' he murmured.</p>
+<p>
+ 'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.</p>
+<p>
+ 'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm.
+From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out of
+their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing
+they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind,
+could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no
+mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile
+belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It
+might easily be fifteen. She 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. At the end of it she was still singing.
+The 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. It was
+curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in
+Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And 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. If there was hope, it lay in the
+proles! Without having read to the end of the book, he
+knew that that must be Goldstein's final message. The future
+belonged to the proles. And 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? Yes, because
+at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is
+equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen,
+strength would change into consciousness. The proles were
+immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that
+valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would
+come. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us,
+that first day, at the edge of the wood?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to
+please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.'</p>
+<p>
+ The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing.
+All 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. Out of those mighty loins a race of
+conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead, theirs
+was the future. But 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'We are the dead,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.</p>
+<p>
+ They sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to have
+turned into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of
+Julia's eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of
+rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply,
+almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It was behind the picture,' said the voice. 'Remain
+exactly where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.'</p>
+<p>
+ It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do
+nothing except stand gazing into one another's eyes. To run for
+life, to get out of the house before it was too late -- no such
+thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice
+from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had been
+turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had
+fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Now they can see us,' said Julia.</p>
+<p>
+ ' Now we can see you,' said the voice. ' Stand out in the
+middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind
+your heads. Do not touch one another.'</p>
+<p>
+ They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could
+feel Julia's body shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking
+of his own. He could just stop his teeth from chattering, but
+his knees were beyond his control. There was a sound of
+trampling boots below, inside the house and outside. The yard
+seemed to be full of men. Something was being dragged across
+the stones. The woman's singing had stopped abruptly. There 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The house is surrounded,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The house is surrounded,' said the voice.</p>
+<p>
+ He heard Julia snap her teeth together. 'I suppose we may
+as well say good-bye,' she said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You may as well say good-bye,' said the voice. And 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"!'</p>
+<p>
+ Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The
+head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had
+burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window.
+There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full
+of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their
+feet and truncheons in their hands.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he
+barely moved. One thing alone mattered; to keep still, to keep
+still and not give them an excuse to hit you! A 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. Winston met his eyes. The feeling
+of nakedness, with one's hands behind one's head and one's face
+and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. The man protruded
+the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips
+should have been, and then passed on. There was another crash.
+Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and
+smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.</p>
+<p>
+ The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar
+rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought
+Winston, how small it always was! There was a gasp and a thump
+behind him, and he received a violent kick on the ankle which
+nearly flung him off his balance. One of the men had smashed
+his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up like a
+pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting
+for breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a
+millimetre, but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within
+the angle of his vision. Even 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. He 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.
+Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and
+carried her out of the room like a sack. Winston 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.</p>
+<p>
+ He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts
+which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting
+began to flit through his mind. He wondered whether they had
+got Mr Charrington. He wondered what they had done to the woman
+in the yard. He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and
+felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three
+hours ago. He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said
+nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light seemed too strong.
+Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an August
+evening? He 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. But he did not pursue the thought further.
+It was not interesting.</p>
+<p>
+ There ws another, lighter step in the passage. Mr
+Charrington came into the room. The demeanour of the
+black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also
+changed in Mr Charrington's appearance. His eye fell on the
+fragments of the glass paperweight.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply.</p>
+<p>
+ A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared;
+Winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard
+a few moments ago on the telescreen. Mr Charrington was still
+wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been
+almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing his
+spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though
+verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him.
+He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any
+longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown
+bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had
+nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black
+eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole
+lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed
+shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about
+five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the first time
+in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the
+Thought Police.</p>
+<h1><a name="18">XVIII</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the
+Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making certain. He
+was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of
+glittering white porcelain. Concealed 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. A 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. There were four telescreens, one in
+each wall.</p>
+<p>
+ There was a dull aching in his belly. It had been there
+ever since they had bundled him into the closed van and driven
+him away. But he was also hungry, with a gnawing, unwholesome
+kind of hunger. It might be twenty-four hours since he had
+eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did not know, probably
+never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when
+they arrested him. Since he was arrested he had not been fed.</p>
+<p>
+ He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his
+hands crossed on his knee. He had already learned to sit still.
+If you made unexpected movements they yelled at you from the
+telescreen. But the craving for food was growing upon him. What
+he longed for above all was a piece of bread. He had an idea
+that there were a few breadcrumbs in the pocket of his
+overalls. It 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. In the end the
+temptation to find out overcame his fear; he slipped a hand
+into his pocket.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Smith!' yelled a voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith
+W.! Hands out of pockets in the cells!'</p>
+<p>
+ He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Before
+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. He 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. It was a noisy, evil-smelling place.
+They 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. The majority of them were common criminals, but there
+were a few political prisoners among them. He 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. The Party
+prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary
+criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody. They 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. On 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. The guards, too, treated the common
+criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to
+handle them roughly. There was much talk about the
+forced-labour camps to which most of the prisoners expected to
+be sent. It was 'all right' in the camps, he gathered, so long
+as you had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery,
+favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was
+homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol
+distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only
+to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the
+murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs
+were done by the politicals.</p>
+<p>
+ There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every
+description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-marketeers,
+drunks, prostitutes. Some of the drunks were so violent
+that the other prisoners had to combine to suppress
+them. An 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. They 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. The woman hoisted herself
+upright and followed them out with a yell of 'F-- bastards!'
+Then, noticing that she was sitting on something uneven, she
+slid off Winston's knees on to the bench.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Beg pardon, dearie,' she said. 'I wouldn't 'a sat on you,
+only the buggers put me there. They dono 'ow to treat a lady,
+do they?' She paused, patted her breast, and belched. 'Pardon,'
+she said, 'I ain't meself, quite.'</p>
+<p>
+ She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Thass better,' she said, leaning back with closed eyes.
+'Never keep it down, thass what I say. Get it up while it's
+fresh on your stomach, like.'</p>
+<p>
+ She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and
+seemed immediately to take a fancy to him. She put a vast arm
+round his shoulder and drew him towards her, breathing beer and
+vomit into his face.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Wass your name, dearie?' she said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Smith,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Smith?' said the woman. 'Thass funny. My name's Smith
+too. Why,' she added sentimentally, 'I might be your mother!'</p>
+<p>
+ She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about
+the right age and physique, and it was probable that people
+changed somewhat after twenty years in a forced-labour camp.</p>
+<p>
+ No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent the
+ordinary criminals ignored the Party prisoners. 'The polits,'
+they called them, with a sort of uninterested contempt. The
+Party prisoners seemed terrified of speaking to anybody, and
+above all of speaking to one another. Only 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.</p>
+<p>
+ It might be two or three hours ago that they had brought
+him here. The dull pain in his belly never went away, but
+sometimes it grew better and sometimes worse, and his thoughts
+expanded or contracted accordingly. When it grew worse he
+thought only of the pain itself, and of his desire for food.
+When it grew better, panic took hold of him. There were moments
+when he foresaw the things that would happen to him with such
+actuality that his heart galloped and his breath stopped. He
+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. He hardly thought of Julia. He
+could not fix his mind on her. He loved her and would not
+betray her; but that was only a fact, known as he knew the
+rules of arithmetic. He felt no love for her, and he hardly
+even wondered what was happening to her. He thought oftener of
+O'Brien, with a flickering hope. O'Brien might know that he had
+been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried to
+save its members. But there was the razor blade; they would
+send the razor blade if they could. There would be perhaps five
+seconds before the guard could rush into the cell. The blade
+would bite into him with a sort of burning coldness, and even
+the fingers that held it would be cut to the bone. Everything
+came back to his sick body, which shrank trembling from the
+smallest pain. He was not certain that he would use the razor
+blade even if he got the chance. It 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain
+bricks in the walls of the cell. It should have been easy, but
+he always lost count at some point or another. More often he
+wondered where he was, and what time of day it was. At one
+moment he felt certain that it was broad daylight outside, and
+at the next equally certain that it was pitch darkness. In this
+place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be turned
+out. It was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O'Brien
+had seemed to recognize the allusion. In the Ministry of Love
+there were no windows. His 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. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ There was a sound of marching boots outside. The steel
+door opened with a clang. A 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. He motioned to the
+guards outside to bring in the prisoner they were leading. The
+poet Ampleforth shambled into the cell. The door clanged shut
+again.</p>
+<p>
+ Ampleforth 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. He
+had not yet noticed Winston's presence. His troubled eyes were
+gazing at the wall about a metre above the level of Winston's
+head. He was shoeless; large, dirty toes were sticking out of
+the holes in his socks. He was also several days away from a
+shave. A 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston roused hirnself a little from his lethargy. He
+must speak to Ampleforth, and risk the yell from the
+telescreen. It was even conceivable that Ampleforth was the
+bearer of the razor blade.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Ampleforth,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth paused,
+mildly startled. His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Ah, Smith!' he said. 'You too!'</p>
+<p>
+ 'What are you in for?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'To tell you the truth -- ' He sat down awkwardly on the
+bench opposite Winston. 'There is only one offence, is there
+not?' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'And have you committed it?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Apparently I have.'</p>
+<p>
+ He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for
+a moment, as though trying to remember something.</p>
+<p>
+ 'These things happen,' he began vaguely. 'I have been able
+to recall one instance -- a possible instance. It was an
+indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive
+edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word "God" to
+remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!' he added
+almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. 'It
+was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was "rod". Do you
+realize that there are only twelve rhymes to "rod" in the
+entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There
+was no other rhyme.'</p>
+<p>
+ The expression on his face changed. The annoyance passed
+out of it and for a moment he looked almost pleased. A sort of
+intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out
+some useless fact, shone through the dirt and scrubby hair.</p>
+<p>
+ '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?'</p>
+<p>
+ No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston.
+Nor, in the circumstances, did it strike him as very important
+or interesting.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do you know what time of day it is?' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ Ampleforth looked startled again. 'I had hardly thought
+about it. They arrested me -- it could be two days ago --
+perhaps three.' His eyes flitted round the walls, as though he
+half expected to find a window somewhere. 'There is no
+difference between night and day in this place. I do not see
+how one can calculate the time.'</p>
+<p>
+ They talked desultorily for some minutes, then, without
+apparent reason, a yell from the telescreen bade them be
+silent. Winston sat quietly, his hands crossed. Ampleforth, 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. The telescreen barked at him to keep still.
+Time passed. Twenty minutes, an hour -- it was difficult to
+judge. Once more there was a sound of boots outside. Winston's
+entrails contracted. Soon, very soon, perhaps in five minutes,
+perhaps now, the tramp of boots would mean that his own turn
+had come.</p>
+<p>
+ The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped into
+the cell. With a brief movement of the hand he indicated
+Ampleforth.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Room 101,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards, his
+face vaguely perturbed, but uncomprehending.</p>
+<p>
+ What seemed like a long time passed. The pain in Winston's
+belly had revived. His mind sagged round and round on the same
+trick, like a ball falling again and again into the same series
+of slots. He had only six thoughts. The pain in his belly; a
+piece of bread; the blood and the screaming; O'Brien ; Julia;
+the razor blade. There was another spasm in his entrails, the
+heavy boots were approaching. As the door opened, the wave of
+air that it created brought in a powerful smell of cold sweat.
+Parsons walked into the cell. He was wearing khaki shorts and a
+sports-shirt.</p>
+<p>
+ This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You here!' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there was neither
+interest nor surprise, but only misery. He began walking
+jerkily up and down, evidently unable to keep still. Each time
+he straightened his pudgy knees it was apparent that they were
+trembling. His eyes had a wide-open, staring look, as though he
+could not prevent himself from gazing at something in the
+middle distance.</p>
+<p>
+ 'What are you in for?' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Thoughtcrime!' said Parsons, almost blubbering. The 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. He paused opposite Winston and began
+eagerly appealing to him: 'You don't think they'll shoot me, do
+you, old chap? They don't shoot you if you haven't actually
+done anything -- only thoughts, which you can't help? I know
+they give you a fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that!
+They'll know my record, won't they? You know what kind of chap
+I was. Not a bad chap in my way. Not brainy, of course, but
+keen. I tried to do my best for the Party, didn't I? I'll get
+off with five years, don't you think? Or even ten years? A chap
+like me could make himself pretty useful in a labour-camp. They
+wouldn't shoot me for going off the rails just once?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Are you guilty?' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Of course I'm guilty!' cried Parsons with a servile
+glance at the telescreen. 'You don't think the Party would
+arrest an innocent man, do you?' His frog-like face grew
+calmer, and even took on a slightly sanctimonious expression.
+'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,' he said
+sententiously. 'It's insidious. It can get hold of you without
+your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my
+sleep! Yes, that's a fact. There I was, working away, trying to
+do my bit -- never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all.
+And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they
+heard me saying?'</p>
+<p>
+ He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical
+reasons to utter an obscenity.</p>
+<p>
+ "Down with Big Brother!" Yes, I said that! Said it over
+and over again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I'm glad
+they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I'm
+going to say to them when I go up before the tribunal? "Thank
+you," I'm going to say, "thank you for saving me before it was
+too late."</p>
+<p>
+ 'Who denounced you?' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It was my little daughter,' said Parsons with a sort of
+doleful pride. 'She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was
+saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty
+smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don't bear her any grudge
+for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in
+the right spirit, anyway.'</p>
+<p>
+ He made a few more jerky movements up and down, several
+times, casting a longing glance at the lavatory pan. Then he
+suddenly ripped down his shorts.
+ 'Excuse me, old man,' he said. 'I can't help it. It's the
+waiting.'</p>
+<p>
+ He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory pan.
+Winston covered his face with his hands.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Smith!' yelled the voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith
+W! Uncover your face. No faces covered in the cells.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston uncovered his face. Parsons used the lavatory,
+loudly and abundantly. It then turned out that the plug was
+defective and the cell stank abominably for hours afterwards.</p>
+<p>
+ Parsons was removed. More prisoners came and went,
+mysteriously. One, a woman, was consigned to 'Room 101', and,
+Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel and turn a different colour
+when she heard the words. A 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. There were
+six prisoners in the cell, men and women. All sat very still.
+Opposite Winston there sat a man with a chinless, toothy face
+exactly like that of some large, harmless rodent. His 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. His pale-grey eyes flitted timorously from
+face to face and turned quickly away again when he caught
+anyone's eye.</p>
+<p>
+ The door opened, and another prisoner was brought in whose
+appearance sent a momentary chill through Winston. He was a
+commonplace, mean-looking man who might have been an engineer
+or technician of some kind. But what was startling was the
+emaciation of his face. It was like a skull. Because of its
+thinness the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large,
+and the eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable
+hatred of somebody or something.</p>
+<p>
+ The man sat down on the bench at a little distance from
+Winston. Winston 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. Suddenly he realized what was
+the matter. The man was dying of starvation. The same thought
+seemed to occur almost simultaneously to everyone in the cell.
+There was a very faint stirring all the way round the bench.
+The eyes of the chinless man kept flitting towards the
+skull-faced man, then turning guiltily away, then being dragged
+back by an irresistible attraction. Presently he began to
+fidget on his seat. At 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.</p>
+<p>
+ There was a furious, deafening roar from the telescreen.
+The chinless man jumped in his tracks. The skull-faced man had
+quickly thrust his hands behind his back, as though
+demonstrating to all the world that he refused the gift.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Bumstead!' roared the voice. '2713 Bumstead J.! Let fall
+that piece of bread!'</p>
+<p>
+ The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Remain standing where you are,' said the voice. 'Face the
+door. Make no movement.'</p>
+<p>
+ The chinless man obeyed. His large pouchy cheeks were
+quivering uncontrollably. The door clanged open. As the young
+officer entered and stepped aside, there emerged from behind
+him a short stumpy guard with enormous arms and shoulders. He
+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.
+The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the floor.
+His body was flung across the cell and fetched up against the
+base of the lavatory seat. For a moment he lay as though
+stunned, with dark blood oozing from his mouth and nose. A very
+faint whimpering or squeaking, which seemed unconscious, came
+out of him. Then he rolled over and raised himself unsteadily
+on hands and knees. Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the two
+halves of a dental plate fell out of his mouth.</p>
+<p>
+ The prisoners sat very still, their hands crossed on their
+knees. The chinless man climbed back into his place. Down one
+side of his face the flesh was darkening. His mouth had swollen
+into a shapeless cherry-coloured mass with a black hole in the
+middle of it.</p>
+<p>
+
+ From time to time a little blood dripped on to the breast
+of his overalls. His 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.</p>
+<p>
+
+ The door opened. With a small gesture the officer
+indicated the skull-faced man.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Room 101,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston's side. The man
+had actually flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his
+hand clasped together.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Comrade! Officer!' he cried. 'You don't have to take me
+to that place! Haven't I told you everything already? What else
+is it you want to know? There's nothing I wouldn't confess,
+nothing! Just tell me what it is and I'll confess straight off.
+Write it down and I'll sign it -- anything! Not room 101!'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Room 101,' said the officer.</p>
+<p>
+ The man's face, already very pale, turned a colour Winston
+would not have believed possible. It was definitely,
+unmistakably, a shade of green.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do anything to me!' he yelled. 'You've been starving me
+for weeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me.
+Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you
+want me to give away? Just say who it is and I'll tell you
+anything you want. I don't care who it is or what you do to
+them. I've got a wife and three children. The biggest of them
+isn't six years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut
+their throats in front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch
+it. But not Room 101!'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Room 101,' said the officer.</p>
+<p>
+ The man looked frantically round at the other prisoners,
+as though with some idea that he could put another victim in
+his own place. His eyes settled on the smashed face of the
+chinless man. He flung out a lean arm.</p>
+<p>
+ 'That's the one you ought to be taking, not me!' he
+shouted. 'You didn't hear what he was saying after they bashed
+his face. Give me a chance and I'll tell you every word of it.
+He's the one that's against the Party, not me.' The
+guards stepped forward. The man's voice rose to a shriek. 'You
+didn't hear him!' he repeated. 'Something went wrong with the
+telescreen. He's the one you want. Take him, not me!'</p>
+<p>
+ The two sturdy guards had stooped to take him by the arms.
+But just at this moment he flung himself across the floor of
+the cell and grabbed one of the iron legs that supported the
+bench. He had set up a wordless howling, like an animal. The
+guards took hold of him to wrench him loose, but he clung on
+with astonishing strength. For perhaps twenty seconds they were
+hauling at him. The prisoners sat quiet, their hands crossed on
+their knees, looking straight in front of them. The howling
+stopped; the man had no breath left for anything except hanging
+on. Then there was a different kind of cry. A kick from a
+guard's boot had broken the fingers of one of his hands. They
+dragged him to his feet.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Room 101,' said the officer.</p>
+<p>
+ The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with head sunken,
+nursing his crushed hand, all the fight had gone out of him.</p>
+<p>
+ A long time passed. If it had been midnight when the
+skull-faced man was taken away, it was morning: if morning, it
+was afternoon. Winston was alone, and had been alone for hours.
+The pain of sitting on the narrow bench was such that often he
+got up and walked about, unreproved by the telescreen. The
+piece of bread still lay where the chinless man had dropped it.
+At the beginning it needed a hard effort not to look at it, but
+presently hunger gave way to thirst. His mouth was sticky and
+evil-tasting. The humming sound and the unvarying white light
+induced a sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head.
+He 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. Whenever
+his physical sensations were a little under control the terror
+returned. Sometimes with a fading hope he thought of O'Brien
+and the razor blade. It was thinkable that the razor blade
+might arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed. More
+dimly he thought of Julia. Somewhere or other she was suffering
+perhaps far worse than he. She might be screaming with pain at
+this moment. He thought: 'If I could save Julia by doubling my
+own pain, would I do it? Yes, I would.' But that was merely an
+intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to
+take it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel
+anything, except pain and foreknowledge of pain. Besides, was
+it possible, when you were actually suffering it, to wish for
+any reason that your own pain should increase? But that
+question was not answerable yet.</p>
+<p>
+ The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O'Brien
+came in.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had
+driven all caution out of him. For the first time in many years
+he forgot the presence of the telescreen.</p>
+<p>
+ 'They've got you too!' he cried.</p>
+<p>
+ 'They got me a long time ago,' said O'Brien with a mild,
+almost regretful irony. He stepped aside. from behind him there
+emerged a broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in
+his hand.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You know him, Winston,' said O'Brien. 'Don't deceive
+yourself. You did know it -- you have always known it.'</p>
+<p>
+ Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no
+time to think of that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in
+the guard's hand. It might fall anywhere; on the crown, on the
+tip of the ear, on the upper arm, on the elbow-</p>
+<p>
+ The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralysed,
+clasping the stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had
+exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that
+one blow could cause such pain! The light cleared and he could
+see the other two looking down at him. The guard was laughing
+at his contortions. One question at any rate was answered.
+Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase
+of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should
+stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In 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.</p>
+<h1><a name="19">XIX</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ 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. Light that seemed
+stronger than usual was falling on his face. O'Brien was
+standing at his side, looking down at him intently. At the
+other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a
+hypodermic syringe.</p>
+<p>
+ Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings
+only gradually. He had the impression of swimming up into this
+room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater
+world far beneath it. How long he had been down there he did
+not know. Since the moment when they arrested him he had not
+seen darkness or daylight. Besides, his memories were not
+continuous. There 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. But whether the
+intervals were of days or weeks or only seconds, there was no
+way of knowing.</p>
+<p>
+ With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had
+started. Later he was to realize that all that then happened
+was merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation to which
+nearly all prisoners were subjected. There was a long range of
+crimes -- espionage, sabotage, and the like -- to which
+everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession
+was a formality, though the torture was real. How many times he
+had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could
+not remember. Always there were five or six men in black
+uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it was fists,
+sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods,
+sometimes it was boots. There 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. There 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 hirnself into losing
+consciousness. There 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. There 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. I must hold out till the pain becomes
+unbearable. Three more kicks, two more kicks, and then I will
+tell them what they want.' 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. There were also longer
+periods of recovery. He remembered them dimly, because they
+were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor. He 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. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. His 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. These other questioners saw to it that he was in
+constant slight pain, but it was not chiefly pain that they
+relied on. They 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. Their 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 Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times
+in a single session. Most 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. When his nerves were in rags
+after hours of questioning, even this appeal could reduce him
+to snivelling tears. In the end the nagging voices broke him
+down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He
+became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed,
+whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out
+what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly,
+before the bullying started anew. He 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. He confessed that he
+had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian government as far
+back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an
+admirer of capitalism, and a sexual pervert. He confessed that
+he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners
+must have known, that his wife was still alive. He 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. It was
+easier to confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides,
+in a sense it was all true. It 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.</p>
+<p>
+ There were also memories of another kind. They stood out
+in his mind disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all
+round them.</p>
+<p>
+ He was in a cell which might have been either dark or
+light, because he could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near
+at hand some kind of instrument was ticking slowly and
+regularly. The eyes grew larger and more luminous. Suddenly he
+floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes, and was swallowed
+up.</p>
+<p>
+ He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, under
+dazzling lights. A man in a white coat was reading the dials.
+There was a tramp of heavy boots outside. The door clanged
+open. The waxed-faced officer marched in, followed by two
+guards.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Room 101,' said the officer.</p>
+<p>
+ The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not
+look at Winston either; he was looking only at the dials.</p>
+<p>
+ He 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. He was
+confessing everything, even the things he had succeeded in
+holding back under the torture. He was relating the entire
+history of his life to an audience who knew it already. With
+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. Some dreadful
+thing which had lain embedded in the future had somehow been
+skipped over and had not happened. Everything was all right,
+there was no more pain, the last detail of his life was laid
+bare, understood, forgiven.</p>
+<p>
+ He was starting up from the plank bed in the
+half-certainty that he had heard O'Brien's voice. All 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. It
+was O'Brien who was directing everything. It was he who set the
+guards on to Winston and who prevented them from killing him.
+It 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. It
+was he who asked the questions and suggested the answers. He
+was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor,
+he was the friend. And 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. For seven years I have
+watched over you. Now the turning-point has come. I shall save
+you, I shall make you perfect.' 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.</p>
+<p>
+ He did not remember any ending to his interrogation. There
+was a period of blackness and then the cell, or room, in which
+he now was had gradually materialized round him. He was almost
+flat on his back, and unable to move. His body was held down at
+every essential point. Even the back of his head was gripped in
+some manner. O'Brien was looking down at him gravely and rather
+sadly. His face, seen from below, looked coarse and worn, with
+pouches under the eyes and tired lines from nose to chin. He
+was older than Winston had thought him; he was perhaps
+forty-eight or fifty. Under his hand there was a dial with a
+lever on top and figures running round the face.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I told you,' said O'Brien, 'that if we met again it would
+be here.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ Without any warning except a slight movement of O'Brien's
+hand, a wave of pain flooded his body. It 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. He
+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.
+Although the pain had brought the sweat out on his forehead,
+the worst of all was the fear that his backbone was about to
+snap. He set his teeth and breathed hard through his nose,
+trying to keep silent as long as possible.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are afraid,' said O'Brien, watching his face, 'that
+in another moment something is going to break. Your especial
+fear is that it will be your backbone. You have a vivid mental
+picture of the vertebrae snapping apart and the spinal fluid
+dripping out of them. That is what you are thinking, is it not,
+Winston?'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston did not answer. O'Brien drew back the lever on the
+dial. The wave of pain receded almost as quickly as it had
+come.</p>
+<p>
+ 'That was forty,' said O'Brien. 'You can see that the
+numbers on this dial run up to a hundred. Will 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? If 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. Do you
+understand that?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien's manner became less severe. He resettled his
+spectacles thoughtfully, and took a pace or two up and down.
+When he spoke his voice was gentle and patient. He had the air
+of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and
+persuade rather than to punish.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I am taking trouble with you, Winston,' he said, 'because
+you are worth trouble. You know perfectly well what is the
+matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have
+fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged. You
+suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real
+events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events
+which never happened. Fortunately it is curable. You have never
+cured yourself of it, because you did not choose to. There was
+a small effort of the will that you were not ready to make.
+Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease
+under the impression that it is a virtue. Now we will take an
+example. At this moment, which power is Oceania at war with?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with Eastasia.</p>
+<p>
+ 'With Eastasia. Good. And Oceania has always been at war
+with Eastasia, has it not?'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston drew in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak
+and then did not speak. He could not take his eyes away from
+the dial.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The truth, please, Winston. Your truth. Tell me
+what you think you remember.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I remember that until only a week before I was arrested,
+we were not at war with Eastasia at all. We were in alliance
+with them. The war was against Eurasia. That had lasted for
+four years. Before that -- '</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Another example,' he said. 'Some years ago you had a very
+serious delusion indeed. You 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. You believed that you had seen
+unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their
+confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about
+which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had
+actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something
+like this.'</p>
+<p>
+ An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's
+fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of
+Winston's vision. It was a photograph, and there was no
+question of its identity. It was the photograph. It 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. For only
+an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight
+again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He
+made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of
+his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a
+centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even
+forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in
+his fingers again, or at least to see it.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It exists!' he cried.</p>
+<p>
+ 'No,' said O'Brien.</p>
+<p>
+ He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the
+opposite wall. O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail
+slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it
+was vanishing in a flash of flame. O'Brien turned away from the
+wall.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Ashes,' he said. 'Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It
+does not exist. It never existed.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I
+remember it. You remember it.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I do not remember it,' said O'Brien.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a
+feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain
+that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But
+it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the
+photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his
+denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting.
+How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that
+lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was
+the thought that defeated him.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than
+ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward
+but promising child.</p>
+<p>
+ 'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the
+past,' he said. 'Repeat it, if you please.'</p>
+<p>
+ "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls
+the present controls the past," repeated Winston obediently.</p>
+<p>
+ "Who controls the present controls the past," said
+O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. 'Is it your
+opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?'</p>
+<p>
+ Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston.
+His eyes flitted towards the dial. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien smiled faintly. 'You are no metaphysician,
+Winston,' he said. 'Until this moment you had never considered
+what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does
+the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or
+other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is
+still happening?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Then where does the past exist, if at all?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'In records. It is written down.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'In records. And- ?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'In the mind. In human memories.</p>
+<p>
+ 'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all
+records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past,
+do we not?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'But how can you stop people remembering things?' cried
+Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. 'It is
+involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory?
+You have not controlled mine!'</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the
+dial.</p>
+<p>
+ 'On the contrary,' he said, 'you have not
+controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here
+because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You
+would not make the act of submission which is the price of
+sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only
+the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that
+reality is something objective, external, existing in its own
+right. You also believe that the nature of reality is
+self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you
+see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same
+thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not
+external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
+Not 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. Whatever the Party holds to be the
+truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except
+by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that
+you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of
+self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself
+before you can become sane.'</p>
+<p>
+ He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he
+had been saying to sink in.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do you remember,' he went on, ' writing in your diary,
+"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four"?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston,
+with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.</p>
+<p>
+ 'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?</p>
+<p>
+ 'Four.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'And if the party says that it is not four but five --
+then how many?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Four.'</p>
+<p>
+ The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial
+had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over
+Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in
+deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not
+stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He
+drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly
+eased.</p>
+<p>
+ 'How many fingers, Winston?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Four.'</p>
+<p>
+ The needle went up to sixty.</p>
+<p>
+ 'How many fingers, Winston?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'</p>
+<p>
+ The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at
+it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his
+vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars,
+enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably
+four.</p>
+<p>
+ 'How many fingers, Winston?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'</p>
+<p>
+ 'How many fingers, Winston?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Five! Five! Five!'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still
+think there are four. How many fingers, please?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop
+the pain!</p>
+<p>
+ Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brien's arm round his
+shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds.
+The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt
+very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were
+chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a
+moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by
+the heavy arm round his shoulders. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.</p>
+<p>
+ 'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing
+what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.</p>
+<p>
+ Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes
+they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You
+must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.'</p>
+<p>
+ He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbs
+tightened again, but the pain had ebbed away and the trembling
+had stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold. O'Brien motioned
+with his head to the man in the white coat, who had stood
+immobile throughout the proceedings. The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Again,' said O'Brien.</p>
+<p>
+ The pain flowed into Winston's body. The needle must be at
+seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew
+that the fingers were still there, and still four. All that
+mattered was somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over. He
+had ceased to notice whether he was crying out or not. The pain
+lessened again. He opened his eyes. O'Brien had drawn back the
+lever.</p>
+<p>
+ 'How many fingers, Winston?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I
+could. I am trying to see five.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or
+really to see them?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Really to see them.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Again,' said O'Brien.</p>
+<p>
+ Perhaps the needle was eighty -- ninety. Winston could not
+intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind 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. He was trying to count them, he
+could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to
+count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious
+identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When
+he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the
+same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still
+streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He
+shut his eyes again.</p>
+<p>
+ 'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I don't know. I don't know. You will kill me if you do
+that again. Four, five, six -- in all honesty I don't know.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Better,' said O'Brien.</p>
+<p>
+ A needle slid into Winston's arm. Almost in the same
+instant a blissful, healing warmth spread all through his body.
+The pain was already half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and
+looked up gratefully at O'Brien. At sight of the heavy, lined
+face, so ugly and so intelligent, his heart seemed to turn
+over. If he could have moved he would have stretched out a hand
+and laid it on O'Brien arm. He had never loved him so deeply as
+at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain.
+The old feeling, that it bottom it did not matter whether
+O'Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back. O'Brien was a
+person who could be talked to. Perhaps one did not want to be
+loved so much as to be understood. O'Brien had tortured him to
+the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was certain, he
+would send him to his death. It made no difference. In 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.
+O'Brien was looking down at him with an expression which
+suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind. When
+he spoke it was in an easy, conversational tone.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do you know where you are, Winston?' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do you know how long you have been here?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I don't know. Days, weeks, months -- I think it is
+months.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this
+place?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'To make them confess.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No, that is not the reason. Try again.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'To punish them.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No!' exclaimed O'Brien. His voice had changed
+extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern
+and animated. 'No! Not merely to extract your confession, not
+to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here?
+To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston,
+that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands
+uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you
+have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act:
+the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our
+enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by
+that?'</p>
+<p>
+ He was bending over Winston. His face looked enormous
+because of its nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen
+from below. Moreover it was filled with a sort of exaltation, a
+lunatic intensity. Again Winston's heart shrank. If it had been
+possible he would have cowered deeper into the bed. He felt
+certain that O'Brien was about to twist the dial out of sheer
+wantonness. At this moment, however, O'Brien turned away. He
+took a pace or two up and down. Then he continued less
+vehemently:</p>
+<p>
+ 'The first thing for you to understand is that in this
+place there are no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious
+persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the
+Inquisitlon. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy,
+and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at
+the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because
+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. Men were dying because they
+would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory
+belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who
+burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the
+totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis
+and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more
+cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that
+they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at
+any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed
+their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves
+to destroy their dignity. They 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. And yet after only a few years
+the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become
+martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why
+was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they
+had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make
+mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered
+here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow
+the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that
+posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never
+hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of
+history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the
+stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a
+register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be
+annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will
+never have existed.'</p>
+<p>
+ Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a
+momentary bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as though
+Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came
+nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.</p>
+<p>
+ '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? That is what you were
+thinking, was it not?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien smiled slightly. 'You are a flaw in the pattern,
+Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell
+you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the
+past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with
+the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us,
+it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic
+because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never
+destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we
+reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we
+bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely,
+heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill
+him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should
+exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it
+may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any
+deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake
+still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even
+the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked
+up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the
+bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.
+The command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The
+command of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt". Our command is
+"Thou art". No one whom we bring to this place ever
+stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those
+three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed
+-- Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford -- in the end we broke them
+down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them
+gradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping -- and in
+the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By
+the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of
+men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they
+had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how
+they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they
+could die while their minds were still clean.'</p>
+<p>
+ His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the
+lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not
+pretending, thought Winston, he is not a hypocrite, he believes
+every word he says. What most oppressed him was the
+consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched
+the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of
+the range of his vision. O'Brien was a being in all ways larger
+than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or could
+have, that O'Brien had not long ago known, examined, and
+rejected. His mind contained Winston's mind. But in that
+case how could it be true that O'Brien was mad? It must be he,
+Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him.
+His voice had grown stern again.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston,
+however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once
+gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you
+live out the natural term of your life, still you would never
+escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever.
+Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the
+point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to
+you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand
+years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human
+feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will
+you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or
+laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be
+hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you
+with ourselves.'</p>
+<p>
+ He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston
+was aware of some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into
+place behind his head. O'Brien had sat down beside the bed, so
+that his face was almost on a level with Winston's.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Three thousand,' he said, speaking over Winston's head to
+the man in the white coat.</p>
+<p>
+ Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped
+themselves against Winston's temples. He quailed. There was
+pain coming, a new kind of pain. O'Brien laid a hand
+reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.</p>
+<p>
+ 'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes
+fixed on mine.'</p>
+<p>
+ At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what
+seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether
+there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of
+light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although 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.
+A terrific painless blow had flattened him out. Also something
+had happened inside his head. As 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It will not last,' said O'Brien. 'Look me in the eyes.
+What country is Oceania at war with?'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania and
+that he himself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered
+Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not
+know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I don't remember.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that
+now?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since 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. Do you remember that?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ ' Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men
+who had been condemned to death for treachery. You pretended
+that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent.
+No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later
+you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at
+which you first invented it. Do you remember that?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw
+five fingers. Do you remember that?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the
+thumb concealed.</p>
+<p>
+ 'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the
+scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was
+no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old
+fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back
+again. But 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. It 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.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You see now,' said O'Brien, 'that it is at any rate
+possible.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes,' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left
+Winston saw the man in the white coat break an ampoule and draw
+back the plunger of a syringe. O'Brien turned to Winston with a
+smile. In almost the old manner he resettled his spectacles on
+his nose.</p>
+<p>
+ '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?
+You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to
+me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be
+insane. Before we bring the session to an end you can ask me a
+few questions, if you choose.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Any question I like?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Anything.' He saw that Winston's eyes were upon the dial.
+'It is switched off. What is your first question?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'What have you done with Julia?' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien smiled again. 'She betrayed you, Winston.
+Immediately-unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over
+to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw
+her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her
+dirty-mindedness -- everything has been burned out of her. It
+was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You tortured her?'</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien left this unanswered. 'Next question,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Does Big Brother exist?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the
+embodiment of the Party.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Does he exist in the same way as I exist?</p>
+<p>
+ 'You do not exist,' said O'Brien.</p>
+<p>
+ Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him. He
+knew, or he could imagine, the arguments which proved his own
+nonexistence; but they were nonsense, they were only a play on
+words. Did not the statement, 'You do not exist', contain a
+logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so? His mind
+shrivelled as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments
+with which O'Brien would demolish him.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my
+own identity. I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs.
+I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can
+occupy the same point simultaneously. In that sense, does Big
+Brother exist?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It is of no importance. He exists.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Will Big Brother ever die?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Of course not. How could he die? Next question.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Does the Brotherhood exist?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'That, Winston, you will never know. If 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. As long as you live it will be
+an unsolved riddle in your mind.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little
+faster. He still had not asked the question that had come into
+his mind the first. He had got to ask it, and yet it was as
+though his tongue would not utter it. There was a trace of
+amusement in O'Brien's face. Even his spectacles seemed to wear
+an ironical gleam. He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows
+what I am going to ask! At the thought the words burst out of
+him:</p>
+<p>
+ 'What is in Room 101?'</p>
+<p>
+ The expression on O'Brien's face did not change. He
+answered drily:</p>
+<p>
+ 'You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows
+what is in Room 101.'</p>
+<p>
+ He raised a finger to the man in the white coat. Evidently
+the session was at an end. A needle jerked into Winston's arm.
+He sank almost instantly into deep sleep.</p>
+<h1><a name="20">XX</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ 'There are three stages in your reintegration,' said
+O'Brien. 'There is learning, there is understanding, and there
+is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second
+stage.'</p>
+<p>
+ As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late
+his bonds were looser. They 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. The dial, also, had
+grown to be less of a terror. He could evade its pangs if he
+was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he showed
+stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they got
+through a whole session without use of the dial. He could not
+remember how many sessions there had been. The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ '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. And when you were free
+you were puzzled by what was essentially the same question. You
+could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not
+its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary,
+"I understand how: I do not understand why"? It was when
+you thought about "why" that you doubted your own sanity. You
+have read the book, Goldstein's book, or parts of it, at
+least. Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You have read it?' said Winston.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it.
+No book is produced individually, as you know.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Is it true, what it says?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'A description, yes. The programme it sets forth is
+nonsense. The secret accumulation of knowledge -- a gradual
+spread of enlightenment -- ultimately a proletarian rebellion
+-- the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw yourself that that
+was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians
+will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They
+cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason: you know it
+already. If you have ever cherished any dreams of violent
+insurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way in which
+the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is for ever.
+Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.'</p>
+<p>
+ He came closer to the bed. 'For ever!' he repeated. 'And
+now let us get back to the question of "how" and "why". You
+understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in
+power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive?
+Why should we want power? Go on, speak,' he added as Winston
+remained silent.</p>
+<p>
+ Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or
+two. A feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad
+gleam of enthusiasm had come back into O'Brien's face. He knew
+in advance what O'Brien would say. That the Party did not seek
+power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority.
+That 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. That the choice for
+mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the
+great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That 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. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing
+was that when O'Brien said this he would believe it. You could
+see it in his face. O'Brien knew everything. A 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. He had
+understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference:
+all was justified by the ultimate purpose. What 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?</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly.
+'You believe that human beings are not fit to govern
+themselves, and therefore-'</p>
+<p>
+ He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot
+through his body. O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up
+to thirty-five.</p>
+<p>
+ 'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should
+know better than to say a thing like that.'</p>
+<p>
+ He pulled the lever back and continued:</p>
+<p>
+ 'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is
+this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are
+not interested in the good of others ; we are interested solely
+in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only
+power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand
+presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the
+past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even
+those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and hypocrites.
+The 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. They 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. We are not
+like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the
+intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an
+end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to
+safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to
+establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is
+persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of
+power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the
+tiredness of O'Brien's face. It 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. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from
+the cheekbones. O'Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing
+the worn face nearer.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are thinking,' he said, 'that my face is old and
+tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not
+even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not
+understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The
+weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die
+when you cut your fingernails?'</p>
+<p>
+ He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and
+down again, one hand in his pocket.</p>
+<p>
+ 'We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But
+at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It
+is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The
+first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The
+individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an
+individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery".
+Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is
+freedom. Alone -- free -- the human being is always defeated.
+It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die,
+which is the greatest of all failures. But 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. The second thing
+for you to realize is that power is power over human beings.
+Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter
+-- external reality, as you would call it -- is not important.
+Already our control over matter is absolute.'</p>
+<p>
+ For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent
+effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and merely
+succeeded in wrenching his body painfully.</p>
+<p>
+ 'But how can you control matter?' he burst out. 'You don't
+even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are
+disease, pain, death-'</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. 'We
+control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside
+the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing
+that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I
+could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I
+do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must
+get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of
+Nature. We make the laws of Nature.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet.
+What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them
+yet.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And
+if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut them
+out of existence. Oceania is the world.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is
+tiny helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions
+of years the earth was uninhabited.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How
+could it be older? Nothing exists except through human
+consciousness.'</p>
+<p>
+ '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.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not.
+Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there
+was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would
+be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars!
+Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of
+our reach for ever.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They
+are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if
+we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the
+centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did
+not say anything. O'Brien continued as though answering a
+spoken objection:</p>
+<p>
+ 'For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When
+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. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce
+a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant,
+according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians
+are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the
+swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he
+knew, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing
+exists outside your own mind -- surely there must be some way
+of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed
+long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he
+had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's
+mouth as he looked down at him.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not
+your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is
+solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism.
+Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different
+thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,'
+he added in a different tone. 'The real power, the power we
+have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but
+over men.' 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?'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough.
+Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying
+your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and
+humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and
+putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
+Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?
+It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that
+the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is
+torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world
+which will grow not less but more merciless as it
+refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards
+more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded
+on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world
+there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and
+self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already
+we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived
+from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child
+and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.
+No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.
+But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.
+Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one
+takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated.
+Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a
+ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are
+at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty
+towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of
+Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of
+triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no
+literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no
+more need of science. There will be no distinction between
+beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment
+of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be
+destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always
+there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing
+and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there
+will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an
+enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future,
+imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.'</p>
+<p>
+ He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston
+had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He
+could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien
+went on:</p>
+<p>
+ 'And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be
+there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society,
+will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated
+over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have
+been in our hands -- all that will continue, and worse. The
+espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the
+executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a
+world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the
+Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the
+opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his
+heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they
+will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet
+they will always survive. This 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.
+Always 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. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A
+world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after
+triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve
+of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that
+world will be like. But in the end you will do more than
+understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of
+it.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. 'You
+can't!' he said weakly.</p>
+<p>
+ 'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You could not create such a world as you have just
+described. It is a dream. It is impossible.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Why?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and
+hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Why not?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It
+would commit suicide.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is
+more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were,
+what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear
+ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of
+human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference
+would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the
+individual is not death? The party is immortal.'</p>
+<p>
+ As usual, the voice had battered Winston into
+helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in
+his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he
+could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing
+to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien
+had said, he returned to the attack.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I don't know -- I don't care. Somehow you will fail.
+Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are
+imagining that there is something called human nature which
+will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we
+create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps
+you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the
+slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind.
+They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The
+others are outside -- irrelevant.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or
+later they will see you for what you are, and then they will
+tear you to pieces.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any
+reason why it should?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There
+is something in the universe -- I don't know, some spirit, some
+principle -- that you will never overcome.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do you believe in God, Winston?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I don't know. The spirit of Man.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'And do you consider yourself a man?.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your
+kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that
+you are alone? You are outside history, you are
+non-existent.' His manner changed and he said more harshly:
+'And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our
+lies and our cruelty?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes, I consider myself superior.'</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking.
+After a moment Winston recognized one of them as his own. It
+was a sound-track of the conversation he had had with O'Brien,
+on the night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood.
+He 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. O'Brien made a small impatient gesture, as though to say
+that the demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned
+a switch and the voices stopped.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Get up from that bed,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself
+to the floor and stood up unsteadily.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the
+guardian of the human spirit. You shall see yourself as you
+are. Take off your clothes.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls
+together. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of
+them. He could not remember whether at any time since his
+arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath
+the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags,
+just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid
+them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror
+at the far end of the room. He approached it, then stopped
+short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Go on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand between the wings of the
+mirror. You shall see the side view as well.'</p>
+<p>
+ He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed,
+grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its
+actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that
+he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The
+creature's face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent
+carriage. A 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. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in
+look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that
+it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it
+registered would be different from the ones he felt. He had
+gone partially bald. For the first moment he had thought that
+he had gone grey as well, but it was only the scalp that was
+grey. Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body
+was grey all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here 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. But the truly frightening thing was the
+emaciation of his body. The 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. He saw now what O'Brien had meant
+about seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine was
+astonishing. The 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. At a guess he
+would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty,
+suffering from some malignant disease.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You have thought sometimes,' said O'Brien, 'that my face
+-- the face of a member of the Inner Party -- looks old and
+worn. What do you think of your own face?'</p>
+<p>
+ He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that he
+was facing him.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Look at the condition you are in!' he said. 'Look at this
+filthy grime all over your body. Look at the dirt between your
+toes. Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you
+know that you stink like a goat? Probably you have ceased to
+notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see? I can make my
+thumb and forefinger meet round your bicep. I could snap your
+neck like a carrot. Do you know that you have lost twenty-five
+kilograms since you have been in our hands? Even your hair is
+coming out in handfuls. Look!' He plucked at Winston's head and
+brought away a tuft of hair. 'Open your mouth. Nine, ten,
+eleven teeth left. How many had you when you came to us? And
+the few you have left are dropping out of your head. Look
+here!'</p>
+<p>
+ He seized one of Winston's remaining front teeth between
+his powerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot
+through Winston's jaw. O'Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out
+by the roots. He tossed it across the cell.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are rotting away,' he said; 'you are falling to
+pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look
+into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That
+is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put
+your clothes on again.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements.
+Until now he had not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was.
+Only one thought stirred in his mind: that he must have been in
+this place longer than he had imagined. Then suddenly as he
+fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of pity for
+his ruined body overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing
+he had collapsed on to a small stool that stood beside the bed
+and burst into tears. He 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. O'Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It will not last for ever,' he said. 'You can escape from
+it whenever you choose. Everything depends on yourself.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You did it!' sobbed Winston. 'You reduced me to this
+state.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you
+accepted when you set yourself up against the Party. It was all
+contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did
+not foresee.'</p>
+<p>
+ He paused, and then went on:</p>
+<p>
+ 'We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You
+have seen what your body is like. Your mind is in the same
+state. I do not think there can be much pride left in you. You
+have been kicked and flogged and insulted, you have screamed
+with pain, you have rolled on the floor in your own blood and
+vomit. You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed
+everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation
+that has not happened to you?'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still
+oozing out of his eyes. He looked up at O'Brien.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I have not betrayed Julia,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. 'No,' he said;
+'no; that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.'</p>
+<p>
+ The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed
+able to destroy, flooded Winston's heart again. How
+intelligent, he thought, how intelligent! Never did O'Brien
+fail to understand what was said to him. Anyone else on earth
+would have answered promptly that he had betrayed Julia.
+For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under
+the torture? He 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. And yet, in the sense in which
+he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not
+stopped loving her; his feelings towards her had remained the
+same. O'Brien had seen what he meant without the need for
+explanation.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Tell me,' he said, 'how soon will they shoot me?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'It might be a long time,' said O'Brien. 'You are a
+difficult case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured
+sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.'</p>
+<h1><a name="21">XXI</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger
+every day, if it was proper to speak of days.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. There was a pillow and a mattress on the
+plank bed, and a stool to sit on. They had given him a bath,
+and they allowed him to wash himself fairly frequently in a tin
+basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They had
+given him new underclothes and a clean suit of overalls. They
+had dressed his varicose ulcer with soothing ointment. They had
+pulled out the remnants of his teeth and given him a new set of
+dentures.</p>
+<p>
+ Weeks or months must have passed. It 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. He 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. The food
+was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once
+there was even a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but
+the never-speaking guard who brought his food would give him a
+light. The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil
+tied to the corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he
+was awake he was completely torpid. Often 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. He had long grown used to sleeping
+with a strong light on his face. It seemed to make no
+difference, except that one's dreams were more coherent. He
+dreamed a great deal all through this time, and they were
+always happy dreams. He 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. Such thoughts as he had
+when he was awake were mostly about his dreams. He seemed to
+have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the
+stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no
+desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not
+to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be
+clean all over, was completely satisfying.</p>
+<p>
+ By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he
+still felt no impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was
+to lie quiet and feel the strength gathering in his body. He
+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. Finally it was established beyond a doubt
+that he was growing fatter; his thighs were now definitely
+thicker than his knees. After that, reluctantly at first, he
+began exercising himself regularly. In a little while he could
+walk three kilometres, measured by pacing the cell, and his
+bowed shoulders were growing straighter. He attempted more
+elaborate exercises, and was astonished and humiliated to find
+what things he could not do. He 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. He squatted down on his
+heels, and found that with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he
+could just lift himself to a standing position. He lay flat on
+his belly and tried to lift his weight by his hands. It was
+hopeless, he could not raise himself a centimetre. But after a
+few more days -- a few more mealtimes -- even that feat was
+accomplished. A time came when he could do it six times
+running. He began to grow actually proud of his body, and to
+cherish an intermittent belief that his face also was growing
+back to normal. Only 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.</p>
+<p>
+ His mind grew more active. He 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.</p>
+<p>
+ He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw
+now, he had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken
+the decision. From 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. He knew now that for seven years the Thought
+police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass.
+There 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. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary
+they had carefully replaced. They had played sound-tracks to
+him, shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of
+Julia and himself. Yes, even ... He could not fight against
+the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It
+must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be
+mistaken? By what external standard could you check its
+judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of
+learning to think as they thought. Only!</p>
+<p>
+ The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began
+to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote
+first in large clumsy capitals:</p>
+<p>
+
+ FREEDOM IS SLAVERY</p>
+<p>
+
+ Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:</p>
+<p>
+
+ TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE</p>
+<p>
+
+ But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though
+shying away from something, seemed unable to concentrate. He
+knew that he knew what came next, but for the moment he could
+not recall it. When he did recall it, it was only by
+consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not come of
+its own accord. He wrote:</p>
+<p>
+
+ GOD IS POWER</p>
+<p>
+
+ He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past
+never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia.
+Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson,
+and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged
+with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their
+guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered
+remembering contrary things, but those were false memories,
+products of self-deception. How easy it all was! Only surrender,
+and everything else followed. It 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. Nothing had changed except your
+own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He
+hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy,
+except!</p>
+<p>
+ Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were
+nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,'
+O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap
+bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats
+off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him
+do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of
+submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought
+burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it.
+It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly.
+The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or
+other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real'
+things happened. But how could there be such a world? What
+knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All
+happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds,
+truly happens.</p>
+<p>
+ He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he
+was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized,
+nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The
+mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought
+presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive.
+Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.</p>
+<p>
+ He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He
+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. It was not easy. It needed
+great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical
+problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and
+two make five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It 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. Stupidity was as
+necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.</p>
+<p>
+ All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how
+soon they would shoot him. 'Everything depends on yourself,'
+O'Brien had said; but he knew that there was no conscious act
+by which he could bring it nearer. It might be ten minutes
+hence, or ten years. They 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. It was
+perfectly possible that before he was shot the whole drama of
+his arrest and interrogation would be enacted all over again.
+The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected
+moment. The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ One 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. He was walking down the
+corridor, waiting for the bullet. He knew that it was coming in
+another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed out,
+reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no
+more pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He
+walked easily, with a joy of movement and with a feeling of
+walking in sunlight. He 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. He was in the Golden
+Country, following the foot-track across the old
+rabbit-cropped pasture. He could feel the short springy turf
+under his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face. At 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.</p>
+<p>
+ Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat
+broke out on his backbone. He had heard himself cry aloud:</p>
+<p>
+ 'Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!'</p>
+<p>
+ For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of
+her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but
+inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of
+his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had
+ever done when they were together and free. Also he knew that
+somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.</p>
+<p>
+ He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What
+had he done? How many years had he added to his servitude by
+that moment of weakness?</p>
+<p>
+ In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots
+outside. They could not let such an outburst go unpunished.
+They would know now, if they had not known before, that he was
+breaking the agreement he had made with them. He obeyed the
+Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old days he had
+hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity.
+Now he had retreated a step further: in the mind he had
+surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart
+inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but he preferred
+to be in the wrong. They would understand that- O'Brien would
+understand it. It was all confessed in that single foolish cry.</p>
+<p>
+ He would have to start all over again. It might take
+years. He ran a hand over his face, trying to familiarize
+himself with the new shape. There were deep furrows in the
+cheeks, the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose flattened. Besides,
+since last seeing himself in the glass he had been given a
+complete new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve
+inscrutability when you did not know what your face looked
+like. In any case, mere control of the features was not enough.
+For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a
+secret you must also hide it from yourself. You 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. From now onwards he must not only think
+right; he must feel right, dream right. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell
+when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be
+possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking down a
+corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world
+inside him could turn over. And 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! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill
+him like an enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same
+instant bang! would go the bullet, too late, or too early. They
+would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim
+it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out
+of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in their
+own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.</p>
+<p>
+ He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an
+intellectual discipline. It was a question of degrading
+himself, mutilating himself. He had got to plunge into the
+filthiest of filth. What was the most horrible, sickening thing
+of all? He thought of Big Brother. The 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. What were his true feelings towards Big
+Brother?</p>
+<p>
+ There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel
+door swung open with a clang. O'Brien walked into the cell.
+Behind him were the waxen-faced officer and the black-uniformed
+guards.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Get up,' said O'Brien. 'Come here.'</p>
+<p>
+ Winston stood opposite him. O'Brien took Winston's
+shoulders between his strong hands and looked at him closely.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You have had thoughts of deceiving me,' he said. 'That
+was stupid. Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.'</p>
+<p>
+ He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:</p>
+<p>
+ 'You are improving. Intellectually there is very little
+wrong with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed to
+make progress. Tell 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?'</p>
+<p>
+ 'I hate him.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to
+take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough
+to obey him: you must love him.'</p>
+<p>
+ He released Winston with a little push towards the guards.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Room 101,' he said.</p>
+<h1><a name="22">XXII</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed
+to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building.
+Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure. The
+cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level.
+The room where he had been interrogated by O'Brien was high up
+near the roof. This place was many metres underground, as deep
+down as it was possible to go.</p>
+<p>
+ It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But
+he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that
+there were two small tables straight in front of him, each
+covered with green baize. One was only a metre or two from him,
+the other was further away, near the door. He was strapped
+upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not
+even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind,
+forcing him to look straight in front of him.</p>
+<p>
+ For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and
+O'Brien came in.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101.
+I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it.
+The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'</p>
+<p>
+ The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something
+made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on
+the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was
+standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from
+individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by
+fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths.
+There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even
+fatal.'</p>
+<p>
+ He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a
+better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire
+cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the
+front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with
+the concave side outwards. Although 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. They were rats.</p>
+<p>
+ 'In your case, said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world
+happens to be rats.'</p>
+<p>
+ 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. But at this moment the meaning of the
+mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His
+bowels seemed to turn to water.</p>
+<p>
+ 'You can't do that!' he cried out in a high cracked voice.
+'You couldn't, you couldn't! It's impossible.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that
+used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in
+front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was
+something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that
+you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open.
+It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'O'Brien!' said Winston, making an effort to control his
+voice. 'You know this is not necessary. What is it that you
+want me to do?'</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the
+schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected. He looked
+thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an
+audience somewhere behind Winston's back.</p>
+<p>
+ 'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always enough. There
+are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain,
+even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something
+unendurable -- something that cannot be contemplated. Courage
+and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a
+height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come
+up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with
+air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is
+the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are
+a form of pressure that you cannot withstand. even if you
+wished to. You will do what is required of you.</p>
+<p>
+ 'But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don't
+know what it is?'</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the
+nearer table. He set it down carefully on the baize cloth.
+Winston could hear the blood singing in his ears. He had the
+feeling of sitting in utter loneliness. He 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.
+Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres away from him.
+They were enormous rats. They were at the age when a rat's
+muzzle grows blunt and fierce and his fur brown instead of
+grey.</p>
+<p>
+ 'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible
+audience, 'although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of
+that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor
+quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare not leave
+her baby alone in the house, even for five minutes. The rats
+are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will
+strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people.
+They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human
+being is helpless.'</p>
+<p>
+ There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed
+to reach Winston from far away. The rats were fighting; they
+were trying to get at each other through the partition. He
+heard also a deep groan of despair. That, too, seemed to come
+from outside himself.</p>
+<p>
+ O'Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed
+something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made a
+frantic effort to tear himself loose from the chair. It was
+hopeless; every part of him, even his head, was held immovably.
+O'Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a metre from
+Winston's face.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You
+understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit
+over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever,
+the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will
+shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap
+through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore
+straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first.
+Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the
+tongue.'</p>
+<p>
+ The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a
+succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in
+the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his
+panic. To think, to think, even with a split second left -- to
+think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odour of the
+brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of
+nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything
+had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming
+animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea.
+There was one and only one way to save himself. He must
+interpose another human being, the body of another human
+being, between himself and the rats.</p>
+<p>
+ The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out
+the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of
+hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now.
+One 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. Winston could
+see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic
+took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.</p>
+<p>
+ 'It was a common punishment in Imperial China,' said
+O'Brien as didactically as ever.</p>
+<p>
+ The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his
+cheek. And then -- no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny
+fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But 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. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't
+care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the
+bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'</p>
+<p>
+ He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from
+the rats. He 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. He was light years distant, but
+O'Brien was still standing at his side. There was still the
+cold touch of wire against his cheek. But through the darkness
+that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew
+that the cage door had clicked shut and not open.</p>
+<h1><a name="23">XXIII</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight
+slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the
+lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the
+telescreens.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty
+glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed
+him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the
+caption said. Unbidden, 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. It was saccharine
+flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the café.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston was listening to the telescreen. At 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. The news from the African front was disquieting in
+the extreme. On and off he had been worrying about it all day.
+A Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with Eurasia: Oceania had
+always been at war with Eurasia) was moving southward at
+terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin had not mentioned any
+definite area, but it was probable that already the mouth of
+the Congo was a battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were
+in danger. One did not have to look at the map to see what it
+meant. It was not merely a question of losing Central Africa:
+for the first time in the whole war, the territory of Oceania
+itself was menaced.</p>
+<p>
+ A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of
+undifferentiated excitement, flared up in him, then faded
+again. He stopped thinking about the war. In these days he
+could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few
+moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at a
+gulp. As always, the gin made him shudder and even retch
+slightly. The stuff was horrible. The 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-</p>
+<p>
+ He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as
+it was possible he never visualized them. They were something
+that he was half-aware of, hovering close to his face, a smell
+that clung to his nostrils. As the gin rose in him he belched
+through purple lips. He had grown fatter since they released
+him, and had regained his old colour -- indeed, more than
+regained it. His features had thickened, the skin on nose and
+cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald scalp was too deep a
+pink. A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the
+current issue of The Times, with the page turned down at
+the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston's glass was empty,
+he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no need to
+give orders. They knew his habits. The 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. He never even
+bothered to count his drinks. At 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. It would have made no difference if it had
+been the other way about. He had always plenty of money
+nowadays. He even had a job, a sinecure, more highly-paid than
+his old job had been.</p>
+<p>
+ The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took
+over. Winston raised his head to listen. No bulletins from the
+front, however. It was merely a brief announcement from the
+Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter, it appeared, the
+Tenth Three-Year Plan's quota for bootlaces had been
+overfulfilled by 98 per cent.</p>
+<p>
+ He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It
+was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to
+play and mate in two moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait
+of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of
+cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged.
+In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black
+ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph
+of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of
+calm power. White always mates.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. Fifteen-thirty!
+This is news of the highest importance. Take care not to miss
+it. Fifteen-thirty!' The tinking music struck up again.</p>
+<p>
+ Winston's heart stirred. That was the bulletin from the
+front; instinct told him that it was bad news that was coming.
+All day, with little spurts of excitement, the thought of a
+smashing defeat in Africa had been in and out of his mind. He
+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. Why had it not been possible to outflank
+them in some way? The outline of the West African coast stood
+out vividly in his mind. He picked up the white knight and
+moved it across the board. There was the proper spot.
+Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he saw
+another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in
+their rear, cutting their comunications by land and sea. He
+felt that by willing it he was bringing that other force into
+existence. But it was necessary to act quickly. If 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. It
+might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision of the
+world, the destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath. An
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its
+place, but for the moment he could not settle down to serious
+study of the chess problem. His thoughts wandered again. Almost
+unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the
+table: 2+2=</p>
+<p>
+ 'They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could
+get inside you. 'What happens to you here is for ever,'
+O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your
+own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was
+killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.</p>
+<p>
+ He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no
+danger in it. He knew as though instinctively that they now
+took almost no interest in his doings. He could have arranged
+to meet her a second time if either of them had wanted to.
+Actually it was by chance that they had met. It 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. He was hurrying along with
+frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw her not ten metres
+away from him. It struck him at once that she had changed in
+some ill-defined way. They almost passed one another without a
+sign, then he turned and followed her, not very eagerly. He
+knew that there was no danger, nobody would take any interest
+in him. She did not speak. She 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. Presently they were in among
+a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for
+concealment or as protection from the wind. They halted. It was
+vilely cold. The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted
+the occasional, dirty-looking crocuses. He put his arm round
+her waist.</p>
+<p>
+ There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden
+microphones: besides, they could be seen. It did not matter,
+nothing mattered. They could have lain down on the ground and
+done that if they had wanted to. His flesh froze with
+horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever to
+the clasp of his arm ; she did not even try to disengage
+herself. He knew now what had changed in her. Her 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. It
+was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way,
+had stiffened. He 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. Her body felt like
+that. It occurred to him that the texture of her skin would be
+quite different from what it had once been.</p>
+<p>
+ He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As
+they walked back across the grass, she looked directly at him
+for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of
+contempt and dislike. He 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. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side
+but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak.
+She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately
+crushed a twig. Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he
+noticed.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I betrayed you,' she said baldly.</p>
+<p>
+ 'I betrayed you,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ She gave him another quick look of dislike.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something
+something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And
+then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it
+to So-and-so." And 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. But that isn't true. At the time
+when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way
+of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself
+that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You
+don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is
+yourself.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'All you care about is yourself,' he echoed.</p>
+<p>
+ 'And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other
+person any longer.'</p>
+<p>
+ 'No,' he said, 'you don't feel the same.'</p>
+<p>
+ There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind
+plastered their thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at
+once it became embarrassing to sit there in silence: besides,
+it was too cold to keep still. She said something about
+catching her Tube and stood up to go.</p>
+<p>
+ 'We must meet again,' he said.</p>
+<p>
+ 'Yes,' she said, 'we must meet again. '</p>
+<p>
+ He followed irresolutely for a little distance, half a
+pace behind her. They did not speak again. She did not actually
+try to shake him off, but walked at just such a speed as to
+prevent his keeping abreast of her. He 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. He was overwhelmed by a desire not so
+much to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree
+Café, which had never seemed so attractive as at this moment.
+He had a nostalgic vision of his corner table, with the
+newspaper and the chessboard and the ever-flowing gin. Above
+all, it would be warm in there. The next moment, not altogether
+by accident, he allowed himself to become separated from her by
+a small knot of people. He made a halfhearted attempt to catch
+up, then slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite
+direction. When he had gone fifty metres he looked back. The
+street was not crowded, but already he could not distinguish
+her. Any one of a dozen hurrying figures might have been hers.
+Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no longer
+recognizable from behind.</p>
+<p>
+ 'At the time when it happens,' she had said, 'you do mean
+it.' He had meant it. He had not merely said it, he had wished
+it. He had wished that she and not he should be delivered over
+to the-</p>
+<p>
+ Something changed in the music that trickled from the
+telescreen. A cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came
+into it. And then -- perhaps it was not happening, perhaps it
+was only a memory taking on the semblance of sound -- a voice
+was singing:</p>
+<p class="quote">
+ 'Under the spreading chestnut tree<br>
+ I sold you and you sold me '</p>
+<p>
+
+ The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed
+that his glass was empty and came back with the gin bottle.</p>
+<p>
+ He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not
+less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had
+become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and
+his resurrection. It was gin that sank him into stupor every
+night, and gin that revived him every morning. When 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.
+Through the midday hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle
+handy, listening to the telescreen. From fifteen to
+closing-time he was a fixture in the Chestnut Tree. No one
+cared what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no
+telescreen admonished him. Occasionally, 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. He 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. They were engaged
+in producing something called an Interim Report, but what it
+was that they were reporting on he had never definitely found
+out. It was something to do with the question of whether commas
+should be placed inside brackets, or outside. There were four
+others on the committee, all of them persons similar to
+himself. There were days when they assembled and then promptly
+dispersed again, frankly admitting to one another that there
+was not really anything to be done. But 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. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The telescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his
+head again. The bulletin! But no, they were merely changing the
+music. He had the map of Africa behind his eyelids. The
+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. As though for reassurance he
+looked up at the imperturbable face in the portrait. Was it
+conceivable that the second arrow did not even exist?</p>
+<p>
+ His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of
+gin, picked up the white knight and made a tentative move.
+Check. But it was evidently not the right move, because</p>
+<p>
+ Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He 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. His mother was sitting
+opposite him and also laughing.</p>
+<p>
+ It must have been about a month before she disappeared. It
+was a moment of reconciliation, when the nagging hunger in his
+belly was forgotten and his earlier affection for her had
+temporarily revived. He 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. The boredom of the
+two children in the dark, cramped bedroom became unbearable.
+Winston 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. In the end
+his mother said, 'Now be good, and I'Il buy you a toy. A 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. He could still remember the smell of the
+damp cardboard. It was a miserable outfit. The board was
+cracked and the tiny wooden dice were so ill-cut that they
+would hardly lie on their sides. Winston looked at the thing
+sulkily and without interest. But then his mother lit a piece
+of candle and they sat down on the floor to play. Soon 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. They played
+eight games, winning four each. His tiny sister, too young to
+understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against
+a bolster, laughing because the others were laughing. For a
+whole afternoon they had all been happy together, as in his
+earlier childhood.</p>
+<p>
+ He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false
+memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They
+did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were.
+Some things had happened, others had not happened. He turned
+back to the chessboard and picked up the white knight again.
+Almost in the same instant it dropped on to the board with a
+clatter. He had started as though a pin had run into him.</p>
+<p>
+ A shrill trumpet-call had pierced the air. It was the
+bulletin! Victory! It always meant victory when a trumpet-call
+preceded the news. A sort of electric drill ran through the
+café. Even the waiters had started and pricked up their ears.</p>
+<p>
+ The trumpet-call had let loose an enormous volume of
+noise. Already an excited voice was gabbling from the
+telescreen, but even as it started it was almost drowned by a
+roar of cheering from outside. The news had run round the
+streets like magic. He 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. Fragments 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!'</p>
+<p>
+ Under the table Winston's feet made convulsive movements.
+He had not stirred from his seat, but in his mind he was
+running, swiftly running, he was with the crowds outside,
+cheering himself deaf. He looked up again at the portrait of
+Big Brother. The colossus that bestrode the world! The rock
+against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain! He
+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. Ah, it was
+more than a Eurasian army that had perished! Much 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. The waiters were turning back
+to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle.
+Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his
+glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer.
+He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven,
+his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing
+everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the
+white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight,
+and an armed guard at his back. The longhoped-for bullet was
+entering his brain.</p>
+<p>
+ He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken
+him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark
+moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn,
+self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears
+trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right,
+everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won
+the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.</p>
+<h1><a name="appendix">APPENDIX:
+The Principles of Newspeak</a></h1>
+<p class="no-indent">
+ Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been
+devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English
+Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who
+used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in
+speech or writing. The 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. It was expected that
+Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard
+English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.
+Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending
+to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and
+more in their everyday speech. The 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. It is with the final, perfected version, as
+embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are
+concerned here.</p>
+<p>
+ The 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. It 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. Its 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. This 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. To give a single example. The 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'. It 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. Quite 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. Newspeak
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ Newspeak 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. Newspeak words were divided
+into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B
+vocabulary (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary.
+It 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.</p>
+<p class="spacer">
+<p>
+ <i>The A vocabulary.</i>
+ The 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. It 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. All
+ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them.
+So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class
+was simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly
+understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use
+the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or
+philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express
+simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects
+or physical actions.</p>
+<p>
+ The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities.
+The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability
+between different parts of speech. Any 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. Between 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.
+The word thought, for example, did not exist in
+Newspeak. Its place was taken by think, which did duty
+for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was followed
+here: in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen
+for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and
+verb of kindred meaning were not etymologically connected, one
+or other of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for
+example, no such word as cut, its meaning being
+sufficiently covered by the noun-verb knife. Adjectives
+were formed by adding the suffix-ful to the noun-verb,
+and adverbs by adding -wise. Thus for example,
+speedful meant 'rapid' and speedwise meant
+'quickly'. Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as
+good, strong, big, black, soft, were retained,
+but their total number was very small. There was little need
+for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived
+at by adding-ful to a noun-verb. None of the
+now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a very few
+already ending in-wise: the -wise termination was
+invariable. The word well, for example, was replaced by
+goodwise.</p>
+<p>
+ In 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-. Thus, for example, uncold meant
+'warm', while pluscold and doublepluscold meant,
+respectively, 'very cold' and 'superlatively cold'. It 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. By such methods it
+was found possible to bring about an enormous diminution of
+vocabulary. Given, 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. All that was necessary, in any case where two
+words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which
+of them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be
+replaced by unlight, or light by undark,
+according to preference.</p>
+<p>
+ The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its
+regularity. Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned
+below all inflexions followed the same rules. Thus, in all
+verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and
+ended in-ed. The 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., being abolished. All plurals were made by
+adding-s or-es as the case might be. The plurals of man, ox,
+life, were mans, oxes, lifes. Comparison of
+adjectives was invariably made by adding-er,-est (good,
+gooder, goodest), irregular forms and the more, most
+formation being suppressed.</p>
+<p>
+ The only classes of words that were still allowed to
+inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the
+demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All 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. There were also certain irregularities in
+word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy
+speech. A 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. But this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion
+with the B vocabulary. Why so great an importance was
+attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in
+this essay.</p>
+<p class="spacer">
+<p>
+ <i>The B vocabulary.</i>
+ The 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. Without a
+full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult
+to use these words correctly. In some cases they couId 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. The 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.</p>
+<p>
+ The B words were in all cases compound words.</p>
+<p>
+ They consisted of two or more words,
+or portions of words, welded together in an easily
+pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a
+noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To
+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'. This inflected as follows:
+noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past participle,
+goodthinked; present participle, good-
+thinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb,
+goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker.</p>
+<p>
+ The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan.
+The 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. In 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. Because
+of the great difficuIty in securing euphony, irregular
+formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A
+vocabulary. For 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. In principle, however, all B
+words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.</p>
+<p>
+ Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely
+intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a
+whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a
+Times leading article as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel
+Ingsoc. The 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.' But this is not an adequate
+translation. To begin with, in order to</p>
+<p>
+
+ 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 ideologcal
+colour.</p>
+<p>
+ grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted
+above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by
+Ingsoc. And 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. But the special function of
+certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was
+not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These
+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. The
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ As 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. Countless other words
+such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism,
+democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased
+to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering
+them, abolished them. All 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. Greater
+precision would have been dangerous. What 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'. He 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. He knew Jehovah and the
+commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with
+other names or other attributes were false gods. In 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. His sexual life,
+for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words
+sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity).
+Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It
+covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other
+perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for
+its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately,
+since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all
+punishable by death. In 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. He 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. In 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.</p>
+<p>
+ No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A
+great many were euphemisms. Such 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. Some words, on the
+other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of
+the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was
+prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and
+spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses. Other
+words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation 'good'
+when applied to the Party and 'bad' when applied to its
+enemies. But 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.</p>
+<p>
+ So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or
+might have political significance of any kind was fitted into
+the B vocabulary. The 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. In 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. This was not
+done solely with the object of saving time. Even 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. Examples were such
+words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comin- tern, Inprecorr,
+Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as
+it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a
+conscious purpose. It 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.
+The words Communist International, for instance, call up
+a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags,
+barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word
+Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a
+tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine.
+It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as
+limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern 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. In 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. This 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.</p>
+<p>
+ In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other
+than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always
+sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And 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. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in
+force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much
+alike. Almost 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. The use of them encouraged a
+gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And
+this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make
+speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically
+neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
+For 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. His
+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.</p>
+<p>
+ So did the fact of having very few words to choose from.
+Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new
+ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak,
+indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its
+vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each
+reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the
+smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped
+to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without
+involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly
+admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ' to
+quack like a duck'. Like various other words in the B
+vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning.
+Provided 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.</p>
+<p class="spacer">
+<p>
+ <i>The C vocabulary.</i>
+ The C vocabulary was supplementary
+to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and
+technical terms. These 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. They followed the same grammatical rules
+as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C
+words had any currency either in everyday speech or in
+political speech. Any 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. Only 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. There was, indeed, no
+word for 'Science', any meaning that it could possibly bear
+being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.</p>
+<p>
+ From the foregoing account it will be seen that in
+Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very
+low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible
+to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy.
+It would have been possible, for example, to say Big Brother
+is ungood. But 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. Ideas 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. One
+could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by
+illegitimately translating some of the words back into
+Oldspeak. For 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.
+It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a
+palpable untruth-i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight,
+or strength. The concept of political equality no longer
+existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged
+out of the word equal. In 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. In 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 vaished. A 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. There would be many crimes and errors which it
+would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were
+nameless and therefore unimaginable. And 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.</p>
+<p>
+ When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the
+last link with the past would have been severed. History 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. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced
+to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It 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. In practice this meant that no book written before
+approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole.
+Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to
+ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well
+as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the
+Declaration of Independence:</p>
+<p class="quote"><i>
+ 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. That to secure these rights,
+Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers
+from the consent of the governed. That 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...</i></p>
+<p>
+ It would have been quite impossible to render this into
+Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The
+nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the
+whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full
+translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby
+Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute
+government.</p>
+<p>
+ A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed,
+already being transformed in this way. Considerations 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. Various
+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. These 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.
+There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian
+literature -- indispensable technical manuals, and the like --
+that had to be treated in the same way. It 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.</p>
+</BODY></HTML>
projects / sandbox / commitdiff