2000-09-14

r1984ch1

George Orwell. 1984

George Orwell [Eric Blair]: "1984"
Published: 1949

* Chapter One *

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three
thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding
ramifications below. 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.
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.
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 ricespirit. Winston poured out nearly
a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down
like a dose of medicine.
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.
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.
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.
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 forcedlabour 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 speakwrite 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:

April 4th, 1984.

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.
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.
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.
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:

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

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.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything
so nebulous could be said to happen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, blackmoustachio'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:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several
seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on
everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The
little sandyhaired 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.
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.
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.
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.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a
belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
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

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

over and over again, filling half a page.
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.
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.
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.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began
writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the
back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always
shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big
brother
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and
laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There
was a knocking at the door.
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.

x x x

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.
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.
'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-'
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.
'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs
Parsons vaguely.
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.
'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-
apprehensive glance at the door. 'They haven't been out today.
And of course-'
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.
'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.'
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.
'Have you got a spanner?-said Winston, fiddling with the
nut on the angle-joint.
'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming
invertebrate. 'I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children -'
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.
'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.
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.
'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!'
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.
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.
'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.'
'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in
his huge voice.
'Want to see the hanging ! Want to see the hanging!'
chanted the little girl, still capering round.
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call,
clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice
continued raspingly:
'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 -'
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.
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.
'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.
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:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

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.
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?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten
minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
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:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is
free, when men are different from one another and do not live
alone -- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be
undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude,
from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink --
greetings !
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:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS
death.
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 oldfashioned 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.
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.

x x x

Winston was dreaming of his mother.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. '
Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to
forties!'
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.
'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! . .
.'
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.
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.
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:
'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.
But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted
Winston could not now remember.
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.
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?
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'
'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more
genially.
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.
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! . . .'
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
'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.'
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.
'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.

x x x

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.
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.
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:

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints
verify current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

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.
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.
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.
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.
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 fiftyseven
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.
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.
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 printingshops 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.
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.
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.
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:

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:
The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in The Times
of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes
references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and
submit your draft to higher authority before filing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, rankand-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.
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.
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 thirtyone
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.
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.
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.

x x x

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.
'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at
Winston's back.
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.
'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,'
he said.
'Not one!' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've
tried all over the place. They don't exist any longer.'
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.
'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added
untruthfully.
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.
'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?' said
Syme.
'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see
it on the flicks, I suppose.'
'A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.
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.
'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.'
'Nex', please!' yelled the white-aproned prole with the
ladle.
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.
'There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said
Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin on the way.'
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.
'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising
his voice to overcome the noise.
'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's
fascinating.'
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.
'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.'
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.
'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.
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.
'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?'
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:
'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?'
'Except-' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
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.
'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.'
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.
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 quackquack-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.
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.
'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.'
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 Cafe/, haunt of painters and
musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against
frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe/, 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.
Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said.
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.
'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.'
'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.
'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.'
Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy
notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat
handwriting of the illiterate.
'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 dressingdown for it. In fact I told him I'd take the
catapult away if he does it again.
'I think he was a little upset at not going to the
execution,' said Winston.
' 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.'
'What did they do that for?' said Winston, somewhat taken
aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:
'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?'
'What happened to the man?' said Winston.
'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.
'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from
his strip of paper.
'Of course we can't afford to take chances,' agreed
Winston dutifully.
'What I mean to say, there is a war on,' said Parsons.
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.
'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-'
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?
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?
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.
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.
'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?'
'Not one,' said Winston. 'I've been using the same blade
for six weeks myself.'
'Ah, well -- just thought I'd ask you, old boy.'
'Sorry,' said Winston.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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?'
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.

x x x

Winston was writing in his diary:
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
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.
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.
He drew his breath and went on writing:
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and
wrote:
She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without
any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you
can imagine, pulled up her skirt. I
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.
But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He
wrote:
I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light
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
-- !
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.
He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:
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.
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.

x x x

If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the
proles.
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-!
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 stallkeeper 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?
He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and
until after they have rebelled they cannot become
conscious.
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.'
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some time after their release Winston had actually seen
all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe/. 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.
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 cafe/. 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.
It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now
remember how he had come to be in the cafe/ 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:

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
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.
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?
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.
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:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make
four. If that is granted, all else follows.

x x x

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.
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.
'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.
' "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." '
'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where
it is.'
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.
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.
'Steamer!' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead!
Lay down quick!'
'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.
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.
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.
'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!'
'Yes, it 'as, then!'
'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-'
'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.'
'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and
white. An' I tell you, no number-'
'Oh, pack it in!' said the third man.
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.
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 stallkeepers 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.
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?'
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.
'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?'
'And what in hell's name is a pint?' said the barman,
leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
'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.'
'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.
'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.'
'When you were a young man we were all living in the
treetops,' said the barman, with a glance at the other
customers.
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.
'May I offer you a drink?' he said.
'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.'
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.
"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.'
'You must have seen great changes since you were a young
man,' said Winston tentatively.
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.
'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.'
'Which war was that?' said Winston.
'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!'
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.
'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-'
The old man brightened suddenly.
'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.'
'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-'
The old man brightened again.
'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.'
Winston had the feeling that they were talking at
crosspurposes.
'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-'
'The 'Ouse of Lords,' put in the old man reminiscently.
'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?'
The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off about a
quarter of his beer before answering.
'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.'
'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?'
'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-'
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.
'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?'
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.
'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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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?'
'I was passing,' said Winston vaguely. 'I just looked in.
I don't want anything in particular.'
'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.'
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.
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.
'What is it?' said Winston, fascinated.
'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.'
'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston.
'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?'
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.
'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.'
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.
'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.
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.
'There's no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring.
'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.'
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.
'Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all
-' he began delicately.
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.
'The frame's fixed to the wall,' said the old man, 'but I
could unscrew it for you, I dare say.'
'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.'
'That's right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in --
oh, many years ago. It was a church at one time, St Clement
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!'
'What's that?' said Winston.
'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.'
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.
'I never knew it had been a church,' he said.
'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!

"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's
-- "there, now, that's as far as I can get.
A farthing, thatwas a small copper coin,
looked something like a cent.'

'Where was St Martin's?' said Winston.
'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.'
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.
'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.'
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.
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-!
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

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels
to water. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

* Chapter Two *

It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the
cubicle to go to the lavatory.
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.
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.
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.
'You're hurt?' he said.
'It's nothing. My arm. It'll be all right in a second.'
She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had
certainly turned very pale.
'You haven't broken anything?'
'No, I'm all right. It hurt for a moment, that's all.'
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.
'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly. 'I only gave my
wrist a bit of a bang. Thanks, comrade!'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
I love you.
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.
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- ma^che/ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'What time do you leave work?'
'Eighteen-thirty.'
'Where can we meet?'
'Victory Square, near the monument.
'It's full of telescreens.'
'It doesn't matter if there's a crowd.'
'Any signal?'
'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.'
'What time?'
'Nineteen hours.'
'All right.'
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.
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.
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.
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 clankclank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing
leg-irons. Truckload 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.
'Can you hear me?'
'Yes.'
'Can you get Sunday afternoon off?'
'Yes.'
'Then listen carefully. You'll have to remember this. Go
to Paddington Station-'
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.
'Yes.'
'You turn left, then right, then left again. And the
gate's got no top bar.'
'Yes. What time?'
'About fifteen. You may have to wait. I'll get there by
another way. Are you sure you remember everything?'
'Yes.'
'Then get away from me as quick as you can.'
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.
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.

x x x

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.
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.
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.
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.
'Here we are,' she said.
He was facing her at several paces' distance. As yet he
did not dare move nearer to her.
'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.'
He still had not the courage to approach her. 'We're all
right here?' he repeated stupidly.
'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.'
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.
'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?'
'Yes, easily.'
'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.'
'I couldn't care less,' said the girl.
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.
'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.'
'What is your name?' said Winston.
'Julia. I know yours. It's Winston -- Winston Smith.'
'How did you find that out?'
'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?'
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.
'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.'
The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a
tribute to the excellence of her disguise.
'Not the Thought Police! You didn't honestly think that?'
'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-'
'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?'
'Yes, something of that kind. A great many young girls are
like that, you know.'
'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 dullbrown 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.
'Where did you get this stuff?' he said.
'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.'
The first fragment of chocolate had meIted 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.
'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?'
'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.'
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.
'Don't go out into the open. There might be someone
watching. We're all right if we keep behind the boughs.'
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?
'Isn't there a stream somewhere near here?' he whispered.
'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.'
'It's the Golden Country -- almost,' he murmured.
'The Golden Country?'
'It's nothing, really. A landscape I've seen sometimes in
a dream.'
'Look!' whispered Julia.
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.
Winston put his lips against her ear. 'Now,' he
whispered.
'Not here,' she whispered back. 'Come back to the hide-
out. It's safer.'
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
'Have you done this before?'
'Of course. Hundreds of times -- well scores of times
anyway
'With Party members.'
'Yes, always with Party members.'
'With members of the Inner Party?'
'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.'
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 selfdenial 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.
'Listen. The more men you've had, the more I love you. Do
you understand that?'
'Yes, perfectly.'
'I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue
to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
'Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I'm corrupt to the
bones.'
'You like doing this? I don't mean simply me: I mean the
thing in itself?'
'I adore it.'
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.
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.
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.

x x x

'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.'
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.
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.
'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!'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 infallibIe 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.
'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously.
'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.'
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.
'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.
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.
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.
'What was she like, your wife?' said Julia.
'She was -- do you know the Newspeak word
goodthinkful? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of
thinking a bad thought?'
'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of
person, right enough.'
He began telling her the story of his married life, but
curiousIy 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.
'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.'
'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.
'How did you know that?'
'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; peopIe are such hypocrites.'
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:
'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 simpIy 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?'
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.
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.
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.
'Look, Katharine ! Look at those flowers. That clump down
near the bottom. Do you see they're two different colours?'
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 . . .
'Why didn't you give her a good shove?' said Julia. 'I
would have.'
'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.'
'Are you sorry you didn't?'
'Yes. On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.'
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.
'Actually it would have made no difference,' he said.
'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?'
'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.'
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.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.
'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.'
'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?'
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.
'Yes, I like that,' he said.
'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.'
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.

x x x

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.
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.
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.
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:

It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!

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.
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.
'It's all off,' she murmured as soon as she judged it safe
to speak. 'Tomorrow, I mean.'
'What?'
'Tomorrow afternoon. I can't come.'
'Why not?'
'Oh, the usual reason. It's started early this time.'
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.
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.
'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.'
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.
'It isn't sugar?' he said.
'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-'
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.
'It's coffee,' he murmured, 'real coffee.'
'It's Inner Party coffee. There's a whole kilo here, she
said.
'How did you manage to get hold of all these things?'
'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.'
Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a
corner of the packet.
'It's real tea. Not blackberry leaves.'
'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.'
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:

They sye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!

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.
'You can turn round now,' said Julia.
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.
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 remem bered 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.
'Scent too!' he said.
'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.'
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.
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.
'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?'
'Twenty-three thirty.'
'It's twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in
earlier than that, because -- Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!'
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.
'What was it?' he said in surprise.
'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.'
'Rats!' murmured Winston. 'In this room!'
'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-'
'Don't go on!' said Winston, with his eyes tightly
shut.
'Dearest! You've gone quite pale. What's the matter? Do
they make you feel sick?'
'Of all horrors in the world -- a rat!'
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.
'I'm sorry,' he said, 'it's nothing. I don't like rats,
that's all.'
'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.'
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.
'What is it, do you think?' said Julia.
'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.'
'And that picture over there' -- she nodded at the
engraving on the opposite wall-'would that be a hundred years
old?'
'More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's
impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.'
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.'
'It's a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement
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!"
To his astonishment she capped the line:

'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey -- '

'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!"
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.
'Who taught you that?' he said.
'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.'
'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.'
'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.'
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.

x x x

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'Were they friends of yours?' she said.
'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.'
'Then what was there to worry about? People are being
killed off all the time, aren't they?'
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.'
'And what good was that?'
'It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes
later. But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it.'
'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?'
'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.'
'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm
interested in us.
'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told
her.
She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms
round him in delight.
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.

x x x

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.
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.
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.
'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?'
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.'
'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.'
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:
'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?'
'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued
yet. We are still using the ninth in the Records Department.'
'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?'
'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where
this tended.
'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.'
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.
'I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said. 'If not,
my servant will give you the dictionary.'
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.
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.
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 whiIe 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.

x x x

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?'
'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.
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.
'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed
I had murdered my mother?'
'Why did you murder her?' said Julia, almost asleep.
'I didn't murder her. Not physically.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'Winston, Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come
back! Give your sister back her chocolate!'
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.
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.
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.
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.
'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,'
she said indistinctly. 'All children are swine.'
'Yes. But the real point of the story-'
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.
'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud. 'We are not
human.'
'Why not?' said Julia, who had woken up again.
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?'
'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm
not going to do it, all the same.'
'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.'
'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.'
'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.'
'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that,
right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it.
They torture you.'
'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.'
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 -- any- thing -- but they can't make
you believe it. They can't get inside you.'
'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.'
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.

x x x

They had done it, they had done it at last!
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.
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.
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:
'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.'
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.
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.
'You can turn it off!' he said.
'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that
privilege.'
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 conceivabIe
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.
'Shall I say it, or will you?' he said.
'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing is
really turned off?'
'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.'
'We have come here because-'
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:
'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.'
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.
'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.'
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.
'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.'
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.
'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he said.
'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do
not know.'
'And the conspiracy -- the organization? Is it real? It is
not simply an invention of the Thought Police?'
'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?'
'Anything that we are capable of,' said Winston.
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.
'You are prepared to give your lives?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit murder?'
'Yes.'
'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of
hundreds of innocent people?'
'Yes.'
'To betray your country to foreign powers?'
'Yes.'
'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?'
'Yes.'
'If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to
throw sulphuric acid in a child's face -- are you prepared to
do that?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the
rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-worker?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order
you to do so?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never
see one another again?'
'No!' broke in Julia.
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.
'You did well to tell me,' said O'Brien. 'It is necessary
for us to know everything.'
He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with
somewhat more expression in it:
'Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as
a different person? 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.'
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.
'Good. Then that is settled.'
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.
'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.
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.
'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 immedi ate 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.'
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:
'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.'
He halted and looked for the third time at his wrist-
watch.
'It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,' he said to
Julia. 'Wait. The decanter is still half full.'
He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the
stem.
'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?'
'To the past,' said Winston.
'The past is more important,' agreed O'Brien gravely.
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.
'There are details to be settled,' he said. 'I assume that
you have a hiding-place of some kind?'
Winston explained about the room over Mr Charrington's
shop.
'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.
'As a rule, yes.'
'What is it like?'
'Black, very shabby. With two straps.'
'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.'
They were silent for a moment.
'There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said
O'Brien. 'We shall meet again -- if we do meet again-'
Winston looked up at him. 'In the place where there is no
darkness?' he said hesitantly.
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?.'
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:
'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins
"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's"?'
Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he
completed the stanza:

'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey
When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.'

'You knew the last line!' said Winston.
'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.'
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.

x x x

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein

Winston began reading:

Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of
the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the
world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. 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.
The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable. . .
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:

Chapter III
War is Peace

The splitting up of the world into three great
super-states was an event which could be and indeed was
foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. 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.
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.
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 indus triousness 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'I've got the book,' he said as they disentangled
themselves.
'Oh, you've got it? Good,' she said without much interest,
and almost immediately knelt down beside the oilstove to make
the coffee.
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.
'We must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the
Brotherhood have to read it.'
'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.'
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:

Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of
the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the
world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. 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
'Julia, are you awake?' said Winston.
'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous.'
He continued reading:
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.
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 estab
lished 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, underemployed, 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.
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.
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.
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 popu lar 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.
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.
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 selfabasement 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.
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 re/gime as the work of repression and espionage carried
out by the Ministry of Love.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
'Julia.
No answer.
'Julia, are you awake?'
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.
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;

'It was only an 'opeless fancy,
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!'

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.
'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.'
'We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.'
'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.'
Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable
voice sang on:

'They sye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!'

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?
'She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
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.
'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us,
that first day, at the edge of the wood?'
'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to
please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.'
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.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.
'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.
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.
'You are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.
'It was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.
'It was behind the picture,' said the voice. 'Remain
exactly where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.'
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.
'Now they can see us,' said Julia.
' 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.'
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.
'The house is surrounded,' said Winston.
'The house is surrounded,' said the voice.
He heard Julia snap her teeth together. 'I suppose we may
as well say good-bye,' she said.
'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"!'
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.
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 prizefighter'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.
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.
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.
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.
'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply.
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.

* Chapter Three *

x x x

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.
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.
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.
'Smith!' yelled a voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith
W.! Hands out of pockets in the cells!'
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.
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.
'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.'
She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.
'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.'
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.
'Wass your name, dearie?' she said.
'Smith,' said Winston.
'Smith?' said the woman. 'Thass funny. My name's Smith
too. Why,' she added sentimentally, 'I might be your mother!'
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.
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-ohone', which he did not understand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'Ampleforth,' he said.
There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth paused,
mildly startled. His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston.
'Ah, Smith!' he said. 'You too!'
'What are you in for?'
'To tell you the truth -- ' He sat down awkwardly on the
bench opposite Winston. 'There is only one offence, is there
not?' he said.
'And have you committed it?'
'Apparently I have.'
He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for
a moment, as though trying to remember something.
'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.'
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.
'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?'
No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston.
Nor, in the circumstances, did it strike him as very important
or interesting.
'Do you know what time of day it is?' he said.
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.'
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.
The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped into
the cell. With a brief movement of the hand he indicated
Ampleforth.
'Room 101,' he said.
Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards, his
face vaguely perturbed, but uncomprehending.
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.
This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness.
'You here!' he said.
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.
'What are you in for?' said Winston.
'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?'
'Are you guilty?' said Winston.
'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?'
He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical
reasons to utter an obscenity.
"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."
'Who denounced you?' said Winston.
'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.'
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.'
He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory pan.
Winston covered his face with his hands.
'Smith!' yelled the voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith
W! Uncover your face. No faces covered in the cells.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'Bumstead!' roared the voice. '2713 Bumstead J.! Let fall
that piece of bread!'
The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor.
'Remain standing where you are,' said the voice. 'Face the
door. Make no movement.'
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.
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.

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.

The door opened. With a small gesture the officer
indicated the skull-faced man.
'Room 101,' he said.
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.
'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 !'
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man's face, already very pale, turned a colour Winston
would not have believed possible. It was definitely,
unmistakably, a shade of green.
'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!'
'Room 101,' said the officer.
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.
'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!'
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.
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with head sunken,
nursing his crushed hand, all the fight had gone out of him.
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.
The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O'Brien
came in.
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.
'They've got you too!' he cried.
'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.
'You know him, Winston,' said O'Brien. 'Don't deceive
yourself. You did know it -- you have always known it.'
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-
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.

x x x

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.
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.
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.
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.
There were also memories of another kind. They stood out
in his mind disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all
round them.
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.
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.
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not
look at Winston either; he was looking only at the dials.
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.
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.
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.
'I told you,' said O'Brien, 'that if we met again it would
be here.'
'Yes,' said Winston.
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.
'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?'
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.
'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?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
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.
'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?'
'When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with Eastasia.
'With Eastasia. Good. And Oceania has always been at war
with Eastasia, has it not?'
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.
'The truth, please, Winston. Your truth. Tell me
what you think you remember.'
'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 -- '
O'Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand.
'Another example,' he said. 'Some years ago you had a very
serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three
onetime 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.'
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.
'It exists!' he cried.
'No,' said O'Brien.
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.
'Ashes,' he said. 'Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It
does not exist. It never existed.'
'But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I
remember it. You remember it.'
'I do not remember it,' said O'Brien.
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.
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.
'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the
past,' he said. 'Repeat it, if you please.'
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls
the present controls the past," repeated Winston obediently.
"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?'
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.
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?'
'No.'
'Then where does the past exist, if at all?'
'In records. It is written down.'
'In records. And- ?'
'In the mind. In human memories.
'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all
records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past,
do we not?'
'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!'
O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the
dial.
'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.'
He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he
had been saying to sink in.
'Do you remember,' he went on, ' writing in your diary,
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four"?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston,
with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
'Four.'
'And if the party says that it is not four but five --
then how many?'
'Four.'
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.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four.'
The needle went up to sixty.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'
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.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Five! Five! Five!'
'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still
think there are four. How many fingers, please?'
'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop
the pain!
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.
'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.
'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing
what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.
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.'
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.
'Again,' said O'Brien.
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.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I
could. I am trying to see five.'
'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or
really to see them?'
'Really to see them.'
'Again,' said O'Brien.
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.
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'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.'
'Better,' said O'Brien.
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.
'Do you know where you are, Winston?' he said.
'I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.'
'Do you know how long you have been here?'
'I don't know. Days, weeks, months -- I think it is
months.'
'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this
place?'
'To make them confess.'
'No, that is not the reason. Try again.'
'To punish them.'
'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?'
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:
'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.'
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.
'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?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
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.'
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.
'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.'
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.
'Three thousand,' he said, speaking over Winston's head to
the man in the white coat.
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.
'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes
fixed on mine.'
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.
'It will not last,' said O'Brien. 'Look me in the eyes.
What country is Oceania at war with?'
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.
'I don't remember.'
'Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that
now?'
'Yes.'
'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?'
'Yes.'
' 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?'
'Yes.'
'Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw
five fingers. Do you remember that?'
'Yes.'
O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the
thumb concealed.
'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?'
'Yes.'
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.
'You see now,' said O'Brien, 'that it is at any rate
possible.'
'Yes,' said Winston.
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.
'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.'
'Any question I like?'
'Anything.' He saw that Winston's eyes were upon the dial.
'It is switched off. What is your first question?'
'What have you done with Julia?' said Winston.
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.'
'You tortured her?'
O'Brien left this unanswered. 'Next question,' he said.
'Does Big Brother exist?'
'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the
embodiment of the Party.'
'Does he exist in the same way as I exist?
'You do not exist,' said O'Brien.
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.
'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?'
'It is of no importance. He exists.'
'Will Big Brother ever die?'
'Of course not. How could he die? Next question.'
'Does the Brotherhood exist?'
'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.'
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:
'What is in Room 101?'
The expression on O'Brien's face did not change. He
answered drily:
'You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows
what is in Room 101.'
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.