Part One

[b][size=+2]IT WAS[/b] a bright cold day in April, andthe clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled intohis breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quicklythrough the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enoughto prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At oneend of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had beentacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than ametre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy blackmoustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs.It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldomworking, and at present the electric current was cut off duringdaylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation forHate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who wasthirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, wentslowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite thelift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. Itwas one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes followyou 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 whichhad something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice camefrom an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part ofthe surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and thevoice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. Theinstrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but therewas no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window:a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasizedby the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair wasvery fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarsesoap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had justended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world lookedcold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust andtorn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky aharsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except theposters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio’d facegazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on thehouse-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, flappedfitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the singleword INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed downbetween the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and dartedaway again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snoopinginto people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only theThought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was stillbabbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the NinthThree-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmittedsimultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a verylow whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remainedwithin the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he couldbe seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whetheryou were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on whatsystem, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire wasguesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all thetime. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wantedto. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in theassumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except indarkness, 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 awaythe Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white abovethe grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vaguedistaste—this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the thirdmost populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out somechildhood memory that should tell him whether London had always beenquite like this. Were there always these vistas of rottingnineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber,their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugatediron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And thebombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and thewillow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places wherethe bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordidcolonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, hecould not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a seriesof bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostlyunintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak—wasstartlingly different from any other object in sight. It was anenormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up,terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winstonstood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face inelegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand roomsabove ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scatteredabout London there were just three other buildings of similarappearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surroundingarchitecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see allfour of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministriesbetween which the entire apparatus of government was divided. TheMinistry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment,education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerneditself 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 wereno windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry ofLove, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible toenter except on official business, and then only by penetrating througha maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hiddenmachine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barrierswere roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed withjointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into theexpression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facingthe telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leavingthe Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in thecanteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen excepta hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow’sbreakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquidwith a plain white label marked [size=-1]VICTORY GIN.It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese ricespirit. Winstonpoured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulpedit 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 hadthe 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 theworld began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpledpacket marked [size=-1]VICTORY CIGARETTESand incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on tothe floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to theliving-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of thetelescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle ofink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbledcover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in anunusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the endwall, 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 inwhich Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built,had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in thealcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside therange of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, ofcourse, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could notbe seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that hadsuggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had justtaken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smoothcreamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not beenmanufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however,that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in thewindow of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town(just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been strickenimmediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members weresupposed not to go into ordinary shops (’dealing on the free market’,it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there werevarious things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it wasimpossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glanceup and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the bookfor two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting itfor any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in hisbriefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromisingpossession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This wasnot illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws),but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished bydeath, or at least by twenty-five years in a forcedlabour camp. Winstonfitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off.The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, andhe had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply becauseof a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written onwith a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actuallyhe was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it wasusual to dictate everything into the speakwrite which was of courseimpossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink andthen faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels.To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters hewrote:

April 4th, 1984.He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended uponhim. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure thathis age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date withina year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writingthis diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for amoment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with abump against the Newspeak word doublethink.For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home tohim. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its natureimpossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which caseit would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and hispredicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. Thetelescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curiousthat he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself,but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intendedto say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and ithad never crossed his mind that anything would be needed exceptcourage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was totransfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had beenrunning inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however,even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begunitching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so italways became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was consciousof nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, theitching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and aslight booziness caused by the gin.
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectlyaware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwritingstraggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters andfinally even its full stops:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One verygood one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in theMediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat mantrying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw himwallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him throughthe helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea roundhim turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let inthe water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw alifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there wasa middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow witha little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screamingwith fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was tryingto burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him andcomforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the timecovering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms couldkeep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb inamong them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. thenthere was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right upinto the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followedit up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a womandown in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fussand shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids theydidnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the policeturned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to hernobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never

Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. Hedid not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But thecurious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memoryhad clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost feltequal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of thisother incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin thediary 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 cubiclesand grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the bigtelescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was justtaking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knewby sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. Oneof them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did notknow her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department.Presumably—since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carryinga spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writingmachines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty- seven, withthick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrowscarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound severaltimes round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring outthe shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the veryfirst moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of theatmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes andgeneral clean- mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. Hedisliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. Itwas always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the mostbigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateurspies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave himthe impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passedin the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed topierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with blackterror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agentof the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, hecontinued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in itas well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member of the InnerParty and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston hadonly a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the groupof people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an InnerParty member approaching. O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thickneck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidableappearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick ofresettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming—insome indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, ifanyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled aneighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seenO’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeplydrawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrastbetween O’Brien’s urbane manner and his prize-fighter’s physique. Muchmore it was because of a secretly held belief—or perhaps not even abelief, merely a hope—that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was notperfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again,perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, butsimply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being aperson that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreenand get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verifythis guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this momentO’Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly elevenhundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department untilthe Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row asWinston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman whoworked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl withdark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of somemonstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen atthe end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge andbristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of thePeople, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and thereamong the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak ofmingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider whoonce, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one ofthe leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brotherhimself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, hadbeen condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, butthere was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He wasthe primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. Allsubsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage,heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere orother he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhapssomewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreignpaymasters, perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumoured—in somehiding-place in Oceania itself.
Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see theface of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a leanJewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a smallgoatee beard—a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, witha kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of whicha pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, andthe voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering hisusual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party—an attack soexaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to seethrough it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmedfeeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might betaken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing thedictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion ofpeace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of thePress, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was cryinghysterically that the revolution had been betrayed—and all this inrapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitualstyle of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words:more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally usein real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as tothe reality which Goldstein’s specious claptrap covered, behind hishead on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of theEurasian army—row after row of solid-looking men with expressionlessAsiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished,to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp ofthe soldiers’ boots formed the background to Goldstein’s bleatingvoice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds,uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half thepeople in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen,and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too muchto be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldsteinproduced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred moreconstant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at warwith one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. Butwhat was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised byeverybody, 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 rubbishthat they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to growless. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A daynever passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions werenot unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vastshadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to theoverthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be.There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium ofall the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and whichcirculated 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 upand down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in aneffort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.The little sandy- haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouthwas opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’sheavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, hispowerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up tothe assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had beguncrying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavyNewspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’snose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid momentWinston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heelviolently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about theTwo Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, onthe contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirtyseconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fearand vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces inwith a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of peoplelike an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into agrimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was anabstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object toanother like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’shatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary,against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at suchmoments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on thescreen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yetthe very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and allthat was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those momentshis secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and BigBrother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standinglike a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of hisisolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his veryexistence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the merepower of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred thisway or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effortwith which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in a nightmare,Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on thescreen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautifulhallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to deathwith a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoother full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cuther throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, herealized whyit was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and prettyand sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never doso, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you toencircle 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 becomean actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face changed into thatof a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasiansoldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machinegun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, sothat some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards intheir seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief fromeverybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother,black-haired, blackmoustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm, andso vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what BigBrother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, thesort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, notdistinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact ofbeing spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, andinstead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:

But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds onthe screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone’seyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandyhairedwoman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front ofher. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like ‘My Saviour!’ sheextended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in herhands. 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, veryslowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’ and the second-a heavy,murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of whichone seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing oftom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It wasa 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 ofconsciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston’s entrails seemed togrow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in thegeneral delirium, but this sub-human chanting of ‘B- B! . . . B-B !’always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: itwas impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to controlyour face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctivereaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which theexpression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it wasexactly 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. Hehad taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them onhis nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of asecond when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happenWinston knew—yes, he knew!—that O’Brien was thinking the same thing ashimself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their twominds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the otherthrough their eyes. ‘I am with you,’ O’Brien seemed to be saying tohim. ‘I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about yourcontempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on yourside!’ And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O’Brien’s facewas as inscrutable as everybody else’s.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it hadhappened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was tokeep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself werethe enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast undergroundconspiracies were true after all—perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessionsand 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, onlyfleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches ofoverheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls—once, even,when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had lookedas though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork:very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubiclewithout looking at O’Brien again. The idea of following up theirmomentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have beeninconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it.For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, andthat was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, inthe 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 sathelplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automaticaction. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting asbefore. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printingin large neat capitals

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 thanthe initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was temptedto 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 fromwriting it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, orwhether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The ThoughtPolice would get him just the same. He had committed—would still havecommitted, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crimethat contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. Youmight dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner orlater they were bound to get you.
It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened atnight. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking yourshoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces roundthe bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report ofthe arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Yourname was removed from the registers, every record of everything you hadever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and thenforgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usualword.
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 necki dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back ofthe neck i dont care down with big brother

He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid downthe pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking atthe door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope thatwhoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, theknocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. Hisheart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, wasprobably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards the door.

[b][size=+2]AS[/b] he put his hand to the door-knobWinston saw that he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIGBROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to belegible across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to havedone. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudgethe creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink waswet.He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly awarm waveof relief flowed through him. A colourless, crushed-looking woman, withwispy hair and a lined face, was standing outside.
‘Oh, comrade,’ she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, ‘Ithought I heard you come in. Do you think you could come across andhave 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 weresupposed to call everyone ‘comrade’—but with some women one used itinstinctively.) She was a woman of about thirty, but looking mucholder. One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of herface. Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur repair jobswere an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansions were old flats, builtin 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster flakedconstantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst inevery hard frost,the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating system was usuallyrunning at half steam when it was not closed down altogether frommotives of economy. Repairs,except what you could do for yourself, hadto be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up eventhe 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 adifferent way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as thoughthe place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Gamesimpedimenta—hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves. a burst football, a pair ofsweaty shorts turned inside out—lay all over the floor, and on thetable 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 usualboiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shotthrough by a sharper reek of sweat, which-one knew this at the firstsniff, though it was hard to say how was the sweat of some person notpresent at the moment. In another room someone with a comb and a pieceof toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music whichwas still issuing from the telescreen.
‘It’s the children,’ said Mrs Parsons, casting ahalf-apprehensive glance at the door. ‘They haven’t been out today. Andof course—’
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. Thekitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish waterwhich smelt worse than ever of cabbage. Winston knelt down and examinedthe angle-joint of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hatedbending down, which was always liable to start him coughing. MrsParsons 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, Tomis.’
Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He wasa fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecileenthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges onwhom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Partydepended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from theYouth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he hadmanaged to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. Atthe Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for whichintelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leadingfigure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged inorganizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savingscampaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you withquiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in anappearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past fouryears. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimonyto 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 thechildren charged into the living-room. Mrs Parsons brought the spanner.Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of humanhair that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best hecould 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 thetable and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his smallsister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragmentof wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, andred neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raisedhis hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious wasthe boy’s demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.
‘You’re a traitor!’ yelled the boy. ‘You’re a thought- criminal! You’rea Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporize you, I’ll send you to thesalt mines!’
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting ‘Traitor!’ and‘Thought-criminal!’ the little girl imitating her brother in everymovement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling oftiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort ofcalculating ferocity in the boy’s eye, a quite evident desire to hit orkick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to doso. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winstonthought.
Mrs Parsons’ eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, andback again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed withinterest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.
‘They do get so noisy,’ she said. ‘They’re disappointed because theycouldn’t go to see the hanging, that’s what it is. I’m too busy to takethem. 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 thePark that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once amonth, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to betaken to see it. He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for thedoor. But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hitthe back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was as though ared-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun round just in time tosee Mrs Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boypocketed a catapult.
‘Goldstein!’ bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what moststruck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman’s greyishface.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down atthe table again, still rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreenhad stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with asort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the newFloating Fortress which had just been anchored between lceland and theFaroe lslands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a lifeof terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching hernight and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadayswere horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of suchorganizations as the Spies they were systematically turned intoungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendencywhatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary,they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, theprocessions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles,the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother—it was all a sort ofglorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, againstthe enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs,thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to befrightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly aweek passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing howsome eavesdropping little sneak—‘child hero’ was the phrase generallyused—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parentsto the Thought Police.
The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked up his penhalf-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to writein the diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O’Brien again.
Years ago—how long was it? Seven years it must be—he had dreamed thathe was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to oneside of him had said as he passed: ‘We shall meet in the place wherethere is no darkness.’ It was said very quietly, almost casually—astatement, not a command. He had walked on without pausing. What wascurious was that at the time, in the dream, the words had not made muchimpression on him. It was only later and by degrees that they hadseemed to take on significance. He could not now remember whether itwas before or after having the dream that he had seen O’Brien for thefirst time, nor could he remember when he had first identified thevoice as O’Brien’s. But at any rate the identification existed. It wasO’Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.
Winston had never been able to feel sure—even after this morning’sflash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure whether O’Brienwas a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. Therewas a link of understanding between them, more important than affectionor partisanship. ‘We shall meet in the place where there is nodarkness,’ he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only thatin some way or another it would come true.
The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call, clear andbeautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice continuedraspingly:
‘Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrivedfrom the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a gloriousvictory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reportingmay well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here isthe newsflash —’
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gorydescription of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendousfigures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as fromnext week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes totwenty.
Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a deflatedfeeling. The telescreen—perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps todrown the memory of the lost chocolate—crashed into ‘Oceania, ’Tis forthee’. You were supposed to stand to attention. However, in his presentposition he was invisible.
‘Oceania, ’Tis for thee’ gave way to lighter music. Winston walked overto the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was stillcold and clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull,reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were fallingon London at present.
Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and theword INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. INGSOC. The sacredprinciples of INGSOC. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of thepast. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the seabottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. Hewas alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. Whatcertainty had he that a single human creature now living was on hisside? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would notendure for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:

He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tinyclear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other faceof the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyespursued 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 orawake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or inbed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetresinside your skull.
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry ofTruth, with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as theloopholes of a fortress. His heart quailed before the enormouspyramidal shape. It was too strong, it could not be stormed. A thousandrocket bombs would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom hewas writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an age thatmight be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death butannihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself tovapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, beforethey wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you makeappeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymousword 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 intohim. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would everhear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuitywas not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sanethat 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 menare different from one another and do not live alone—to a time whentruth 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 onlynow, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that hehad taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are includedin 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 stayalive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand wereinkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you.Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like thelittle sandy- haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the FictionDepartment) might start wondering why he had been writing during thelunch interval, why he had used an oldfashioned pen, what he had beenwriting—and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to thebathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brownsoap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore welladapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think ofhiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existencehad been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious.With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain ofwhitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it wasbound to be shaken off if the book was moved.

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.

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 nineteen he had designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. 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.

[b][size=+2]IN[/b] the low-ceilinged canteen, deepunderground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room wasalready very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counterthe steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell whichdid not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of theroom there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could bebought 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 ResearchDepartment. Perhaps ‘friend’ was not exactly the right word. You didnot have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were somecomrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was aphilologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of theenormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Editionof the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature, smaller thanWinston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournfuland derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he wasspeaking 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 unusedones which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them formonths past. At any given moment there was some necessary article whichthe Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons,sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at presentit was razor blades. You could only get hold of them, if at all, byscrounging 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 facedSyme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at theend 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 eyesseemed to say, ‘I see through you. I know very well why you didn’t goto see those prisoners hanged.’ In an intellectual way, Syme wasvenomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloatingsatisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials andconfessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of theMinistry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting himaway from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in thetechnicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative andinteresting. Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid thescrutiny of the large dark eyes.
‘It was a good hanging,’ said Syme reminiscently. ‘I think it spoils itwhen they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. Andabove all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue a quitebright 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 wasdumped swiftly the regulation lunch—a metal pannikin of pinkish-greystew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless VictoryCoffee, 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 threadedtheir way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to themetal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool ofstew, a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winstontook up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, andgulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he had winked the tears out ofhis eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He began swallowingspoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, hadcubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat.Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied their pannikins. Fromthe table at Winston’s left, a little behind his back, someone wastalking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like thequacking 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 pushedhis pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand andhis cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be ableto speak without shouting.
‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said. ‘We’regetting the language into its final shape—the shape it’s going to havewhen nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, peoplelike 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’redestroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’recutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’tcontain 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 darkface had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expressionand grown almost dreamy.
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the greatwastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nounsthat can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there arealso the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a wordwhich is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains itsopposite 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 justas 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 therein 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 weuse those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’llbe nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badnesswill be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t yousee the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, ofcourse,’ he added as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mentionof Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lackof enthusiasm.
‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’ he said almostsadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’veread some of those pieces that you write in the Timesoccasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In yourheart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and itsuseless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of thedestruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language inthe 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 thedark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range ofthought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible,because there will be no words in which to express it. Every conceptthat can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, withits meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed outand forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far fromthat point. But the process will still be continuing long after you andI are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range ofconsciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s noreason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question ofself-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be anyneed even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the languageis perfect. Newspeak is INGSOC and INGSOC is Newspeak,’ he added with asort of mystical satisfaction. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston,that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human beingwill be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are havingnow?’
‘Except-’ began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say ‘Except the proles,’ but hechecked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not insome way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about tosay.
‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly. ‘ By 2050earlier, 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, notmerely changed into something different, but actually changed intosomething contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature ofthe Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you havea slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has beenabolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In factthere 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, Symewill be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly andspeaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day hewill disappear. It is written in his face.
Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a little sidewaysin his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his left theman with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. Ayoung woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with herback to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeingwith everything that he said. From time to time Winston caught somesuch 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 othervoice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking.Winston knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him thanthat he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He was aman 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 hewas sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winstontwo blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was thatfrom the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almostimpossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winston caught aphrase-’complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’- jerked outvery rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of typecast 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 bedenouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocitiesof the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes onthe Malabar front-it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could becertain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure INGSOC. As hewatched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down,Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being butsome kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, itwas his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted ofwords, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise utteredin unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoonwas tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The voice from the othertable quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surroundingdin.
‘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 havetwo 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. Hethought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Symedespised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable ofdenouncing him as a thought- criminal if he saw any reason for doingso. There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was somethingthat he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. Youcould not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles ofINGSOC, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hatedheretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal,an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member didnot approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him.He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too manybooks, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Café, haunt of painters andmusicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, againstfrequenting the Chestnut Tree Café, yet the place was somehowill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used togather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it wassaid, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme’s fatewas not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Symegrasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston’s, secretopinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought police. So wouldanybody else, for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was notenough. 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 factthreading his way across the room—a tubby, middle-sized man with fairhair and a froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting onrolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk andboyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, somuch so that although he was wearing the regulation overalls, it wasalmost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the blueshorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizinghim one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled backfrom pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shortswhen a community hike or any other physical activity gave him an excusefor doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery ‘Hullo, hullo!’ andsat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads ofmoisture stood out all over his pink face. His powers of sweating wereextraordinary. At the Community Centre you could always tell when hehad been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat handle. Symehad produced a strip of paper on which there was a long column ofwords, and was studying it with an ink-pencil between his fingers.
‘Look at him working away in the lunch hour,’ said Parsons, nudgingWinston. ‘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 tellyou 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 voluntarysubscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keeptrack of them.
‘For Hate Week. You know—the house-by-house fund. I’m treasurer for ourblock. We’re making an all-out effort—going to put on a tremendousshow. I tell you, it won’t be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn’thave the biggest outfit of flags in the whole street. Two dollars youpromised me.’
Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, whichParsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of theilliterate.
‘By the way, old boy,’ he said. ‘I hear that little beggar of mine letfly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressingdownfor it. In fact I told him I’d take the catapult away if he does itagain.
‘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 aboutkeenness! 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 hertroop was on a hike out Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to gowith her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoonfollowing a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, rightthrough the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed himover 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 beendropped by parachute, for instance. But here’s the point, old boy. Whatdo you think put her on to him in the first place? She spotted he waswearing a funny kind of shoes—said she’d never seen anyone wearingshoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Prettysmart 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 altogethersurprised if—’ Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clickedhis 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 thetelescreen just above their heads. However, it was not the proclamationof a military victory this time, but merely an announcement from theMinistry of Plenty.
‘Comrades!’ cried an eager youthful voice. ‘Attention, comrades! Wehave glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production!Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goodsshow that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per centover the past year. All over Oceania this morning there wereirrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out offactories and offices and paraded through the streets with bannersvoicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life whichhis wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of thecompleted figures. Foodstuffs—’
The phrase ‘our new, happy life’ recurred several times. It had been afavourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attentioncaught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gapingsolemnity, 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 ofcharred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it wasseldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was smoking aVictory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new rationdid not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. Forthe moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listeningto the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared thatthere had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising thechocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, hereflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reducedto twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that,after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowedit easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at theother table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furiousdesire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggestthat last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too-in somemore 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. Ascompared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses,more furniture, more cooking- pots, more fuel, more ships, morehelicopters, more books, more babies—more of everything except disease,crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody andeverything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlierWinston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-colouredgravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it outinto a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture oflife. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this?He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its wallsgrimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables andchairs, 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 badcoffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach andin your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had beencheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he hadno memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he couldaccurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one hadnever had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniturehad always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trainscrowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark- coloured, tea a rarity,coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient—nothing cheap andplentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse asone’s body aged, was it not a sign that this was notthe natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfortand dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness ofone’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the grittysoap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strangeevil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one hadsome kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and wouldstill have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blueoveralls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, asmall, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, hislittle eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy itwas, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe thatthe physical type set up by the Party as an ideal-tall muscular youthsand deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt,carefree—existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he couldjudge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, andill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated inthe Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life,with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faceswith very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish bestunder the dominion of the Party.
The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpetcall and gave way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasmby the bombardment of figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.
‘The Ministry of Plenty’s certainly done a good job this year,’ he saidwith a knowing shake of his head. ‘By the way, Smith old boy, I supposeyou 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 theMinistry’s announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. Forsome reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons,with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face. Within twoyears those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. MrsParsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would bevaporized. O’Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand,would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voicewould never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who scuttle sonimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they, too,would never be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl fromthe Fiction Department—she would never be vaporized either. It seemedto him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who wouldperish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easyto 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 athim. It was the girl with dark hair. She was looking at him in asidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant she caught hiseye she looked away again.
The sweat started out on Winston’s backbone. A horrible pang of terrorwent through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort ofnagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keepfollowing him about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether shehad already been at the table when he arrived, or had come thereafterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes Hate,she had sat immediately behind him when there was no apparent need todo so. Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and makesure whether he was shouting loudly enough.
His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually amember of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spywho was the greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she hadbeen looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and itwas possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. Itwas terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in anypublic place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing couldgive you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habitof muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestionof abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear animproper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victorywas announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There waseven a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.
The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she wasnot really following him about, perhaps it was coincidence that she hadsat so close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, andhe laid it carefully on the edge of the table. He would finish smokingit after work, if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely theperson at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quitelikely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within threedays, but a cigarette end must not be wasted. Syme had folded up hisstrip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket. Parsons had beguntalking again.
‘Did I ever tell you, old boy,’ he said, chuckling round the stem ofhis pipe, ‘about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire tothe old market-woman’s skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausagesin a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with abox 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 theSpies nowadays—better than in my day, even. What d’you think’s thelatest thing they’ve served them out with? Ear trumpets for listeningthrough keyholes! My little girl brought one home the other night—triedit out on our sitting-room door, and reckoned she could hear twice asmuch 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 thesignal to return to work. All three men sprang to their feet to join inthe struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out ofWinston’s cigarette.

[b][size=+2]WINSTON[/b] was writing in his diary:

It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrowside-street near one of the big railway stations. She was standing neara 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 thatappealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright redlips. Party women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in thestreet, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I

For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut hiseyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out thevision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation toshout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang hishead against the wall, to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpotthrough the window—to do any violent or noisy or painful thing thatmight black out the memory that was tormenting him.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At anymoment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into somevisible symptom. He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street afew weeks back; a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, agedthirty-five to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief-case. Theywere a few metres apart when the left side of the man’s face wassuddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened again just as theywere passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as theclicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He rememberedthinking at the time: That poor devil is done for. And what wasfrightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. Themost deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no wayof 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 abasement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on thetable, 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 ofKatharine, 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 basementkitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainouscheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Partyever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so. Only the proles usedscent. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up withfornication.
When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in twoyears or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, ofcourse, but it was one of those rules that you could occasionally nerveyourself to break. It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-deathmatter. To be caught with a prostitute might mean five years in aforced-labour camp: not more, if you had committed no other offence.And it was easy enough, provided that you could avoid being caught inthe act. The poorer quarters swarmed with women who were ready to sellthemselves. Some could even be purchased for a bottle of gin, which theproles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly the Party was even inclinedto encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could notbe altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery did not matter very much, solong as it was furtive and joyless and only involved the women of asubmerged and despised class. The unforgivable crime was promiscuitybetween Party members. But—though this was one of the crimes that theaccused in the great purges invariably confessed to—it was difficult toimagine any such thing actually happening.
The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women fromforming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real,undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Notlove so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well asoutside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by acommittee appointed for the purpose, and—though the principle was neverclearly stated—permission was always refused if the couple concernedgave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. Theonly recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for theservice of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as aslightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This againwas never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbedinto every Party member from childhood onwards. There were evenorganizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocatedcomplete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten byartificial insemination (artsem,it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This,Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow itfitted in with the general ideology of the Party. The Party was tryingto kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then todistort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemednatural 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 yearssince they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. Fordays at a time he was capable of forgetting that he had ever beenmarried. They had only been together for about fifteen months. TheParty did not permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation incases where there were no children.
Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendidmovements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might havecalled noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possiblenothing behind it. Very early in her married life he had decided—thoughperhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew mostpeople—that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, emptymind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her headthat was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely nonethat she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out toher. ‘The human sound-track’ he nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet hecould have endured living with her if it had not been for just onething—sex.
As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embraceher was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange wasthat even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling thatshe was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. Therigidlty of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She wouldlie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but submitting.It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible. Buteven then he could have borne living with her if it had been agreedthat they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it was Katharinewho 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 inthe morning, as something which had to be done that evening and whichmust not be forgotten. She had two names for it. One was ‘making ababy’, and the other was ‘our duty to the Party’ (yes, she had actuallyused that phrase). Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positivedread when the appointed day came round. But luckily no child appeared,and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards theyparted.
Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and wrote:

She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind ofpreliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled upher skirt. I

He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, withthe smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his heart afeeling of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was mixed upwith the thought of Katharine’s white body, frozen for ever by thehypnotic 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 filthyscuffles at intervals of years? But a real love affair was an almostunthinkable event. The women of the Party were all alike. Chastity wasas deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By careful earlyconditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinnedinto them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures,parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling hadbeen driven out of them. His reason told him that there must beexceptions, but his heart did not believe it. They were allimpregnable, as the Party intended that they should be. And what hewanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall ofvirtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act,successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. Even tohave awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have beenlike 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 seemedvery bright. For the first time he could see the woman properly. He hadtaken a step towards her and then halted, full of lust and terror. Hewas painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here. It wasperfectly possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out: forthat matter they might be waiting outside the door at this moment. Ifhe 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 hadsuddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paintwas plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it mightcrack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair;but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a littleopen, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teethat 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 itdown 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 asever.

[i][i][b][size=+2]IF[/b] there is hope[/i], wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.[/i] If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there inthose swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population ofOceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. TheParty could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had anyenemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying oneanother. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly itmight, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble inlarger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in theeyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whisperedword. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious oftheir own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only torise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If theychose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surelysooner 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 atremendous shout of hundreds of voices women’s voices—had burst from aside-street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of angerand despair, a deep, loud ‘Oh-o-o-o-oh!’ that went humming on like thereverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It’s started! he hadthought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he hadreached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred womencrowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic asthough they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But atthis moment the general despair broke down into a multitude ofindividual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had beenselling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things, butcooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supplyhad unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled bythe rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens ofothers clamoured round the stall, accusing the stallkeeper offavouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. Therewas a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with herhair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying totear it out of one another’s hands. For a moment they were bothtugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched themdisgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening powerhad sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was itthat 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 ofthe Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberatedthe proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideouslyoppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, womenhad been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in thecoal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into thefactories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principlesof doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiorswho must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of afew simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. Itwas not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work andbreed, their other activities were without importance. Left tothemselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, theyhad reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, asort 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 weremiddle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavyphysical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels withneighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled upthe horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreadingfalse rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals whowere judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made toindoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirablethat the proles should have strong political feelings. All that wasrequired of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed towhenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours orshorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as theysometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being withoutgeneral ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority ofproles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civilpolice interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount ofcriminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves,bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of everydescription; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, itwas of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed tofollow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was notimposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted.For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted ifthe proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They werebeneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals arefree.’
Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. Ithad begun itching again. The thing you invariably came back to was theimpossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution had reallybeen like. He took out of the drawer a copy of a children’s historytextbook which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copying apassage into the diary:

In the old days [it ran], beforethe glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we knowtoday. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody hadenough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had noboots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children noolder than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters whoflogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them onnothing but stale breadcrusts and water. But in among all this terriblepoverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that werelived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look afterthem. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly menwith 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 afrock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which wascalled a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no oneelse was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in theworld, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, allthe houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyedthem they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job awayand starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalisthe had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address himas ‘Sir’. The chief of all the capitalists was called the King. and

But he knew the rest of the catalogue. Therewould be mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges intheir ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, thecat-o’-nine tails, the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, and the practice ofkissing the Pope’s toe. There was also something called the jus primae noctis,which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. Itwas the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with anywoman working in one of his factories.
How could you tell how much of it was lies? It mightbe true that the average human being was better off now than he hadbeen before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was themute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that theconditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other timethey must have been different. It struck him that the trulycharacteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty andinsecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the liesthat streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that theParty was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Partymember, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging throughdreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock,cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set upby the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world ofsteel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—anation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, allthinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetuallyworking, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million peopleall with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities whereunderfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-upnineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and badlavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, cityof a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of MrsParsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplesslywith a blocked waste-pipe.
He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night thetelescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people todayhad more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations—thatthey lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier,stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the peopleof 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 proleswere literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had onlybeen 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate wasnow only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been300—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 wasforgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed—afterthe event: that was what counted—concrete, unmistakable evidence of anact of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long asthirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been—at any rate, it was at aboutthe time when he and Katharine had parted. But the really relevant datewas seven or eight years earlier.
The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the greatpurges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped outonce and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brotherhimself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors andcounter- revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knewwhere, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while themajority had been executed after spectacular public trials at whichthey made confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors werethree men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in1965 that these three had been arrested. As often happened, they hadvanished for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they werealive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminatethemselves in the usual way. They had confessed to intelligence withthe enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement ofpublic funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intriguesagainst the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before theRevolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundredsof thousands of people. After confessing to these things they had beenpardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in factsinecures 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 ofthem in the Chestnut Tree Café. He remembered the sort of terrifiedfascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of hiseye. They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world,almost the last great figures left over from the heroic days of theParty. The glamour of the underground struggle and the civil war stillfaintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already at that timefacts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their namesyears earlier than he had known that of Big Brother. But also they wereoutlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty toextinction within a year or two. No one who had once fallen into thehands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpseswaiting to be sent back to the grave.
There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wiseeven to be seen in the neighbourhood of such people. They were sittingin silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves which wasthe speciality of the café. Of the three, it was Rutherford whoseappearance had most impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been afamous caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflamepopular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now, at longintervals, his cartoons were appearing in the Times.They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner, and curiouslylifeless and unconvincing. Always they were a rehashing of the ancientthemes—slum tenements, starving children, street battles, capitalistsin top hats—even on the barricades the capitalists still seemed tocling to their top hats an endless, hopeless effort to get back intothe past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, hisface pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one time he musthave been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping,bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking upbefore one’s eyes, like a mountain crumbling.
It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember howhe had come to be in the café at such a time. The place was almostempty. A tinny music was trickling from the telescreens. The three mensat in their corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, thewaiter brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on thetable beside them, with the pieces set out but no game started. Andthen, for perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to thetelescreens. The tune that they were playing changed, and the tone ofthe music changed too. There came into it—but it was something hard todescribe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in hismind Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice from thetelescreen was singing:

[size=-1]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 atRutherford’s ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. Andfor the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yetnot 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 hadengaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release. Attheir second trial they confessed to all their old crimes over again,with a whole string of new ones. They were executed, and their fate wasrecorded in the Party histories, a warning to posterity. About fiveyears after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documentswhich had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when hecame on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in amongthe others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out hesaw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of the Timesof about ten years earlier—the top half of the page, so that itincluded the date—and it contained a photograph of the delegates atsome Party function in New York. Prominent in the middle of the groupwere Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, inany case their names were in the caption at the bottom.
The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that onthat date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secretairfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and hadconferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they hadbetrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston’smemory because it chanced to be midsummer day; but the whole story mustbe on record in countless other places as well. There was only onepossible conclusion: the confessions were lies.
Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that timeWinston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in thepurges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. Butthis was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past,like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys ageological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in someway it could have been published to the world and its significance madeknown.
He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photographwas, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet ofpaper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from thepoint of view of the telescreen.
He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so asto get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your faceexpressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could becontrolled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating ofyour 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 whileby the fear that some accident—a sudden draught blowing across hisdesk, for instance—would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again,he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some otherwaste papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbledinto ashes.
That was ten—eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept thatphotograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in hisfingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when thephotograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory.Was the Party’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because apiece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?
But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from itsashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the timewhen 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 menhad betrayed their country. Since then there had been otherchanges—two, three, he could not remember how many. Very likely theconfessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the original factsand dates no longer had the smallest significance. The past not onlychanged, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with thesense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood whythe huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages offalsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive wasmysterious. 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 himselfwas a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At onetime it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes roundthe sun; today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might bealone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But thethought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror wasthat he might also be wrong.
He picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait ofBig Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed intohis own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down uponyou—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against yourbrain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, todeny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announcethat two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It wasinevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logicof their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience,but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by theirphilosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what wasterrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, butthat they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two andtwo make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past isunchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in themind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?
But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. Theface of O’Brien, not called up by any obvious association, had floatedinto his mind. He knew, with more certainty than before, that O’Brienwas on his side. He was writing the diary for O’Brien—toO’Brien: it was like an interminable letter which no one would everread, but which was addressed to a particular person and took itscolour from that fact.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It wastheir final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought ofthe enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Partyintellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments whichhe would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was inthe 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, wateris wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With thefeeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was settingforth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

[b][size=+2]FROM[/b] somewhere at the bottom of apassage the smell of roasting coffee—real coffee, not VictoryCoffee—came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily.For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of hischildhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptlyas though it had been a sound. He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcerwas throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he hadmissed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you couldbe certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre wascarefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, andwas never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was notworking, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind ofcommunal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste forsolitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightlydangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife,it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this eveningas he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air hadtempted 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-stopand wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east,then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardlybothering in which direction he was going.
‘If there is hope,’ he had written in the diary, ‘it lies in theproles.’ The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mysticaltruth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague,brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been SaintPancras Station. He was walking up a cobbled street of littletwo-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on thepavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes. Therewere puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In andout of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched offon either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers—girls in fullbloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls,and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be likein ten years’ time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayedfeet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and thenscattered at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of thewindows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the peoplepaid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of guardedcuriosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded acrossthelr aprons were talking outside a doorway. Winston caught scraps ofconversation as he approached.
‘ “Yes,” I says to ’er, “that’s all very well,” I says. “But if you’dof been in my place you’d of done the same as what I done. It’s easy tocriticize,” I says, “but you ain’t got the same problems as what Igot.” ‘
‘Ah,’ said the other, ‘that’s jest it. That’s jest where it is.’
The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostilesilence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely akind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of someunfamiliar animal. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a commonsight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in suchplaces, unless you had definite business there. The patrols might stopyou 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 yourusual way home?’—and so on and so forth. Not that there was any ruleagainst walking home by an unusual route: but it was enough to drawattention to you if the Thought Police heard about it.
Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warningfrom all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. Ayoung woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbedup a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, andleapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in aconcertina-like black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, rantowards 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 torocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proleswere nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind.They seemed to possess some kind of instinct which told them severalseconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although the rocketssupposedly travelled faster than sound. Winston clasped his forearmsabove his head. There was a roar that seemed to make the pavementheave; a shower of light objects pattered on to his back. When he stoodup he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from thenearest window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres upthe street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it acloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around theruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement aheadof him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. Whenhe 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 toresemble 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 hewas out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordidswarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing hadhappened. It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which theproles frequented (’pubs’, they called them) were choked withcustomers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening andshutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. Inan angle formed by a projecting house- front three men were standingvery close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-upnewspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Evenbefore he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces,Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It wasobviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was afew paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two ofthe men were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost onthe 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 yearswrote 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 bleedingnumber. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February—second week inFebruary.’
‘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 hadgone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionatefaces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was theone public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It wasprobable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lotterywas the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It wastheir delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectualstimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who couldbarely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations andstaggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made aliving simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winstonhad nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed bythe Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the partywas aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums wereactually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existentpersons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one partof Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on tothat. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when youlooked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it becamean act of faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. Hehad a feeling that he had been in this neighbourhood before, and thatthere was a main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead therecame a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and thenended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley where afew stallkeepers were selling tired-looking vegetables. At this momentWinston remembered where he was. The alley led out into the mainstreet, and down the next turning, not five minutes away, was thejunk-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 hispenholder and his bottle of ink.
He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side ofthe alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to befrosted over but in reality were merely coated with dust. A very oldman, bent but active, with white moustaches that bristled forward likethose of a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winstonstood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eightyat the least, had already been middle- aged when the Revolutionhappened. He and a few others like him were the last links that nowexisted with the vanished world of capitalism. In the Party itselfthere were not many people left whose ideas had been formed before theRevolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the greatpurges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who survived had longago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender. If there wasany one still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditionsin the early part of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenlythe passage from the history book that he had copied into his diarycame 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 oldman and question him. He would say to him: ‘Tell me about your lifewhen you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things betterthan they are now, or were they worse?’
Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he descendedthe steps and crossed the narrow street. It was madness of course. Asusual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles andfrequenting their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to passunnoticed. If the patrols appeared he might plead an attack offaintness, but it was not likely that they would believe him. He pushedopen the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in theface. 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 gameof darts which was going on at the other end of the room interrupteditself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he hadfollowed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation withthe barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man with enormousforearms. 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, straighteninghis shoulders pugnaciously. ‘You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug inthe ’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 halflitre—that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front ofyou.
‘I likes a pint,’ persisted the old man. ‘You could ‘a drawed me off apint easy enough. We didn’t ’ave these bleeding litres when I was ayoung 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’sentry seemed to disappear. The old man’s whitestubbled face had flushedpink. 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. Heappeared not to have noticed Winston’s blue overalls. ‘Pint!’ he addedaggressively to the barman. ‘Pint of wallop.’
The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thickglasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter. Beer was theonly drink you could get in prole pubs. The proles were supposed not todrink 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 thebar had begun talking about lottery tickets. Winston’s presence wasforgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under the window wherehe and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It washorribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in theroom, 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 settleddown behind a glass. ‘A ’alf litre ain’t enough. It don’t satisfy. Anda ’ole litre’s too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone theprice.’
‘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, andfrom the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in thebar-room that he expected the changes to have occurred.
‘The beer was better,’ he said finally. ‘And cheaper! When I was ayoung 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, andhis shoulders straightened again. ‘’Ere’s wishing you the very best of’ealth!’
In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam’s apple made a surprisinglyrapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. Winston went to thebar and came back with two more half-litres. The old man appeared tohave forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full litre.
‘You are very much older than I am,’ said Winston. ‘You must have beena grown man before I was born. You can remember what it was like in theold days, before the Revolution. People of my age don’t really knowanything about those times. We can only read about them in books, andwhat it says in the books may not be true. I should like your opinionon that. The history books say that life before the Revolution wascompletely different from what it is now. There was the most terribleoppression, injustice, poverty worse than anything we can imagine. Herein London, the great mass of the people never had enough to eat frombirth to death. Half of them hadn’t even boots on their feet. Theyworked twelve hours a day, they left school at nine, they slept ten ina room. And at the same time there were a very few people, only a fewthousands—the capitalists, they were called—who were rich and powerful.They owned everything that there was to own. They lived in greatgorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor-cars andfour-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 comeinto my ’ead only yesterday, I dono why. I was jest thinking, I ain’tseen a top ’at in years. Gorn right out, they ’ave. The last time Iwore one was at my sister-in-law’s funeral. And that was—well, Icouldn’t give you the date, but it must’a been fifty years ago. Ofcourse 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 andso forth who lived on them—were the lords of the earth. Everythingexisted for their benefit. You—the ordinary people, the workers—weretheir slaves. They could do what they liked with you. They could shipyou off to Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your daughters ifthey chose. They could order you to be flogged with something called acat-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 solong. 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 Sundayafternoon to ’ear the blokes making speeches. Salvation Army, RomanCatholics, Jews, Indians—all sorts there was. And there was onebloke—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 thebourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class!” Parasites—that was anotherof them. And ‘yenas—’e definitely called ’em ’yenas. Of course ’e wasreferring 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 youhave more freedom now than you had in those days? Are you treated morelike a human being? In the old days, the rich people, the people at thetop—’
‘The ’Ouse of Lords,’ put in the old man reminiscently.
‘The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is, were thesepeople able to treat you as an inferior, simply because they were richand you were poor? Is it a fact, for instance, that you had to callthem “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 showedrespect, like. I didn’t agree with it, myself, but I done it oftenenough. Had to, as you might say.’
‘And was it usual—I’m only quoting what I’ve read in history books—wasit usual for these people and their servants to push you off thepavement into the gutter?’
‘One of ’em pushed me once,’ said the old man. ‘I recollect it as if itwas yesterday. It was Boat Race night—terribly rowdy they used to geton Boat Race night—and I bumps into a young bloke on ShaftesburyAvenue. Quite a gent, ’e was—dress shirt, top ’at, black overcoat. ’Ewas kind of zig-zagging across the pavement, and I bumps into ’imaccidental-like. ’E says, “Why can’t you look where you’re going?” ’esays. 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 shoveas pretty near sent me under the wheels of a bus. Well, I was young inthem days, and I was going to ’ave fetched ’im one, only—’
A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man’s memory wasnothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One could question him all daywithout getting any real information. The party histories might stillbe true, after a fashion: they might even be completely true. He made alast attempt.
‘Perhaps I have not made myself clear,’ he said. ‘What I’m trying tosay is this. You have been alive a very long time; you lived half yourlife before the Revolution. In 1925, for instance, you were alreadygrown up. Would you say from what you can remember, that life in 1925was better than it is now, or worse? If you could choose, would youprefer to live then or now?’
The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He finished up hisbeer, more slowly than before. When he spoke it was with a tolerantphilosophical air, as though the beer had mellowed him.
‘I know what you expect me to say,’ he said. ‘You expect me to say asI’d sooner be young again. Most people’d say they’d sooner be young, ifyou arst’ ’em. You got your ’ealth and strength when you’re young. Whenyou get to my time of life you ain’t never well. I suffer somethingwicked from my feet, and my bladder’s jest terrible. Six and seventimes a night it ’as me out of bed. On the other ’and, there’s greatadvantages in being a old man. You ain’t got the same worries. No truckwith women, and that’s a great thing. I ain’t ’ad a woman for near onthirty 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. Hewas about to buy some more beer when the old man suddenly got up andshuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal at the side of the room. Theextra half-litre was already working on him. Winston sat for a minuteor two gazing at his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feetcarried him out into the street again. Within twenty years at the most,he reflected, the huge and simple question, ‘Was life better before theRevolution than it is now?’ would have ceased once and for all to beanswerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the fewscattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparingone age with another. They remembered a million useless things, aquarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expressionon a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morningseventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range oftheir vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects butnot large ones. And when memory failed and written records werefalsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improvedthe conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there didnot exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which itcould be tested.
At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted andlooked up. He was in a narrow street, with a few dark little shops,interspersed among dwelling-houses. Immediately above his head therehung three discoloured metal balls which looked as if they had oncebeen gilded. He seemed to know the place. Of course! He was standingoutside the junk-shop where he had bought the diary.
A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficiently rash actto buy the book in the beginning, and he had sworn never to come nearthe place again. And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts towander, his feet had brought him back here of their own accord. It wasprecisely against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped toguard himself by opening the diary. At the same time he noticed thatalthough it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still open. Withthe feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging abouton the pavement, he stepped through the doorway. If questioned, hecould plausibly say that he was trying to buy razor blades.
The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which gave off anunclean but friendly smell. He was a man of perhaps sixty, frail andbowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes distorted by thickspectacles. His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy andstill black. His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the factthat he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vagueair of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literaryman, or perhaps a musician. His voice was soft, as though faded, andhis accent less debased than that of the majority of proles.
‘I recognized you on the pavement,’ he said immediately. ‘You’re thegentleman that bought the young lady’s keepsake album. That was abeautiful 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 anythingspecial 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 couldhave satisfied you.’ He made an apologetic gesture with his softpalmedhand. ‘You see how it is; an empty shop, you might say. Between you andme, the antique trade’s just about finished. No demand any longer, andno stock either. Furniture, china, glass—it’s all been broken up bydegrees. And of course the metal stuff’s mostly been melted down. Ihaven’t seen a brass candlestick in years.’
The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, but therewas almost nothing in it of the slightest value. The floorspace wasvery restricted, because all round the walls were stacked innumerabledusty picture-frames. In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts,worn-out chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches thatdid not even pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneousrubbish. Only on a small table in the corner was there a litter of oddsand ends—lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like—whichlooked as though they might include something interesting. As Winstonwandered towards the table his eye was caught by a round, smooth thingthat 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 ofrainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass. At theheart 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 theIndian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in the glass. That wasn’tmade 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’snot many that’d say so nowadays.’ He coughed. ‘Now, if it so happenedthat you wanted to buy it, that’d cost you four dollars. I can rememberwhen a thing like that would have fetched eight pounds, and eightpounds was—well, I can’t work it out, but it was a lot of money. Butwho cares about genuine antiques nowadays even the few that’s left?’
Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid the covetedthing into his pocket. What appealed to him about it was not so muchits beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quitedifferent from the present one. The soft, rainwatery glass was not likeany glass that he had ever seen. The thing was doubly attractivebecause of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it mustonce have been intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in hispocket, but fortunately it did not make much of a bulge. It was a queerthing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in hispossession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, wasalways vaguely suspect. The old man had grown noticeably more cheerfulafter receiving the four dollars. Winston realized that he would haveaccepted 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 alight if we’re going upstairs.’
He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowly up thesteep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into a room which didnot give on the street but looked out on a cobbled yard and a forest ofchimney-pots. Winston noticed that the furniture was still arranged asthough the room were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpeton the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternlyarm-chair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock witha twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under thewindow, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous bedwith the mattress still on it.
‘We lived here till my wife died,’ said the old man halfapologetically. ‘I’m selling the furniture off by little and little.Now that’s a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it would be if youcould get the bugs out of it. But I dare say you’d find it a little bitcumbersome.
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. Thethought flitted through Winston’s mind that it would probably be quiteeasy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take therisk. It was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon asthought of; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, asort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what itfelt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an openfire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterlyalone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you,no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking ofthe clock.
‘There’s no telescreen!’ he could not help murmuring.
‘Ah,’ said the old man, ‘I never had one of those things. Tooexpensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. Nowthat’s a nice gateleg table in the corner there. Though of course you’dhave 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 alreadygravitated towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish. Thehunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the samethoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was veryunlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a bookprinted earlier than 1960. The old man, still carrying the lamp, wasstanding in front of a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on theother 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 ofan oval building with rectangular windows, and a small tower in front.There was a railing running round the building, and at the rear endthere was what appeared to be a statue. Winston gazed at it for somemoments. It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember thestatue.
‘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 yearsago. It was a church at one time, St Clement Danes, its name was.’ Hesmiled apologetically, as though conscious of saying something slightlyridiculous, and added: ‘“Oranges and lemons,” say the bells of StClement’s!’
‘What’s that?’ said Winston.
‘Oh—”‘Oranges and lemons’, say the bells of St Clement’s.” That was arhyme 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 armsdown and caught you. It was just names of churches. All the Londonchurches were in it—all the principal ones, that is.’
Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It wasalways difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anythinglarge and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, wasautomatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, whileanything that was obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dimperiod called the Middle Ages. The centuries of capitalism were held tohave produced nothing of any value. One could not learn history fromarchitecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues,inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets—anything that mightthrow 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’vebeen put to other uses. Now, how did that rhyme go? Ah! I’ve got it!

[size=-1]‘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, alongsidethe picture gallery. A building with a kind of a triangular porch andpillars in front, and a big flight of steps.’
Winston knew the place well. It was a museum used for propagandadisplays of various kinds—scale models of rocket bombs and FloatingFortresses, waxwork tableaux illustrating enemy atrocities, and thelike.
‘St Martin’s-in-the-Fields it used to be called,’ supplemented the oldman, ‘though I don’t recollect any fields anywhere in those parts.’
Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an even moreincongruous possession than the glass paperweight, and impossible tocarry home, unless it were taken out of its frame. But he lingered forsome minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered,was not Weeks—as one might have gathered from the inscription over theshopfront—but Charrington. Mr Charrington, it seemed, was a widoweraged sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years.Throughout that time he had been intending to alter the name over thewindow, but had never quite got to the point of doing it. All the whilethat they were talking the half-remembered rhyme kept running throughWinston’s head. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clement’s, Youowe 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 actuallyhearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhereor other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple afteranother he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he couldremember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.
He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so asnot to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before steppingout of the door. He had already made up his mind that after a suitableinterval—a month, say—he would take the risk of visiting the shopagain. It was perhaps not more dangerous than shirking an evening atthe Centre. The serious piece of folly had been to come back here inthe first place, after buying the diary and without knowing whether theproprietor of the shop could be trusted. However—!
Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy further scrapsof beautiful rubbish. He would buy the engraving of St Clement Danes,take it out of its frame, and carry it home concealed under the jacketof his overalls. He would drag the rest of that poem out of MrCharrington’s memory. Even the lunatic project of renting the roomupstairs flashed momentarily through his mind again. For perhaps fiveseconds exaltation made him careless, and he stepped out on to thepavement without so much as a preliminary glance through the window. Hehad even started humming to an improvised tune —

[size=-1]‘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. Afigure in blue overalls was coming down the pavement, not ten metresaway. It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with darkhair. The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizingher. She looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on asthough she had not seen him.
For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move. Then he turned tothe right and walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that hewas going in the wrong direction. At any rate, one question wassettled. There was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying onhim. She must have followed him here, because it was not credible thatby pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the sameevening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometres distant from anyquarter where Party members lived. It was too great a coincidence.Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply anamateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly mattered. It was enoughthat she was watching him. Probably she had seen him go into the pub aswell.
It was an effort to walk. The lump of glass in his pocket bangedagainst his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it outand throw it away. The worst thing was the pain in his belly. For acouple of minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did notreach a lavatory soon. But there would be no public lavatories in aquarter like this. Then the spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.
The street was a blind alley. Winston halted, stood for several secondswondering vaguely what to do, then turned round and began to retracehis steps. As he turned it occurred to him that the girl had onlypassed him three minutes ago and that by running he could probablycatch up with her. He could keep on her track till they were in somequiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone. The pieceof glass in his pocket would be heavy enough for the job. But heabandoned the idea immediately, because even the thought of making anyphysical effort was unbearable. He could not run, he could not strike ablow. Besides, she was young and lusty and would defend herself. Hethought also of hurrying to the Community Centre and staying there tillthe 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 lightswould be switched off at the main at twenty-three thirty. He went intothe kitchen and swallowed nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin. Then hewent to the table in the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out ofthe drawer. But he did not open it at once. From the telescreen abrassy female voice was squalling a patriotic song. He sat staring atthe marbled cover of the book, trying without success to shut the voiceout of his consciousness.
It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The properthing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some peopledid so. Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But itneeded desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, orany quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thoughtwith a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain andfear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertiaat exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. He might havesilenced the dark-haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: butprecisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the powerto act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fightingagainst an external enemy, but always against one’s own body. Even now,in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutivethought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seeminglyheroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torturechamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for arealways forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills theuniverse, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screamingwith pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or coldor sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
He opened the diary. It was important to write something down. Thewoman on the telescreen had started a new song. Her voice seemed tostick into his brain like jagged splinters of glass. He tried to thinkof O’Brien, for whom, or to whom, the diary was written, but instead hebegan thinking of the things that would happen to him after the ThoughtPolice 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 ofsuch things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine ofconfession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor andscreaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth, andbloody clots of hair.
Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Whywas it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobodyever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess. When onceyou had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given dateyou 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 imageof 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. Theplace where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which onewould never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mysticallyshare in. But with the voice from the telescreen nagging at his ears hecould not follow the train of thought further. He put a cigarette inhis mouth. Half the tobacco promptly fell out on to his tongue, abitter dust which was difficult to spit out again. The face of BigBrother swam into his mind, displacing that of O’Brien. Just as he haddone a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of his pocket and looked atit. The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind ofsmile was hidden beneath the dark moustache? Like a leaden knell thewords came back at him:

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