Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Part One
[size=+2]IT WAS 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:

[size=+2]AS 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:

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.

[size=+2]IN 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.