1984

George Orwell

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

* Chapter One *

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were
striking thirteen. Winston Smith,
chhiisn nuzzled into his
breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly
enough to prevent a swirl of grittyfrodmu with him.
ntering along
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large fodrispilnadyo,or had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wtihdeeface of a man of about
forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the
lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom anwdo
tking,
present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours.

It was part of the

economy drive in

preparation for Hate Week.

The flat was seven

flights up, and

Winston, who was thirty-nine

and had a varicose ulcer above his anrkilgeh,twent slowly,
resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the
lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the
wall. It was one of those pictures which are so the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was readinglisotuof figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an ombeltoanlgplaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the
right-hand wall. Winston turned a swaintdcthe voice sank
tchoanttrived a
somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The
instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completmeolvye.d ovHer
to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his
body merely emphasized by
btlhuee overalls which were the
uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt

razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even througthhe shut window-pane, the world
looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were
whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and thteh
unh
was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, excetphte posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every
commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately
opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the captionwhislaeid, the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at
streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped
fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the
single word INGSOC. In the far disat
icopter skimmed
down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a
bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windowsp.atrTohles
did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron thaenoverfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and
transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston
ambaodvee,
the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained wtihteh
ield of vision
which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as
heard. There was of course no way of knowing yowuhwe e being watched at any given moment. Howoften, or on what
system, the Thought Police plugged ianny iondividual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your
wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct in-the assumption that every
sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turnedthettelescreen. It was
safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A
kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white abtohveegrimy landscape. This, he
thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this wasLondon , chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the
provinces ofOceania . He tried to sqouuete
ome childhood
memory that should tell him whetherLondon had always been quite like this. Were thaelrweays these vistas of rotting
nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of
timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls siang
lng
directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled
in the air and thewillow-herb straggled over the heaps of
rubble; and the places where the
hbaodm
leared a larger
patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden
dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, hneot could remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no backgroundmosatnldy
unintelligible.

The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak* -- was
startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidalstructure of glittering white concrete,
soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possirbelaed, ptiocked
out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministryof Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered aboLuotndon there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwatrhfe surrounding architecture that
from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of
them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries
between which the entire apparatus of goverwnamse
ivided.
The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine aTrhtesMinistry of
Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. thAenMinistry of Plenty,
which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in
Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

The Ministry of Love

was

the really frightening one.

There

were no windows in it

at

all. Winston had never been

inside the

Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre ofwasiat. It
place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire
entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nEevsetns. the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards ibnlack uniforms, armed with jointed
truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features
into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to
wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed thientor
tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he wtahsat aware
there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured
bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourlesswitlhiaquid plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly,
oily smell, as of Chinese ricespirit. Winston poured out nearly
a teacupful, nerved himself for a sahnodc like a dose of medicine.
ulped it down
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes.The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in
swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of
the head with a rubber cTlhuebnext moment, however, the
burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more
cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked

VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it uprwihgehrte,upon
the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a
small table that stood to the left of the telescretehne. From

table drawer he took out a penholder, a

bottle of ink,

and a

thick, quarto-sized blank book with a cover.

redandba mkarbled

For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in
an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in
the end wall, where it could command the whole roomi,n
it was
the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in wWhiincshton was now sitting, and
which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to
hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able retmoain outside the range of the
telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course,
but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography rooofm thtahte
had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawerw.as aItpeculiarly beautiful
book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of
a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, thatbootkhwas much older
than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quartetrhe toofwn (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelmidnegsire to possess it. Party
members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it cawlalsed), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as
shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quicukp angdladnocwen
the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conswcainotuisng of
it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing writtietn, itinwas a
compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary.
This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since thenroe were longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain
that it would be punished by death, or at
tlweeanstty-fbiyve
years in a forcedlabour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the
penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. waTshan
pen
archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had
procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply
because of a feeling that the beautiful
pcarpeearmdeserved
to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he nowtaused to writing by
hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite which wacsourosfe impossible
for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and

then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gonehisthrough bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 198.4

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had
descended upon him. To begin with, hneot kdniodw with any
certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he
believed that he had been born inor 19454; but it was

never possible nowadays to

pin down any date within a

year or

two.

For whom, it suddenly

occurred to hwiomndetro, was he

writing this diary? For the

future, for the unborn. His

mind

hovered for a moment round the doubtful date paogne, atnhde
then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word

doublethinkFor the first time the magnitude of what he

had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Eitfhuetrurethe
would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen
to him: or it would be different from would be meaningless.
hiits,preadnidcament
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military muswiacs. It curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of
expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that
he had originally intended to say. For weeks
hpaadsbeenhe
making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual
writing would be easy. All he hdaodwastoto transfer to
paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running
inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however,
even the monologue had dried up. Morheiosv
aricose ulcer
had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because
if he did
istoalways became inflamed. The seconds were
ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of

the page in front of him, the

itching of

the skin

above his

ankle, the blaring of the by the gin.

music, and

a slight

bcoaouzsiendess

Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly
aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, sheddingitsfirst capital letters and finally even its full stops:

April4th, 1984 .Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good onaeshiopf full of refugees being bombedsomewhere in theMediterranean . Audience much amused by

shots of a great hugemanf

rying to swim away with a

helicopterafter him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters

gunsights, then he was full of anhdo

sea round him

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 a lifeboat off

ildren with a helicopter

hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been ajewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three

years old in her arms. littlsecrebaomying with fright and hidinghis head between her breasts as if he was trying to

burrow right into her and the woman putting her ahrimms round andcomforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up aass pomsuscihble as if she

thoughther arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them fltaesrhrific

andthe boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up rightthe auipr ainto helicopterwith a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applaustehe pfarrotmy seats but a

womandown in the prole part of the house suddenly started

kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter

iotf showed

notin front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of

kids it aint until the police turned her turned

dhoenrt

out i

supposeanything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never

Winston stopped writing, partly becausewashsuffering
from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this
stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that
wwahsile he
doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it
down. It was, he now realized, because oofthetrhincident
that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministarnyy,thiinfg so nebulous could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records
Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs
out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes
Hate. Winston was just taking his place
oifntheonmeiddle
rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never
spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One
woafs athem
girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her
name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department.
Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen heorilyw
nds
and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of
the novel-writing machines. She
aw old-looking girl, of
about twenty- seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and
swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the
shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very
first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean- mindedness which she manacgaerdry to
about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially

the young and pretty ones. It was always theandw
all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the
Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and
nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangetrhoaunsmost. Once when
they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong
glance which seemed to pierce right into him
aa omenftor
had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a
peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up inweliltasas hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the
Inner Party and holder of some sop
portant and remote
that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round theas tcheayirs
saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neccokarsaen,d a humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he
had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his
spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming -- in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which,
if anyone had still thought in such terms, migrhetcalhlaevde
an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston
had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years.
He felt deeply drawn to him,nota
olely because he was
intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's physique. Much morewasibecause of a
secretly held belief -- or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope -- that O'Brien's politiocratlhodoxy was not perfect.
Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again,
perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy watsh
ritten in his
face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talskomethoow if
you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to vtehriisfguess: indeed,
there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced at
his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Depaurnttmielnthe
Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as
Winston, a couple of places away. A
ssamnadlyl-,haired woman
who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine runninwgithout oil, burst from the big
telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set

one's

teeth on

edge and bristled

the hair at theoneb'asck

of

neck.

The Hate

had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the
People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audienTchee.little sandy-haired woman
gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the

renegade and backslider wohnoce, long ago (how long ago,
nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big hiBmrsoetlhfe,rand
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and
disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from
day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. Hweas the primal traitor, the earliest
defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies,
deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or
other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protectihoins forfeign
paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place inOceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. coHueld never see
the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white
hair and a small goatee beard -- a clever face, and yet somehow
inherently despicable, with a kind of senile sililni
ess
long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and thteoo,voice,
had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual
venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party -- an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have beteon able
see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other peolpelses,level-headed than
oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he wasdenouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was
demanding the immediate conclusion of peace withEurasia , he
was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thoughhetwas crying hysterically
that the revolution had been betrayed -- and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody haobfitutahle
style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the whiloen,e shloeusltd
be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behinhdis head on the telescreen there
marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army -- row after
row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surfoafcthe screen and vanished, to be
replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's
bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds,
uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half
the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep
ekeon
the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army
behind it, were too much to be
bbeosrindee:s, the sight or
even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hmaotrreeconstant than

either Eurasiaor Eastasia, since whenOceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peatchee otwhietrh.
But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a tthiomuessand
a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridichuelleddup
to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in
spite of all this, his influence
sneeevmeerd to grow less.
Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A
day never passed when spainedssaboteurs acting under his
directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the
commander of a vast shadowy aarnm
nderground network of
conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The
Brotherhood, its name wsauspposed to be. There were also
whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which
circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without
a title. People referred to it,
ailfl, saitmply as the

book.But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhonoodr thebook was a

subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate toraosferenzy. People
were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voiciensan effort to drown the maddening
bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy- haired woman had turned bright pink, and her moouptehninwgas
and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy
face was flushed. He was sitting very stirna
shtchair,
his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assaulta waovfe. The dark-haired girl
behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it
at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounctehde voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting wtihtehothers andkicking his heel
violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing
off;
about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was oabcltiged to a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Withitnhirty seconds any pretence was always
unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a
sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people
like an electric current, turning one even against one's will
into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the raognee felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be
switched from onoebject to another like the flame of a
that
blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but,theocontrary, against Big
Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments
his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the

screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in
oaf liweosr.ld
And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people
about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemetdo
to him
be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to toawner up, invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against
the hordes ofAsia , and Goldstein, in sphiitseisolfation,
his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very
existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capabtlhee by mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of
civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to
osnwei'tsch hatred
this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the
pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeiend
ransferring his
hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl
behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his
mind. He would flog her to death
rwuibtbher taruncheon. He
would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows
like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated hehra.tedHher because she was
young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round hseurpplseweet
waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm,
there was only the odious scarlet chastity.
asgagsrhe,ssive symbol of
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, andan ifnosrtant the face
changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into
the figure of a Eurasian soldier who
tsoe
emeaddvancing,
huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to
spring out of the surface of the screen,
ssoome otfhatthe
people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their
seats. But in the same moment, drawing
saighd
feprelief
from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big
Brother, black-haired, blackmoustachio'df,ull of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the
screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely
a few words
eonfcouragement, the sort of words that are
uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually
but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoketnh.e
Then
face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to perssiesvteraflor
seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on
everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The

little sandyhaired woman had flhuenrgself forward over the
back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms towards the
screen. Then she buried her face in her hands.appIatrenwtas that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a
deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B! . . .
oBv-eBr!and--
over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first
'B' and the second-a heavy, murmurous sound, scoumreihoouwsly
savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as
much as thirty seconds they kept it up. Irtefrwaaisn thaat
was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it
was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and ofm
gesBtryother,
but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes coHualtde he
not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human
chanting of 'B- B! . . . B-B !' always filled
hhoirmrorw.ith
Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, wiansstiannctive reaction.
But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactlayt this moment that the significant thing
happened -- if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He hadtaken off his spectacles and was in the act of
resettling them on his nose
hwiistcharacteristic gesture.
But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew-yes, he

knew !-that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as

himself. An unmistakable message had passed. Iats thwoausgh
their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from
one into the other through their eyes. 'I am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to himk.now'precisely what you are
feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don't worry, I aymouroside!' And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as
inscrutable as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whehtahder it happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they
did was to keep alive in him the belief,
tohrat ohtohper,s
besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the
rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all -- perhaps the Brotherhood really existed ! It was impoisnsible,
spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to
be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There evwiadsencneo, only
fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches
of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls -- once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the
hand which had lookaesdthough it might be a signal of

recognition. It

was

all guesswork: very likely he had imagined

everything. He

O'Brien again.

had

The

gone back to his cubicle without atlooking

idea of following up their momentary contact

second, two seconds, they had exchaanngequivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a
memorable event, in the locked loneliness in whihcahd tone live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while
he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. Anidt was no longer the same cramped,
awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals

DOWN

WITH

BIG

BROTHER

DOWN

WITH

BIG

BROTHER

DOWN

WITH

BIG

BROTHER

DOWN

WITH

BIG

BROTHER

DOWN

over

WITH

and

BIG

over

BROTHER

again, filling half a page.

He could not heflepeling a twinge of panic. It was
absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of openidnigaryt,hbut
for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, becauksneew thheat it was
useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he
refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whetwheenrt he
on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He
had committed -- would still have commietvteendif he had
never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.
Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, evyeenarsf,obut
sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rosuhgahkinhgand your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majocraisteys thoefre
was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the nigYhotu.r name was removed
from the registers, every record of everything you had ever
done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You weraebolished, annihilated: vaporized
was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:

theyllshoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the

back of the neck i dont care down with big braoltwhaeyrs

they

shootyou in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother

He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started viTohleernetly.
was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after aattseimnpgtl.eBut
no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping ldirkuem, baut his face,
from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards the door.

x x x

As he put his hand to the door-knob
sWaiwn he
had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have
done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had ntoot wanted smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was
wet.
He drew in his breath and otpheen
oor. Instantly a
warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colourless,
crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair alnidnedaface, was standing outside.
'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, 'I thought I heard you come in. Do yyoouu cotuhlidnk come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It's got
blocked up and-'
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neoing
eousrame
floor. ('Mrs' was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party
-- you were supposed to call eve'rcyoomnreade' -- but with
some women one used it instinctively.) She was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that
there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her
down the passage. These amatreeuprair jobs were an almost
daily irritation. Victory Mansions were old flats, built in
1930 or thereabouts, and were fallinpgiecteos. The plaster
flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there watshe snow, heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motoifveconomy. Repairs,
except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window- pane for two years.
'Of course it's only because isTno'mt home,' said Mrs
Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in

a different way. Everything had a battterraemdp,led-on look,
as though the place had just been visited by some large violent
animal. Games impedimenta -- hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves. a
burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts
itnusrindeedout --
lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.theOwalls were
scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual
boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was
shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which-one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how was the sweat of some person not present at the moment. In anothseormeornoeom
with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune
with the military music which was still issuing from the telescreen.
'It's the children,' said
PMarrssons, casting a half-
apprehensive glance at the door. 'They haven't been out today. And of course-'
She had a habit broefaking off her sentences in the
middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt worse thanof ceavbebrage.
Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. He
hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was
always liable to start helplessly.
choiumghing. Mrs Parsons looked on
'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,' she said.'He loves anything like that. He's ever so good with his hands, Tom is.'
Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at Mitnhiestry of
Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms -- one of those completely
unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more evenon thean
Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At
thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth
League, and before graduating itnhteoYouth League he had
managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post
for which intelligence was not required, but on thehanodther he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes,
spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would infyoorumwith quiet pride,
between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at
the Community Centre every evening for the past four years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him whaebroeuvter he
went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
'Have you got a spanner?-said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the angle-joint.
'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming
invertebrate. 'I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children -' There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the
comb as the children charged into the living-rooPma.rsoMnrss

brought the spanner. Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.
'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had
uppo
behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two yoyuenagresr, made
the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirtsr,ed naencdkerchiefs
which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so victihoeus was
boy's demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.

'You're a traitor!' yelled the

boy.

'You're a

thought-

criminal! You're a Eurasian you, I'll send you to the

spy!

salt

I'll shoot mines!'

youv,apoIr'ilzle

Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting
'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!' tlhiettle girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly
frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs whicshoonwill
grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating
ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite edveisdiernet
tohit or
kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big
enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a hereal pistol was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again.In the better light of the
living-room he noticed with interest that there actually

wadust in the creases of her face.

'They do get so noisy,' sasihde. 'They're disappointed
because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is. I'm too busy to take them. and Tom won't be back from work in time.'
'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roabroeydinthe 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, wbeere to hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This
happened about once moanth, and was a popular spectacle.
Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He took his
leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit tohfehisback
neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot

wire had been jabbed into him. He

spun

rouinndtimjeustto

see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back the boy pocketed a catapult.

into

the doorway while

'Goldstein!' bellowed the boy as the door ocnlhoisme.d

But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on
the woman's greyish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen
and sat down at the table again, still
hriusb
k. The
music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped

military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between lceland and the Faroe lslands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched muwsotman
lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would
be watching her night
daanydfor symptoms of unorthodoxy.
Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations Spaises they
were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in thetmendneoncy whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected witThhe siotn.gs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, thyeelling of slogans, the worship of Big
Brother -- it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemtihees of State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs,
thought-criminals. It was almost normal for peoplethiorvteyr
to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passedwhiicnh TheTimes did not
carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak -- 'child hero' was phtrhaese generally used -- had
overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to
the Thought Police.
The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked up his pen half-heartedlwyo,ndering whether he could find
something more to write in the diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O'Brien again.
Years ago -- how long was it? Seven years it must be -- he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-darAknd room. someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where thenroedariksness.' It was
said very quietly, almost casually -- a statement, not a
command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was
that at the time, in the dream, thehadw
tdsmade much
impression on him. It was only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He counlodw renmoetmber
whether it was before or after having the dream that he had
seen O'Brien for the first time, nor could he rememhbeer when had first identified the voice as O'Brien's. But at any rate
the identification existed. It was O'Brienhadw him out of the dark.
poken to
Winston had never been able to feel sure -- even after
this morning's flash of the eyes it was still imposbseible to sure whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatlTyh.ere was a link of understanding
between them, more important than affection or partisanship.
'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.
The voice from ttheelescreen paused. A trumpet call,
clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly:

'Attention! Your attention, please ! A newsflasthhishas moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South
India have won a glorious victory. I am authorizedthatto say
the actionwe are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash -'
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a
Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners,
came the announcement that, as from weneekx,tthe chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.
Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a
deflated feeling. The telescreen -- perthoa
elebrate the
victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate -- crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thYeoeu'were supposed to
stand to attention. However, in his present position he was invisible.
'Oceania, 'tisfor thee' gave way to lighter music.
Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the
telescreen. The day was still
acnodlclear. Somewhere far

away a rocket bomb

exploded with a dull, reverberating roar.

About twenty or

thirty of them a week were falling on London

at

present.

Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and
fro, andthe word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished.
Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink,
the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering
in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world
where he himself was the monster. He was Thael
was
dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way
of knowing that the dominiontheoParty would not endure

for eve

ike an answer, the three slogans on the white
face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, intiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed,
and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even
from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the
covers of books, on banners, on posters,
tahnedwraopnpings
of a cigarette Packet -- everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or woarwkaikneg,or
eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed -- no escape. Nothing was your own except thceubifcecentimetres
inside your skull.
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the
Ministry of Truth, with the light no
slhoinngienrg on them,
looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shaIptewas too strong, it
could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter

it down. He wondered again for whom he was thwer y.
For the future, for the past -- for an age that might be imaginary. Andin front of him there lay not death but
annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the ThouPgohltice would read what he had
written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeatlhe ftuoture when not a
trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?
The telescreen strucfkourteen. He must leave in ten
minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely utgtheorsitng a truth that
nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making
yourself heard but by staying
tshaanteyou carried on the
human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is

free, when men are different from one anothernota

ivedo

alone -- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:

Fromthe age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, fraogme ofthdeoublethink -- greetings !

He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that
it was only now, when he had begun to be able tohisformulate thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: though death.

Scrime
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became
important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained. It was exactly thoef dektianidl
that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a
woman, probably: someone like the little sandy- haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Departmmiegnhtt)start
wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval,
why he had used an oldfashioned

whpaetn,

hehad been
writing -- and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed tahweay wiintkh
the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like
sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It wuasseleqsusite
to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discoverheadi.r laAid across
the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he
picked up an identifiable grain of whitishandd
posited
it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved.

x x x

Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He must, he thought, have beenor etleenven years old
when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movemaenndtmagnificent 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 evmiudsetntly 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, exacseapttiny, 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, wamsoviintgself
downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There waasir isntill
the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the greenwhiwcahters
in another moment must hide them from sight for ever. He was
out in the light and air while they were beindgowns
ocked
death, and they were down th

cause he was up here.

He knew it and they knew it, and he could see thein knowledge their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in
their hearts, only the knowledge that theydiem
nstorder
that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things.
He could not remember what had happenedh,e knbeuwt in
his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his
sister had been sacrificed to his Itowa
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
ytehairrstago,
had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the atnicmiee,nt
to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood anboytheornwithout
needing to know the reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, wwhaesntooheyoung
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 thinsgasw,, he could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and
pain, but no dignity of emotion, noor cdoemeplex 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 standionngshort springy turf, on a
summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the
ground. The landscape that he was looking at recuorfrteedn so
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 mhoelreeh
there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swayinfgainvtelryyin 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 simnogvleement she tore off her
clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him,he bianrdeleyd
looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for thgeesture with which she had thrown her
clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culturaewhole system of thought, as
though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could
all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid
omfovement
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 fortheara-nsplitting whistle
which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought sevenfifteen, 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 caonunpuoanlsly,
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 minuTtheesnext moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always
attacked him soon after waking Itu
mptied 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 cought,he vaanrdicose 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 forfo
he 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 meOne, two,three, four! One,two,
three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it!

Onetwo, three fourOne two, three, fou.r.!

.'
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of
Winston's mind thiempression made by his dream, and the

rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat. As he
mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing faocne
his
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 lsohsatrpnietsss. You
remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents wibtehionugtable 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 definiterleymember a time when his
country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interovfapeace during his childhood,
because one of his early memories was of an air raid which
appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it
twiamse
the
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, dodwonw
nto 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 hsatdop atnod rest. His
mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way
behind them. She was carrying his baby sister -- orit perhaps
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,sitwteirneg
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 bya busnikd.e on
The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his face was scahrilset and eyes were blue and full of tears. He reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in plsawceeat,oand 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
uannbdearable. In his childish way
Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgivenessand could never be remedied, had just
happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the omladn loved -- a little granddaughter,
perhaps had been killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:
'We didn't ought to 'tarvuested '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 whichbuggers 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 beseanme wtahre.
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 thpeeriwohdo,lto
say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been
utterly impossible, since
wnroitten record, and no spoken
word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the
existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1i9t8was(if
1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with
Eastasia. Inno 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 itk
sw,
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
hhaeppened to possess because his
memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was wiatth
war
Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and

it followed that

any pastfutourre agreement with him was

impossible.

The frightening

thing, he reflected for the ten

thousandth

time ashe forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands
on hips, they were gyrating their bfordoimethe waist, an
exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) -- the frightening thing was that it mighbte traulel. If the
Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or
that event,it never happened-- that, surely, terrifying than mere torture and death?
mwoarse
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance
with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania hiand been alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in hciosnscoiwonusness,
which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -riefcoradlsltold
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 contthreo
ast.' And
yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now trwuaesfrom everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories oyvoeurr 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 labywroirnltdhine

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 impossitbhlaet
and
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
tpor
it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the
process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consctioously induce unconsciousness, and then, onceagain, to become
unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even
to understandthe word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's see whiocfhus can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades.

Onetwo! One- two! . . .'

Winston loathed this exercise, which
ssheonotting pains
all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughifnigt. The half-pleasant quality
went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actdueasltlryoyed. 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
mheenatridon of Big Brother. He
thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but it was impossible tboe certain. In the Party histories, of
course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploibtesen had gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties atnhdirttihees, when
the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great glmeoatmoirn-gcars 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 itsceolmfe inhtaod
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 miSsotm.etimes, indeed, you
could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party hbiosotkosr,ythat the
Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing.wasThere
never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary prooftheofalsification
of an historical fact. And on that occasion
'Smith !' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen.
'6079 Smith W.! Ye

ou! Bend lower, please! You can do

better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please!

That'better, comrade. Now staantdease, the whole squad, and watch me.'

A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His faceremained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay!
Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyegsivecould you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and -- one couslady grnaoctefully, but
with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and tucked
the first joint of her fingers under her toes.

'There,comrades! That'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 a'gYaoiunsee my knees
aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added as she straightened herselufp. 'Anyone under forty- five is
perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't all have the
privilege of fighting in the front line,
lbeuatst waet can
all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just thinkthewyhat
have to put up with. Nowagatirny. That's better, comrade, that's much better,' she added encouragingly as Winston,
with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees
unbent, for the first time in several years.

x x x

With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the
nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started, Winston pulledspetahkewrite towards
him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clitpopgeedther 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 oTroifices.
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
laarrmg,e obalong
slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the
disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thoorusands tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. Froerasosnome they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any
document was due for destruction, or even when onsecraspaw a
of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift
the flap of the nearest memory hole and
idnr,owherietupon
it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhertehe riencesses 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 4tyhpquarter 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 feelionfgsatisfaction 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 oThe 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 anothewras tihtought necessary to
alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For
example, it appeared fr

he Times ofthe seventeenth

of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day,
had predicted that the South Indian
wforuolndtremain quiet
but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in
North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian
CHoimgmhaenrd 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 watyo makse him predict the
thing that had actually happened. Or a

ein,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 containsetdateament of
the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance groswsrloyng. Winston's job was to
rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third messagree,ferirted to a very
simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as FebruaryM,initshtery 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,
Waisnston was aware, the chocolate
ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was neededsubwsatsituttoe
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of

The Timeand pushed them into the pneumatic

tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message annodtesany
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 noufmbeTheTimes
had been assembled and collated, that number would be
reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corcroepcyted placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous
alteration was applied not only to newspabpuetr
books,
periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or
documentation which might conceivabhloyld any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was broughtto duapte. 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 ofn
eds
moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactloyfteansas
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, conssiismtpeldy 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

Timeswhich might, because of changes in political

Thoef

alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have
been rewritten a dozen times still stood
foinlest
earing
its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten agaiangaiann,dand
were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the wriintstternuctions 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 itnecweasssary 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. material that you were dealing with had no connexion with
tMhoest of
anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics weraes mujcuhsta
fantasy in their original version as in their rectified
version. A great deal of the timweerey
xpected 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 ouwtapsugiven 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
nneoarer the truth than fiftyseven
millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been

produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how mbaeneyn
had
produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots wperroeduced 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-wionr
hich, finally,
even the date of the year had become uncertain.
Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the otherside a small, precise-looking, dark-
chinned man named Tillotson was working steadily away, with a
folded newspaper on his knee and his moutchlosvee
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 spectadcalretsed a hostile flash in
Winston's direction.
Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he was employed on. People in the RDeecpoarrdtsment did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long, windowless hall, with its double row cuobficles 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 thfercorriindors
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 vaporizweedre tahnedrefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vapocroiuzpelde ofa
years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual,
dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very
ehaarisrand 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.
tAhnids hall, with its fifty
workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as iwtere, in the huge complexity of the Records
Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers
engaged in an unimaginable multitude of
Tjhoebrse.were the
huge printingshops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios fofrakitnhge
of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its
engineers, its producers, and
tietasms of actors specially
chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose wajsosimply 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 wecroepies 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 wmhaidcehit 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
ointlsyealf
single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the pbausttto supply the citizens of
Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels -- weivtehry conceivable kind of
information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a
slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the
aand from
Ministry had not only to supply the multifariousof tnheeds
party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whoolfe chain separate departments dealing with proletarian literature,
music, drama, and entertainment generally.
wHeerreeproduced
rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensationfailve-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kkianldeidoofscope
known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section --

Pornose

itwas called in Newspeak -- engaged in

producing the lowest kind of pornography,

which

was

sent out in

sealed packets and which no Party member, worked on it, was permitted to look at.

other

than

those who

Three messages had slid out ofpnetuhmeatic tube while
Winston was working, but they were simple matters, and he had disposed of them before the Two MinutesintHeartreupted him.
When the Hate was over he returned to his cubicle, took the
Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, putshheespeakwrite to
one side, cleaned his spectacles, and settled down to his main job of the morning.
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

geuxicdeept you

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 ofThe Times leading articles, whiwcehre
written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlieIrt.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 ThDeaTimeisn
of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent personRse.write 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, seietmed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an organization known as FFCC, which

supplied cigarettes and other comforts tosaitlhoers in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a prominent member of the Inner Party, had sibnegelned out for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous
Merit, Second Class.
Three months later FFCC had suddenly dibseseonlved with no reasons given. One could assume that Withers and his associates were now in disgrace, but there hando rebpeoernt
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
eovren publicly denounced. The great purges
involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminalswho made abject confession of their
crimes and were afterwards executed, were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than oncea coiunple 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 whathaphpaedned to them. In some
cases they might not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally known to Winstonno,t 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 Tillowtassostill crouching secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his head for a
moment: again thheostile spectacle-flash. Winston wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged on the same job as himself. It was perfectly possible. So tricky aof wpoirekce
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 verrisviaolns of what
Big Brother had actually said. And presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select vetrhsiison or that, would
re-edit it and set in motion the complexprocesses of
cross-referencing that would be required, and thteh
hosen
lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.
Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it was fcoorrruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordinate. Perhaps Withers or someone close to him hasduspbeecetned of
heretical tendencies. Or perhaps -- what was likeliest of all
-- thething 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 ttohe becasewhen people
were arrested. Sometimes they were released and allowed to
remain at liberty for as much as
oar twyoeayrears before
being executed. Very occasionally some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a grheoasptpleyarance at
some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of others
by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever. Withers,

however, was already

uanperson. He did neoxtist: he

had never existed. Winston decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse the tendency of Big Brother's speweacsh. It better to make it deal with something totally unconnected with
its original subject.
He might turn the speech intousutahledenunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to inveanvictory 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 remaidnydmade
as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in hecrioriccumstances. 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. Ittruweathat there
was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print
and a couple of faked photographs existence.
swooounlbring him into
Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him anbdegan dictating in Big Brother's familiar
style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a
trick of asking questionsand then promptly answering them
('What lessons do we lefarronm 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 Ogilvryefuhsaedd 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 trboeoepnleader. At
eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing aconversation which appeared to him to have
criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district
organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. Atteenni
e had
designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry
of Peace and which, at its first t
dalk,illed thirtyone
Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twenty-three he had perished in action. Pursued by enemyplajneets while flying over the Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his machine gulneapatnout of the
helicopter into deep water, despatches and all -- an end, said
Big Brother, which it
iwmapsossible 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 recreaetxicoenpst a daily
hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a familyinctoompabteible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty. He had no subjects of conversation except the principleIsngsoofc, 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: iennd htehedecided
against it because of the unnecessary cross-referencing that it would entail.
Once again he glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle. Something seemetdo 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 hisComorwand.e Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck him as
curious that you could create deadbutm
ot living ones.
Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now
existed in the past, and
ownhceenthe act of forgery was
forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

x x x

In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground,luntchhe
queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and
deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of
stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallicwhiscmhe id
not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.
'Just theman I was looking for,' said a voice at
Winston's back.
He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but
there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that
of others. Syme was a philologisstp,eciaalist in Newspeak.
Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition ofNewtshpeeak Dictionary.
He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, onacte mournful and derisive,
which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.
'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got anbyladreasz,o'r 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 for months past. At any giventhemroem
some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it wbausttons, sometimes it was darning
wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor
blades. You coulodnly get hold of them, if at all, by

scrounging more or less furtively on the 'free' market.
'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added untruthfully.
The queue gave another jerk forwAasr
hey halted he
turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.
'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yestsearidday?' 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. 'yIou,k'now
the eyes seemed to say, 'I see through you. I know very well why you didn'gto to see those prisoners hanged.' In an
intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfactionheloifcopter raids
on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from ssuucbhjects and entangling him, if
possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.
'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently. 'I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together.to sIeelike
them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking
right out, and blue a quite bright blue. That's the detail that appeals to me.'
'Nex', please!' yelled the white-apropnreodle with the ladle.
Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On to eachwas dumped swiftly the regulation lunch -- a metal
pannikin of pinkish-grey stew,hunak of bread, a cube of
cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.
'There's a table over there, under that telescsraeiedn,' Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin on the way.'
The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded their way across the crroowodmeand unpacked
their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one corner of

which someone had left a pool

of a fsitletwh,y liquid mess

that had the appearance of vomit. gin, paused for an instant to

Winston took up his mug of collect his nerve, and gulped

the

oily-tasting stuff down. When he had winketdeartshout of
his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He began
swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in itasm sloppiness, had cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was
neral
probably a preparation of meat. Neiotfh
hem spoke again
till they had emptied their pannikins. From the table at
Winston's left, a little behind his back, swoamseto rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the
lking
quacking of a duck, which piercedgentehreal 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 hadbrightened up immediately at the mention of
Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, upt
hunk of
bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table soto baes able to speak without
shouting.
'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said.
'We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape
it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you willto lheaavren it all
over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But nobtit oaf it! We're destroying
words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to botnhee. The Eleventh Edition
won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.'
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallcoowuepdle oaf mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark face had become animateedy,es haids
lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.
'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of
course the great wastage is in the anvde
jectives, but
there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there alasroethe antonyms. After
all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the
opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance.youIhave a word like
"good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will
do just as well -- better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is nOortagain, if you want a stronger
version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string
of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "
doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course
we use those forms already. but in the final version of
Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end thneotiwohnole
of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that,
Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as
an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mentionof Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately
detected a certain lack of 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've read some of those thpaite write in The Timesoccasionally. They're good
enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, wiatlhl its vagueness and its useless
shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the

destruction of words. Do you know Netwhsapteak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?'
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled,
sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme

bit off

another fragment of the

dark-coloured bread, itchewed

briefly,

'Don't

and went on:

you see that the whole

aim of Newspeak is to narrow

the rangeof thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime
literally impossible, because there will be no inw ch
to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactlone word, with its meaninrgigidly
defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and
forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewearnd twhoerds,
range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing
thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there wona'nty nebed even
for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is
perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newshpeead ed
with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very laatest, not single human being will be alive who could understand such a
conversation as we are having now?'
'Except-' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped. It had been on the tip of his tosnagyu'Excteopt the
proles,' but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that
this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
'The proles are not human beings,' hecarsealiedssly. '
By 2050 earlier, probably -- all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literaturtehe poafst will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron -- they'll exist only in Newspveearksions, not merely changed
into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Evleintertahteure of
the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could
you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climattheougohft will
be different. In fact there wilbe no thought, as we
understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep
n-e-edinnogt
conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He iisntetloloigent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear.wriIttteniin
his face.
Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a
little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the
table on his left the man witshtritdheent voice was still

talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with herto Wbiancskton, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with
everything that he said. From time to time Winstonsomceaught
such remark as 'I think you

ore

right, I

sdo

agree withyou', uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an
instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston kmnaenw the
by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held
some important post in the Fiction Department. He waosf
a man
about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sittinhgi,s spectacles caught the light and
presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was thfartom the stream of sound that
poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish
a single word. Just once Winston caught a phrase-'complete and final elimination of Goldsteinismj'e-rked out very rapidly
and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quackquack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually heatrhe mwahnatwas
saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature.
He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be
fulminating against the atrocities thoefEurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front-it made no difference. Whateivtewas, you could be
certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jawrapmiodvliynup
and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It thweaman'nsot
brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was
coming out of him consisted of words, but it was niont speech

the true sense:

it

was a

noise uttered in

unconsciousness,

like

the quacking of

a

duck.

Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle
of his spoon was tracing patterns in the ofp
The
voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din.
'There is a word in Newspeak,' said 'IS
't know
whether you know i

uckspeak, to quack like a duck. It

is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory
meanings. Applied to
oapnponent, it is abuse, applied to
someone you agree with, it is praise.' Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought
again. He thought it witkhindaof sadness, although well
knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a tchroiumgihnta-l if
he saw any reason for doing so. There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked:
discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could
not say that he was unorthodox. He belietvheedprinciples

of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over
victories, he hated heretics,
mneortely with sincerity but
with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint
air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that
would have been better unsaid, he had read tbooooksm,a frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe/, haunt of painters and
musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe/, yet the plascoemehwoaws
ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen therea,nd years
decades ago. Syme's fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet
it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would hibmetray
instantly to the Thought police. So would anybody else, for
that matter: but Syme more
mtohsatn. Zeal was not enough.
Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said. Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that
bloody fool'. Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory
Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room -- a
tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglikAet
face.
thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and
waistline, but his movements were brisk and bHoiysi
hole
appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so much so that although he was wearing the reguloavteiroanlls, it was
almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the
blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief
Sopfiest.hIn
visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Padrisdo,nindeed,
invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other physical activity gave him an excuse for doiHneggreseot.ed
them both with a cheery 'Hullo, hullo!' and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Bmeoaidssturoef
stood out all over his pink face. His powers of sweating were extraordinary. At the Community Centre coyuolud always tell
when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat handle. Syme had produced a strip of pwahpiecrh thoenre
was a long column of words, and was studying it with an ink-pencil between his fingers.
'Look at himworking away in the lunch hour,' said
Parsons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that you've got
there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect.
Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm sub you forgot to give me.'
ycohua.s
's that
'Which sub is that? said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About a quarter of one's salary haedarmtaorkebde
for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was
difficult to keep track of them.
'For Hate Week. You know -- the house-by-house fund. I'm treasurer for our block. Wem'arkeing an all-out effort --

going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won't be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't havbeiggtehset outfit
of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.'
Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy
notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebotohke,neaitn handwriting of the illiterate.
'By the way, old boy,' he said. 'I hear that little beggar
of minelet fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him
a good dressingdown for it. In fact catapult away if he does it again.
hIim It'odldtake the
'I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,' said Winston.
' Ah, well -- what I mean to say, shows
stphieritr,ight
doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them,
but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and
the war, of course. D'you know what that gilrilt
flemine
did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from
the hike, and spent the wahfotleernoon following a strange
man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the
woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, hihma er to the patrols.'
'What did they do that for?' said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:
'My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent -- might
have been dropped by parachute, for instBauntc
ere's the
point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the

first place? She spotted

he was

wearing

a funonfyshokeisnd

-- said she'd never seen

anyone

wearing

shoes like that

before.

So thechances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a
nipper of seven, eh?'
'What happened to the man?' said Winston.
'Ah, that I couldn't say, of coBuurtsIe.wouldn't be
altogether surprised if-' Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, withloouotking 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 trumpeftloactaeldl

from

the telescreen just above

their

heads. However, it was not

the proclamation of a military victory this time, but merely an
announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.
'Comrades!' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention,
comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now compleotfethe output of all
classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over yetahre. Alplast
over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and
offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing
their gratitude to Big Brother for thehapnpeywlife which

his wise leadership

has bestowed upon us. Here are

some of the

completed figures.

The phrase 'our

Foodstuffs-'

new, happy life' recsuervreerdal times.

It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty.
Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat
listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified
boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they were in some way a cause for satisfacthiaodn. luHgeged
out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of
charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grwaememkes a
it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal.
The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four
cigarettes left. For the moment he hadhiss
rs to the
remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out
of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been
demonstrations to thank Big Brother for ratihsei
hocolate
ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he
reflected, it had been announced
tthhearation was to be

reducedto twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, afotnelry twenty-four hours? Yes,

they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the
stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, witfhuriaous desire
to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest
that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too-in
some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed
it. Was he, the

lone in the possession of a memory?

The fabulous statisticcsontinued to pour out of the
telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more copooktisn,g- more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more
babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzinrgapidly upwards. As Syme had done
earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the tdarbalwei,ng a
long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always bteheins? like
Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen.
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together thyaotu sat with elbows touching; bent
spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy,
grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty cAllowtahyessin
your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a
feeling that you had been cheated of something thhaadta right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately
you
remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that werfeullnof holes,

furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowdehdo,uses falling to pieces, bread dark- coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap plaenndtiful except
synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it nostignathat this was notthe
natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the
discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the ltihfattsnever worked, the
cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastessh?oulWdhone
feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral
memory that things had once been different?
He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if otdhreerswsiesde
than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room,
sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting
suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought
Winston, if you did not look aboutto byeolui,eve that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal-tall muscular
youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt,
carefree -- existed and even predominated. Actually,
asso far
he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that
beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy
men, growing stout very early in life, withlegssh,o
wift
scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small
eyes. It was the type that seemed to fbleosutr dominion of the Party.
der the
The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call and gwaavyeto tinny music. Parsons,
stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took
his pipe out of his mouth.
'The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a good job this year,' he said with a knowing shake of his htehaedway,'By
Smith old boy, I suppose you haven't got any razor blades you can let me have?'
'Not one,' said Winston. 'I've been usinsgamet for six weeks myself.'
lade
'Ah, well -- just thought I'd ask you, old boy.'
'Sorry,' said Winston.
The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Ministrya'nsnouncement, had started up
again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly found
himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her hawiirs
nd the
dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those children would be denouncing herthetThought Police. Mrs Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston
would be vaporized. O'Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the
other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little
beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine

corridors of Ministries they, too, wnoeuvledr be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction
Department -- she would never be vaporized either. It seemed to
him that he knew instinctively who would survive
waonudld who
perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.
At this moment he was dragged out
roefverhiieswith a
violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It was the gdiarrlk hawirt.h She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant schaeught his eye she looked away
again.
The sweat started out on Winston's backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It waaslmogsotnat once,
but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about?
Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come there
afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes
Hate, she had sat immediately behhiimnwhen there was no
apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and make sure whether shhoeutiwnagsloudly
enough.
His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not
actually a member
tohfe Thought Police, but then it was
precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all.
He did not know how longhads
een looking at him, but
perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had nboeten perfectly under control. It was
terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in
any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tuincc,onsacnious look
of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried withit the suggestion of abnormality, of having
something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression
on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced,
for example) was itself a punishable offence. There waas even
word for it in Newspe

cecrime, it was called.

The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not really follohwiimnabout, perhaps it was
coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and heit clariedfully on the
edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, if he
could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the
next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the cellars of the MinisLtorvye wiotfhin three
days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted. Syme had folded
up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.
'Did I ever tell you, old boy,' hechuscakildi,ng round
the stem of his pipe, 'about the time when those two nippers of

mine set fire

to

the old market-woman's skirt because they saw

her wrapping

up

sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind

her and set fire to it with a box of matches.
qBuuirtneed her
badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard! That's a first-ratteraining they give them in the Spies
nowadays -- better than in my day, even. What d'you think's the
latest thing they've served them out with? Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes ! My little brgoiurglht one home
the other night -- tried it out on our sitting-room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much as weiatrhtohtehre
hole. Of course it's only a toy, mind you. Still, gives 'em the
right idea, eh?'
At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. It was the signal to return to work. Almlen stphraeneg to
their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston's cigarette.

x x x

Winston was writing in his diary:

It was three years ago. It was on a dark eavening, in narrowside-street near one of the big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in the walla,struenedterlamp

thathardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very thick. It wraesally the paint that appealed to me, the

whitenessof it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces. Therneobowdayselse in the

street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I

For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his
eyes and pressed his fingers against
ttrhyeimn,g to squeeze
out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a strinfgiltohfy words at
the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to
kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through th-e-
window
to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him.
Your worst enemyh,e reflected, was your own nervous
system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to
translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of a man whom he had passed in the strfeeewtweeaks back; a quite
ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five to
forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief-case. They were a few
metres apart when the left side of the man's
sfuadcdeenlwyas
contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened again just as they
were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: That poor dedvoinle foirs.
And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly
unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your
sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, shoe could see.
far as

He drew his breath and went on writing:

Iwent with her through the doorway and across a

backyard into a basement kitchen. There wasagaainsbtethe

wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She

His teeth were set on edge. He would have liked to spit. Simultaneously withthe woman in the basement kitchen he
thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married -- had been
married, at any rate: probably he still was married, so far as
he knew his wife was not dead. He seemed toagabirne
ehe
warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and dirctlyothes and villainous cheap scent, but
nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used
scent, or could be imagined as doing so. Opnrloylest
sed
scent. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.
When he had gone with that womhaand beietn his first
lapse in two years or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes
was forbidden, of course, but it was
tohnoese roufles that
you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was
dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be caught with a prostitute might mfeiavne years in a forced-labour
camp: not more, if you had committed no other offence. And it was easy enough, provided that you could avoid beingin caught the act. The poorer quarters swarmed with women who were ready to sell themselves. Some could even be purchasaebottfloer
of gin, which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly the Party was even inclined to encopurroasgteitution, as an
outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery did not matter very muclho,ng asso it was
furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a submerged and despised classT.he unforgivable crime was promiscuity
between Party members. But -- though this was one of the crimes
that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed to -- it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.
The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties whichmigihtt not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all
pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was
the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Partymembers had to be approved by a committee
appointed for the purpose, and -- though the principle was never clearly stated -- permission was arlewfauyssed if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted toone another. The only recognized purpose of
marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party.
Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirecitt wawsayrubbed into
every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which
advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were
to be begotten by artificiinaslemination (artsem,it

was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was menaontt altogether seriously,
but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the
Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it anidt. Hdeirdtiyd
not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And as far aswomtehnewere concerned, the Party's
efforts were largely successful.
He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten --
nearly eleven years since they had parted.
cIutriowuasshow
seldom he thought of her. For days at a time he was capable of
forgetting that he had ever been married.hadT
ly been
together for about fifteen months. The Party did not permit divorce, but it rather encourasgeepdaration in cases where
there were no children.
Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight,
with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline
ffaaccee, a
that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behiVnedry eiatr.ly
in her married life he had decided -- though perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he kpneeowplemost
-- thatshe had without exception the most stupid, vulgar,
empty mind that he had ever encountered. She hatdhoungohtt a
in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the
Party handed it out to her. 'The human sound-track' he
nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing -- sex.
As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embraceher was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And
what was strange wtahsat even when she was clasping him
against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously
pushing him away with all her streTnhget
igidlty of her
muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but

submitting.It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and,

after a while, horrible. But
tehveennhe could have borne
living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough waistKatharine who refused
this. They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So the performance continued to happen, once a week quite
regulariy, whenever it was not impossible. She even used to
remind him of it in the morning, as something wthoi
eh had
done that evening and which must not be forgotten. She had two names for it. One was 'making a baby', and twhaes 'outrher
duty to the Party' (yes, she had actually used that phrase).
Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round. But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon atfhteeyrwards
parted.
Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and wrote:

She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without

any kind of preliminary in the most can imagine, pulled up her skirt. I

hcoorarrisbel,e way you

He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with
the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostriinl is
and
heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that
moment was mixed up with the thought of Katharine's white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the Party.it Why did always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of
his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years?
But a real love affair waaslmoasnt unthinkable event. The women of the Party were all alike. Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By careful early
conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was
dinned into them at school ina
he Spies and the Youth
League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial
music, the natural feeling had been doruitv
them. His
reason told him that there must be exceptions, but his heart did not believe it. They wereimparlelgnable, as the Party
intended that they should be. And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that viwratlule, eovfen
if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act,
successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.
Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have
iatc,hieved
would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.
But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He wrote:

I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light

After the darkness the feeble light opfaratfhfein lamp
had seemed very bright. For the first time he could see the woman properly. He htaadken a step towards her and then
halted, full of lust and terror. He was painfully conscious of
the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible
that the patrols would catch onh
he way out: for that
matter they might be waiting outside the door at this moment.
If he went away without even doing what he had comdeo
-- !
here to
It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed. What hehad suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman
was old. The paint was plastered so
otnh
face
that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful
detail was that her mouth had fallen a opleint,t
evealing
nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all.
He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:

When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fiftyyears old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the

same.

He pressed his fingers against his eyelids
Haeg
dn.
written it down at last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of
his voice was as strong as ever.

x x x

If there is h proles.

te Winston,it lies itnhe
If there was hope, it mustlie in the proles,
because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could theto dfeosrtcreoy
the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown
from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, haodf
no way
coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it
was inconceivable thaitts members could ever assemble in
larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in
the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proliefsonly they could somehow
become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like
a horse shaking off flies. If they chosceoultdh
low the
Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet-!
He remembered how once he had been walking crdoowwdned a
street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women's
voices -- had burst from a side-street a litathleead.w
was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud
'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went humming on like the reverberation of a
bell. His heart had leapt.
sItta'rsted! he had thought. A
riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mobor tohfreetwhoundred
women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the padsosoemnegders on a
sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down
into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of thestalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were
wretched, flimsy things, butcooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpgeicvteendly
out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were
trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stallkeeper of
favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated woomfen, one them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same
saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands.
For a moment they were both tugging, and thhaenndlet
ame
off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had soundtehdat cirny
from only a few hundred throats ! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
He wrote:

Until they become conscious they will never anrdebel,

untilafter they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks. The Party claicmoeudr,se,of
to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the
Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the
capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been
forced to work in the coal mines (women still
idnithework
coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of sixs.imuBluttaneously, true to
the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles
were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like
animals, by the application of a few simple Inr
ity
very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to
know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their
other activities were without importance.
tLoe
hemselves,
like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to
them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up
in the gutters, thweeynt to work at twelve, they passed
through a brief blossoming- period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they
died, for the most part, at sHiexatvyy.physical work, the
care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours,
films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not
ufpi e
difficult. A few agents thoefThought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuawlhso were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate
them with the ideology of the Party. It was not
tdheastirable
the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them waspriamitive patriotism which could be
appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter ratioAnnsd.even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without geniedreaals, they could
only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils
invariably escaped their notice. The great majoofr
oles
did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with thveemry little. There was a vast
amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world
of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; bsuitnce it all happened among the
proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of
morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of tPhaerty was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that
matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the
proles had shown any sign of needing or wantTihnegy weirte. beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and
animals are free.'

Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. It had begun itching agTahienthing you invariably
came back to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution had really been like. He took outdraowfer the
a copy of a children's history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copying a passage into the diary:

In the old

(diatys
ran), beforethe glorious

Revolution,London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It wasdarak, dirty, miserable place where hardly

anybodyhad enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and nrootof teoven a sleepunder. Children no older than you had to work twelve

hours a day for cruel masters who floggweidth wthiepms if theyworked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water.

But in among all this terrible poverty thejruest were

a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men

whohad as many as thirty servants to look after them. These

rich men were called capitalists. They were fat,

wuigtlhy men

wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, aqnudeera, shiny hat shaped like a

stovepipe,which was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, anno one else was allowed to wear it.

The capitalists owned everythingtheiworld, and everyone

elsewas their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses,

all the factories, and all the money. If anyone

tdhiesmobeyed

theycould throw them into prison, or they could take his job

away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, anhdis take off capand address him as 'Sir'. The chief of all the capitalists

was called the King. and

But he knew the resttheocatalogue. There would be
mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in
their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the
cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's Banquet,thea
ractice
of kissing the Pope's toe. There was also something called the

jus primae noct

ich would probably not be mentioned
in a textbook for children.wasIthe law by which every
capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.
How could you tell how much of it was lies? It

mighbe true that the average hbuemianng was better

off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only
evidence to the contrary
twhaesmute protest in your own
bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in
were intolerable and that at some other time they must have
been different. It struck
thhiamt the truly characteristic
thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if
you looked about you, bore no resemblance not onlylietso the
that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals

that the Party was trying to achieve. Great airte,aevenof
for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a
cigarette end. The ideal setby tuhpe Party was something
huge, terrible, and glittering -- a world of steel and
concrete, of monstrous machines
taenrdrifying weapons -- a
nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thouagnhdtshouting the same
slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting
-- threehundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people
shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up
nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbagbead and lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and
ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a
picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.
He reached down and scratched anhkilse again. Day and
night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations -- that they lliovnegder, worked shorter
hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more
intelligent, better educated, than the peoofp
ifty years
ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The
Party claimed, for example, that todapyer c4e0nt of adult
proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. TheclaPiamretdythat the
infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas
before the Revolution it had been 300 -- and so itIt went on. was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very
well be that literally every word ihnisttohrey books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure
fantasy. For all he knew there might never haavney subcehen law as thejus primae noctis,or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.
Everything faded intmoist. The past was erased, the
erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his
life he had possessed

af-t-er the event: that

wwhaast
counted -- concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingearsslonfgor
as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been -- at any rate, it was at about the time when he and Katharine haBdut parted. the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.
The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purgienswhich the original leaders of the
Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of
them was left, except Big Brother himself. All the that time been exposed as traitors and counter-
bryest had
revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding
knnoew one
where, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while
the majority had been executed after spectacular
tpruiballisc

at which they made confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these thbreeeen arhraedsted.
As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so
that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forthinctroiminate themselves in
the usual way. They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Euermabseizaz)l,ement
of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against thleeadership of Big Brother which had
started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of
sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousapnedospleo.f
After confessing to these things they had been pardoned,
reinstated in the Party, and given
wphoiscthswere in fact
sinecures but which sounded important. All three had written long, abject articles in TheTimes, analysing the
reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.
Some time after their release Winston had actually seen
all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe/. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with whichhad whaetched them
out of the corner of his eye. They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient woarllmdo,st the last great figures left over from the heroic days of the Party. The
glamour of the underground struggle thaencivil war still
faintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already at
that time facts and dates
gwreorweing blurry, that he had
known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big
Brother. But also thweeyre outlaws, enemies, untouchables,
doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or
two. No one who had once fallen into the
thhaen
hougohft
Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.
There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise even toseebnein the neighbourhood of such
people. They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves which was the speciality of the cafe/. Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most
impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whosebrutal cartoons had helped to inflame
popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now, at
long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in The

Time

They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner,
and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always they were a rehashing of the ancient the-m-eslum tenements, starving children, street battles, capitalists in top hats -- even on
the barricades the capitalists still seemed to toc ir
top hats an endless, hopeless effort to get back into the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his
face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid liopnse.timAet he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direHcetion.
seemed to be breaking up before one's eyes, like a mountain

crumbling.
It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winstonnotc
wld
remember how he had come to be in the cafe/ at such a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny music was trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat in their corner almost
motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought fresh glasses of gin. Thwearsea chessboard on the table
beside them, with the pieces set out but no game started. And

then, for perhaps

half

a minute in all, sohmaeptpheinnegd to

the telescreens. The the tone of the

tune music

that they were playing changed, and changed too. There came into it -- but

it

was something hard to describe.wasI
peculiar, cracked,
braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
The three men nevsetrirred. But when Winston glanced
again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were
full of tears. And for the first time he noticae
indwith
of inward shudder, and yet not knowing at wh
shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.
A little later all thwreeree re-arrested. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very
moment of their release. At their second thteryi
onfessed
to all their old crimes over again, with a whole string of new ones. They were executed, and their fatreecowradsed in the
Party histories, a warning to posterity. About five years after
this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to whheins desk
he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped
in among the others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significancwea.s aIhtalf-page torn out ofThe Times of about ten years earlier -- the
top half of the page, so that it included
-t-handdiatte
contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function
in New York. Prominent in the middle of thweereg
ones,
Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the caption at the bottom.
The point was thaattboth trials all three men had
confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil.
They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had confewrirtehdmembers of the
Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets.The date had stuck in Winston's memory
because it chanced to be midsummer day; but the whole story
must be on record in countless other places as welwla.s
There
only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.
Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at
that time Winston had not imagined thteh
eople who were

wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that
they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence;a
it was
fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destrgoeyoslogaical theory. It
was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could
have been published to known.
wtohreld and its significance made
He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph was, and what it meanhta,d cohveered it up
with another sheet of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it
had been upside-down from the point of view of the telescreen.
He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face expressionless wasdifnfoitcult, and even
your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you
could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen
was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He letjudwgheadt he

to be ten minutes go

by,

tormented all the while by the

fear

that some accident

--

a sudden draught blowing across

his desk,

for instance -- would betray him. Then, wuintchoovuetring it
again, he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers. Within anmoitnhuetre, perhaps,
it would have crumbled into ashes.
That was ten -- eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept that photograph. It was curioutshe ftahcat of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a
difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the
event it recorded, was only memory. Was the
hPoalrdt on
the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence
which existed no long

ad once existed?

But today, supposing that it could be sroemseuhrorwected

from its ashes, the photograph might

not even

be evidence.

Already, at the time when he

made his

discovery, Oceania was no

longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents

of Eastasia that

the three dead

men had

betrayed their

country.

Since then there

had been other

changes

-- two, three,

he could

not remember how many. Very litkheelconfessions had been
rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance. The past not only
changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with
the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages
of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:

I understa

OW: I do not understanWHY.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was luanatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a
minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round thetodsauyn,;to believe
that the past is inalterable. Hemight bealone in
holding that belief, and if altohneen,
a lunatic. But the
thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.

He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brothwehrich formed its frontispiece. The
hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you -- somethinpgenetthraatted
inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening
you out of your beliefs, persuading you, atlom
the
evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would behlaiveeve itto.
It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Notthemerely validity of experience, but the very existence of external
reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The ofheresy heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might
be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make
four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or
ptahsattisthe
unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itcsoenltfrolilsable what then?
But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The face of O'Brineont,called up by any obvious
association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with more certainty than before, that O'Brien wahsis soinde. He was writing the diary for O'Briento--O'Brien: it was like
an interminable letter which no one would ever read, but which was addressed to a particular person and tocooklouirtfrom
that fact.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart
sank as he thought of the enormous power
aagrarianysetdhim,
the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would abnloettobe
understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They
were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the
true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that!
The solid world exists, its
dloa
ot change. Stones are
hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. Witthhe feeling that he was speaking to
O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom,
he wrote:

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

x x x

From somewhere at the bottom
poafssaage the smell of
roasting coffee -- real coffee, not Victory Coffee -- came
floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For
perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotteonf
world

his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his
varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three
weeks that he had missed an evening at the Communitya
Centre:
rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a
Party member had no spare time, and was neveerxceaplto
bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be takpianrgt in some kind of communal
recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude,
even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly
dangerous. There was a word for it in Ne e,
it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this
evening as he came out of the Mitnhies
lminess of the
April air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisyat evening the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the
creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had sienetmoelderable. On
impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of Londfoinr,st south, then east, then
north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.
'If there is hope,' he had written in the dilaireys, 'it
in the proles.' The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in
the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north anodf wheatst had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered
doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were
somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobblaensd.outInof
the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off
on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers -- girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouthsy,outahnsdwho
chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years' toilmdebentand creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged
barefooted children who played in the puddlesand then
scattered at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter
of the windows in the street were broken and upb.o
ted
of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded across thelr aprons were talking outside a
doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he approached.
' "Yes," I says to 'er, "that's all very well," I says. "But if you'd of been in my place ydooun'edtheofsame as
what I done. It's easy to criticize," I says, "but you ain't got the same problems as what I got." '
'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. it is.'
jTehsatt
here
The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied

him in hostilseilence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of unsfoammeiliar animal. The
blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a
street like this. Indeed, it was utnow
eseseen in such
places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols
might stop you if you happened to rutnhemi.n
May I see
your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time did
you leave work? Is this your usual way home?' --
aanndd so on
so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking home by
an unusual route: but it was enough to draw attention to you if the Thought Police heard about it.
Suddenly the whole street
iwnacommotion. There were
yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt oudtoorowfay a
little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapatgaibna,call
in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like
black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards
Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.
'Steamer!' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'Bnaonrg!over'ead! Lay down quick!'
'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the
proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly hifmlsuenlgf
on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed to possess some kind of
instinct which told them several seconds in advance when a
rocket was coming, although
rtohcekets supposedly travelled
faster than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a
shower of light objects pattered on to his back. stWohoedn he up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolisghreodup oaf houses
200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in whicwhas a crowd
saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand wacsompsloetely whitened as to
resemble a plaster cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid
the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was outthe aorfea which the bomb had
affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going
on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops whitchhe proles frequented ('pubs',
smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting house- front thrmeeen were standing very close
together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper

which the other twweore studying over his shoulder. Even
before he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces, Winston could see absorptiinoevery line of their
bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few paces away frwohmen stuhdedmenly
the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almotshte poinnt 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 'ol'eem flort of
over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down reg'lar as the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in
seven-'
'Yes, a seve'as won! I could pretty near tell you
the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ine.n
February -- second week in February.'
tedwere in
'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white. An' I tell you, no number-'
'Oh, pack it in!' said the third man.
They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone thirty metres. They wereargsutiinlgl, with
vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out
of enormous prizes, was
otnheepublic event to which the
proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were
some millions of proles for whom the Lottery
pwraisncitphael
if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate
calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole
tribe of men who maa
iving simply by selling systems,
forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was manatgheedMinbiystry
of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Onlysumssmall
were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another,
this was not difficult to arrange.
But if there was hope, it lay in the Yopur cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded
dest.o
had been in this neighbourhood before,thaatnthere was a
main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead there came
a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley
where a few stallkeepers were selling tired-looking vegetables.
At this moment Winston remembered where he waasl.leyT ed

out into the main street, and down the next turning, not five
minutes away, was the junk-shop where he had thbeo nk
book which was now his diary. And in a small stationer's shop
not far away he had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.
He paused for a moment at the
tthoepsteopfs. On the
opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to be frosted over but in realimteyrelwyere coated with dust. A very old man, bent but active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a pupsrhaewdn,
open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, whboe eimguhsty at the
least, had already been middle- aged when the Revolution
happened. He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism. In the Party itself there were not many people whloesfetideas had been
formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the fifstiixetsiesa,nd
and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender. If thwearseany one still
alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in
the early part of
ctehnetury, it could only be a prole.
Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into his diary came back into Winsmtionnd',sand a lunatic
impulse took hold of him. He would go into the pub, he would
scrape acquaintance with that
moalndand question him. He
would say to him: 'Tell me about your life when you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things better than they
are now, or were they worse?'
Hurriedly, lest he should have time to
fbreicgohmteened,
he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It was
madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles and frequenting their pubsi,t wabsutfar
too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the patrols

appeared he might plead an

attack of faintness, butnotit was

likely that they would believe and a hideous cheesy smell

him. He pushed open the door,

of sour beer hit him in the face.

As

he entered the din of voices dropped to about
Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his blue
vhoallufme.its
overalls. A game of darts which was going onothaetr entdhe
of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty
seconds. The old man whom he had followed was
astt
eding
bar, having some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man with enormous forearkmnso.t ofA
others, standing round with glasses in their hands, were watching the scene.
'I arst you civil enough, didn'tsaiId?the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me you ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer?'
'And what in hell's namea pinst?' 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. an'dLitre
half litre -- that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf in front of you.
'I likes a pint,' persisted themano.l'You could 'a
drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.'
'When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,' said the barman, with a glance at the other customers.
There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused by Winston's entry seemed to disappear. The old man's
whitestubbled face had flushed pink. He turned away, muttering to himself, and bumped into Winston. Winston caugghetntlhyim
by the arm.
'May I offer you a drink?' he said.
'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening his
shoulders again. He appeared not to have noticed Winston's blue overalls. 'Pint!' he added aggressively to the barman. 'Pint of wallop.'
The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thick glasses whichhe had rinsed in a bucket under the
counter. Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs.
The proles were supposed not to drink gin, int
tice
they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of darts was
in full swing again, and the knot of men athadt
egunbar
talking about lottery tickets. Winston's presence was forgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man could talk without fear of being oIvterheard.
was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen
in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in. "E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as
he settleddown behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And 'oale litre's too much. It starts my
bladder running. Let alone the price.'
'You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,' said Winston tentatively.
The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of tahsethoGuegnhts,
it were in the bar-room that he expected the changes to have occurred.
'The beer was better,' he said finally. 'And cheaper! When
I was a young man, mild beer -- wallop wecaluls
--to
was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.'
'Which war was that?' said Winston.
'It's all wars,' said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. "Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!'
In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam's maadpepale
surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. Winston went to the bar and came back with two more
half-litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full litre.
'You are very much older than I am,' said Winston. 'You

must have been a grown man before I was born.remYeomubercan
what it was like in the old days, before the Revolution. People
of my age don't really know anything about those times. We can
only read about them in books, and what
iintthesabyosoks
may not be true. I should like your opinion on that. The history books say that life before the Revolution was
completely different from what it is now. There was the most terrible oppression, injustice, poverty worse than anywtehing
can imagine. Here in London, the great mass of the people never
had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them hadn't even boots on their feet. They worked twelve hours a day, they left school at nine, they slept ten in a room. And attimtehe same
there were a very few people, only a few thousands -- the capitalists, they were called -- who riwcehrand powerful. They owned everything that there was to own. They lived in
great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rodein about motor-cars and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore top hats-'
The old man brightened suddenly.
'Top 'ats!' he said. 'Funny you should mention 'em. The
same thing come into my 'ead only yesterday, I donwoas why. I
jest thinking, I ain't seen a top 'at in years. Gorn right out, they 'ave. The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law's funeral. And that was -- well, I couldn'ytou tghievedate,
but it must'a been fifty years ago. Of course it was only 'ired
for the occasion, you understand.'
'It isn't very important about the top hats,' said Winston patiently. 'The point is, these capitalists -- they and a few lawyers and priests and so forth who lived on themthe-- were lords of the earth. Everything existed for their benefit. You
-- the ordinary people, the workers -- were their Thselyaves. could do what they liked with you. They could ship you off to Canada like cattle. They could swlietehpyour daughters if
they chose. They could order you to be flogged with something called a cat-o'-nine tails. You had to take yoofufrwhecnap
you passed them. Every capitalist went about with a gang of lackeys who-'
The old man brightened again.
'Lackeys !' he said. 'Now therew'osrd Ia ain't 'eard
since ever so long. Lackeys! That reg'lar takes me back, that
does. I recollect oh, donkey's years ago -- I used to sometimes go to 'Yde Park of a Sunday afternoon to 'ear the blokes making speeches. Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews, Indians -- all
sorts there was. And there was one blwoeklel, I--couldn't give you 'is name, but a real powerful speaker 'e was. 'E didn't 'alf give it 'em! "Lackeys!" 'e "lsaacykse,ys of the
bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class!" Parasites -- that was another of them. And 'yena'se de-f-initely called 'em
'yenas. Of course 'e was referring to the Labour Party, you understand.'
Winston had the feeling that they were talking at crosspurposes.
'What I really wanted to know was this,' he said. 'Do you

feel that you have more freedom now than you had in those days? Are you treated more like a human being? In datyhse, thoeld
rich people, the people at the top-'
'The 'Ouse of Lords,' put in the old man reminiscently.
'The House ofLords, if you like. What I am asking is, were these people able to tyroeuaas an inferior, simply
because they were rich and you were poor? Is it a fact, for
instance, that you had to call them "Sir" and take off your cap when you passed them?'
The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off about a quarter of his beer before answering.
'Yes,' he said. 'They liked you to touch your'emc.ap to
It showed respect, like. I didn't agree with it, myself, but I
done it often enough. Had to, as you might say.'
'And was it usual -- I'm only quotinIg'vew
ad in
history books -- was it usual for these people and their
servants to push you off the pavement into the gutter?'
'One of'em pushed me once,' said the old man. 'I
recollect it as if it was yesterday. It was Boat Race night --
terribly rowdy they used to get on BoantighRta
and I
bumps into a young bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue. Quite a gent,
'e was -- dress shirt, top 'at, black overcoat. 'E ofwas kind zig-zagging across the pavement, and I bumps into 'im
accidental-like. 'E says, "Wchayn't you look where you're
going?" 'e says. I say, "Ju think you've bought the bleeding pavement?" 'E says, "I'll twist your bloody 'ead off if you get
fresh with me." I says, "You're drunk. I'll givechayrogue in
in 'alf a minute," I says. An' if you'll believe me, 'e puts
'is 'and on my chest and gives me a shove
naesar spernetty
me under the wheels of a bus. Well, I was young in them days, and I was going to 'ave fetched 'im one, only-'
A sense of helplessness thooolkd of Winston. The old
man's memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One could question him all day without getting any real
information. The party histories might still be true, after a
fashion: they might even be completely attempt.
Hter
de a last
'Perhaps I have not made myself clear,' he said. 'What I'm
trying to say is this. You have been alive a very long time;
you lived half your life before the RevolIunt
5, for
instance, you were already grown up. Would you say from what you can remember, that life in 1925 was better thnaonw, it is
or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to live then or
now?'
The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He
finished up his beer, more slowly than before. When he spoke it was with a tolerant philosophical air, as thoubgeher htahde
mellowed him.
'I know what you expect me to say,' he said. 'You expect
me to say as I'd soboen
oung again. Most people'd say
they'd sooner be young, if you arst' 'em. You got your 'ealth

and strength when you're

young. When you

get to my time of life

you ain't never well. I

suffer something

wickemdy feferto,m

and my bladder's jest terrible. Six and seven times a night it
'as me out of bed. On the other 'and, therea'dsvangtraegaets
in being a old man. You ain't got the same worries. No truck with women, and that's a great thing. I ain'wtoma'nafora
near on thirty year, if you'd credit it. Nor wanted to, what's more.'
Winston sat back against the window-sillw.as nIot use
going on. He was about to buy some more beer when the old man suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly intsotintkhieng urinal
at the side of the room. The extra half-litre was already working on him. Winston sat for a minute or twaot higsazing empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out into the street again. Within twyeenatrys at the most, he
reflected, the huge and simple question, 'Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?' woulcdeasheadvonce
and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable
even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing onewitahganother. They
remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate,
a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the swirls of dust wionndy maorning seventy
years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of
their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory faiwlreidtteannd
records were falsified -- when that happened, the claim of the
Party to have improved the conditions of human life tohad got
be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted and looked up. He was in a stnraererto,wwith a few
dark little shops, interspersed among dwelling-houses.
Immediately above his head there hung
dtihsrceoeloured metal
balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He seemed to know the place. coOufrse! He was standing outside the
junk-shop where he had bought the diary.
A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a
sufficiently rash act to buy the book in the beginnhieng, and had sworn never to come near the place again. And yet the
instant that he allowed his thoughts to whainsd
et had
brought him back here of their own accord. It was precisely
against suicidal impulses of this kind hetha
hoped to
guard himself by opening the diary. At the same time he noticed that although it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still open. With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside
than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the doorway. If questioned, he copulladusibly say that he was trying to buy razor blades.
The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which
gave off an unclean but friendly smell. He was a man of perhaps
sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nomsiel,d
and
eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white,
but his eyebrows were bushy and
bsltaiclkl. His spectacles,
his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact that he was wearing

an aged jacket
bolfack velvet, gave him a vague air of
intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musiciHains.voice was soft, as though
faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of
proles.
'I recognized you on the pavement,' he said immediately.
'You're the gentleman that boutghhetyoung lady's keepsake album. That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was. Cream- laid, it used to be called. There'sno pbaepeenr like that
made for -- oh, I dare say fifty years.' He peered at Winston over the top of his spectacles. 'Is antyhtehrieng special I
can do for you? Or did you just want to look round?'
'I was passing,' said Winston vaguely. 'I just looked in. I don't want anything in particular.'
'It's just as well,' stahiedother, 'because I don't
suppose I could have satisfied you.' He made an apologetic gesture with his softpalmed hand. 'You see how itempitsy; an shop, you might say. Between you and me, the antique trade's
just about finished. No demand any longer, and no stock either.
Furniture, china, glass it's all been broken up by degrees. And
of course the metal stuff's mostly been melted seen a brass candlestick in years.'
hdaovwenn.'t I
The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, but there was almnoostthing in it of the slightest
value. The floorspace was very restricted, because all round
the walls were stacked innumerable dusty picture-frames. In the window there were trays of nutsbolatnsd, worn-out chisels,
penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even pretend to be goiinng order, and other miscellaneous
rubbish. Only on a small table in the corner was there a litter
of odds and ends -- lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, and
the like -- which looked as though they might include something
interesting. As Winston wandered towards the table hwiass caught by a round, smooth thing that gleamed softly in the
lamplight, and he picked it up.
eye
It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one soinde, flat the other, making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the colotuhre teaxntdure
of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was starange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.
'What is it?' said Winston, fascinated.
'That's coral, that is,' said the old man. 'It must have
come from the Indian Ocean. They used to
ekmibnedd itofin
the glass. That wasn't made less than a hundred years ago. More, by the look of it.'
'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston.
'It is a beautiful thing,' said the apoptrheecriatively.
'But there's not many that'd say so nowadays.' He coughed.
'Now, if it so happened that you wanted to buy icto,st that'd you four dollars. I can remember when a thing like that would have fetched eight pounds, and epioguhntds was -- well, I
can't work it out, but it was a lot of money. But who cares

about genuine antiques nowadays even the few that's left?'
Winston immediately paid over the
dfoolulrars and slid
the coveted thing into his pocket. What appealed to him about
it was not so much its beauty as the air
tiotposseesmsed
of belonging to an age quite different from the present one. The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any glahseshadthat ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its
apparent uselessness, though he could guess thmautst ointce
have been intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in his pocket, but fortunately it did not make much of a bulge. It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to
have in his possessioAnn.ything old, and for that matter
anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. The old man had grown noticeably more cheerful after receiving the four
dollars. Winston realized that he would have acceptedor three even two.
'There's another room upstairs that you might care to take a lookat,' he said. 'There's not much in it. Just a few
pieces. We'll do with a light if we're going upstairs.'
He lit another lamp, and, with
bbaocwke,dled the way
slowly up the steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage,
into a room which did not give on the street but
olnooked out
a cobbled yard and a forest of chimney-pots. Winston noticed thourgohom wtehree
of carpet on the floor,
a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternly arm-chair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a
twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the
window, and occupying nearly a quaorft
he room, was an
enormous bed with the mattress still on it.
'We lived here till my wife died,' said the old man half
apologetically. 'I'm selling the furniture byo
ittle and
little. Now that's a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it would be if you could get the bugs out ofI dairte. saByut you'd find it a little bit cumbersome.
He was holdlng the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room,and in the warm dim light the place looked
curiously inviting. The thought flitted through Winston's mind
that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few
dollars a week, if he dared to take the
wraissak.wilIdt,
impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but the room had awakened in him a snoorsttalogfia, a sort of
ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it
an arm-chair beside an a kettle on the hob;
utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singtihnegketotfle and the friendly ticking of the clock.
'There's no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring.
'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things.
Too expensive. And I never seteom
eel the need of it,
somehow. Now that's a nice gateleg table in the corner there. Though of course you'd have to puhtingneeswon it if you

wanted to use the flaps.'
There was a smallbookcase in the other corner, and
Winston had already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with thseame thoroughness in the prole quarters as
everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed
anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960.
The old man, still carrying the lamp, was standing
oifn front

a picture in a

rosewood

frame

which hung

on

the other

side of

the fireplace,

opposite

the

bed.

'Now, if you happen to be interested in old parlilnts at
-' he began delicately.
Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steel engraving of an oval building with rectangular windows, and a small tower in front. There wraasiliang running round the
building, and at the rear end there was what appeared to be a statue. Winston gazed at it for some moments. It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember the statue.
'The frame's fixed to the wall,' said the old mIan, 'but could unscrew it for you, I dare say.'
'I know that building,' said Winston finally. 'It's a ruin now. It'sin the middle of the street outside the Palace of Justice.'
'That's right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in -- oh, many years ago. It was a chuorncehtimaet, St Clement
Danes, its name was.' He smiled apologetically, as though conscious of saying something slightly ridiculaonudsadded:
'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's!'
'What's that?' said Winston.

'Oh-"Oranges and lemons, say the bells

of St Clement's."

That was a rhyme we had when I was

a little boy. How it goes

on

I don't remember, but I do kneonwdediup, "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 aromust their for you to pass under, and when they came to "Here comes a
chopper to chop off your head" they brought their arms down and
caught you. It was jnuasmtes of churches. All the London
churches were in it -- all the principal ones, that is.'
Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church
belonged. It was always difficult to detetrhmei
ge of a
London building. Anything large and impressive,if it was reasonably new ianppearance, was automatically claimed as
having been built since the Revolution, while anything that was
obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim period
called the Middle Ages. The centuries of capiwtearlei
eld
to have produced nothing of any value. One could not learn
history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorisatlones, the names of
streets -- anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered.
'I never knew it had been a church,' he said.
'There's a lot of them left, really,'thes
d man,
'though they've been put to other uses. Now, how did that rhyme go? Ah! I've got it!

"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's
-- "there, now, that's as far as I can get. A farthing, thatwas a small copper coin,
looked something like a cent.'
'Where was St Martin's?' said Winston.
'St Martin's ? Thats'tsill standing. It's in Victory

Square, alongside the picture gallery. A building with

a kind

of a triangular porch and pillars in front, and a

big flight

of

steps.'

Winston knew the place well.wasI
museum used for
propaganda displays of various kinds -- scale models of rocket bombs and Floating Fortressewsa,xwork tableaux illustrating
enemy atrocities, and the like.
'St Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be called,'
supplemented the old man, 'though I don't recollefciteldasny anywhere in those parts.'
Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an even more incongruous possession tthhaenglass paperweight,
and impossible to carry home, unless it were taken out of its frame. But he lingered for some minutes tamlokrien,g to the
old man, whose name, he discovered, was not Weeks-as one might have gathered from the inscription over the shop- fbruotnt -- Charrington. Mr Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged
sixty-three and haidnhabited this shop for thirty years.
Throughout that time he had been intending to alter the name over the window, but had never quite got to the dopionignt of it. All the while that they were talking the half-remembered
rhyme kept running through Winston's head. Oraanndg
emons
say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say
the bells of St Martin's ! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the
bells of a lost London that still existed soomre r,
disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.
He got away from Mr Charrington and wentthe sdtoawinrs
alone, so as not to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out of the door. He had alreuapdy made his mind that after a suitable interval -- a month, say -- he would take the risk of visiting the shop again.perIhtapswas
not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Centre. The
serious piece of folly had been to come back herfeirsitn the

place, after buying

the

diary

and

without

knowing whether the

proprietor of the

shop

could

be

trusted.

However-!

Yes, he thought again, he would come Heb
ld buy
further scraps of beautiful rubbish. He would buy the engraving of St Clement Danes, take it out of its frame, and carry it
home concealed under the jacket of his overalls. Hderagwould
the rest of that poem out of Mr Charrington's memory. Even the lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed

momentarily through his mind again. For perhaps five seconds exaltation made him careless, andstehpeped out on to the

pavement without so much

as a preliminary glance through

the

window. He had even

started humming to an improvised

tune

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the
Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice
baonwdelshis
to water. A figure in blue overalls was coming down the
pavement, not ten metres away. It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair. The light was failing, but there was no difficulty reicnognizing her. She looked him
straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.
For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed tTohenmove.
he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing
for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction. At any rate, one question wsaesttled. There was no doubting any
longer that the girl was spying on him. She must have followed
him here, because it was not credible that
cbhyancpeu he
should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometres distfarnotm any quarter
where Party members lived. It was too great a coincidence. Whether she was really agaennt of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly
mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she
had seen him go into the pub as well.
It was an effort to walk. The lump of glaspsockient
his
banged against his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it away. The worst thinpgainwas the in his belly. For a couple of minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did not rleaavcahtoray soon. But there
would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this. Then the spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.
The street was a blind alley. Wihnaslttoend, stood for
several seconds wondering vaguely what to do, then turned round
and began to retrace his steps. As he turned it occurred to him that the girl had only passed him three minutes ago and that by
running he could probably catch up with her. He could keep on
her track till they were in some quiet anpdl
en smash
her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of glass in his
pocket would be heavy enough for the job. But he idea immediately, because even the thought of making any
tahbeandoned
physical effort was unbearable. He could not run, hneot could strike a blow. Besides, she was young and lusty and would
defend herself. He thought also of hurtroy
Community
Centre and staying there till the place closed, so as to
establish a partial alibi for the eveBnuitn
hat 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
hweh
ot back to the
flat. The lights would be switched off at the main at

twenty-three thirty. He went itnhteokitchen and swallowed
nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin. Then he went to the table in the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out of the drawer. But he did not open it at once. From the telescreen a brassy female
voice was squalling a patriotic song. He sat staring at the marbled cover of the book, trying without succsehsust thteo voice out of his consciousness.
It was at night that they came for you, always at night.
The proper thing was to
ykoiulrlself before they got you.
Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill
yourself in a world where firearms, oqruicaknand certain
poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear,
the treachery of thhueman body which always freezes into
inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-hagiirreldif only he had
acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of
his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is nfeivgehrting against an external
enemy, but always against one's own body. Even now, in spite of
the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, seienminagllly
heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture
chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body sweulnltsil iutp
fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaminwgith pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a
sour stomach or an aching tooth.
He opened the diary. It was importawnrtitetsomething
down. The woman on the telescreen had started a new song. Her voice seemed to stick into his brain like spjlaigngteedrs of
glass. He tried to think of O'Brien, for whom, or to whom, the diary was written, but instead he began thinking thoifngsthe
that would happen to him after the Thought Police took him away. It would not matter if they killaetdoncyeo.u To be
killed was what you expected. But before death (nobody spoke of
such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone thtrhoeugrovelling on
the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth, and bloody clots of hair.
Why did you have to endure it, sincendtwhaes always
the same? Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks
out of your life? Nobody
eesvcearped detection, and nobody
ever failed to confess. When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given dwaotueld byeou
dead. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time?
He tried with a little more success than besfuomrmeon to up the image of O'Brien. 'We shall meet in the place where
there is no darkness,' O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it
meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness

was the imagined future, which one would never swehei,ch,but
by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. But with the voice from the telescreen nagginghisaears he could not
follow the train of thought further. He put a cigarette in his mouth. Half the tobacco promptly fell out on totnogueh,ias
bitter dust which was difficult to spit out again. The face of
Big Brother swam into his mdiinsdp,lacing that of O'Brien.
Just as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of his pocket and looked at it. The face gazehdim,uheavayt,
calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the
dark moustache? Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

* Chapter Two *

It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory.
A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor. Itthe gwiarsl with
dark hair. Four days had gone past since the evening when he
had run into her outside the junk-shop. As snheearecra e
saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a distance because it was of the coslaomuer as her overalls.
Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of the bigkaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were
'roughed in'. It was a common accident in the Fiction
Department.
They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled
and fell almost flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her. She must have frailglhetnon the injured arm.
Winston stopped short. The girl had risen to her knees. Her
face had turned a milky yellow colour againstherw th
stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.
A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: ofihim,front
also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her.
In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.
'You're hurt?' he said.
'It's nothing. My arm. It'll be all right in a second.' She spoke as though her hweearretfluttering. She had
certainly turned very pale.
'You haven't broken anything?'
'No, I'm all right. It hurt for a moment, that's all.'

She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up.
She had regained some of her coalnodu better.
ppeared very much
'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly. 'I only gave my wrist a bit of a bang. Thanks, comrade!'
And with that she walked on in the direction ishewhich had been going, as briskly as though it had really been
nothing. The whole incident could not tahkaevneas much as
half a minute. Not to let one's feelings appear in one's face
was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in any casethey had been standing straight in front of a
telescreen when the thing happened. Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprisien,thefor
two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand. There was no question that she
had done it intentionally. It was something small anAds
flat.
he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his

pocket and felt

it with

the tips of his fingers.

It

was

a scrap

of paper folded

While he stood

into a at the

square.

urinamlanahgeed, with a little

more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a
message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted
to take it into one of the water-closets and atr
ce.it
But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously.
He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment
of paper casually among the other papers
doensk,t
ut on
his spectacles and hitched the speakwrite towards him. 'five minutes,' he told himself, 'five minutetshe vaetry least!'
His heart bumped in his breast with frightening loudness.
Fortunately the piece
woofrk he was engaged on was mere
routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing close attention.
Whatever was written on the paper, it must hakviend some of political meaning. So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was
an agent of the Thought Police, just as he hadHe dfiedared.

not know why

the

Thought Police should choose

to deliver

their

messages in

such

a fashion, but perhaps they

had their

reasons.

The thing that was written on the paper mai
summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some
hreatb,e a
description. But there waansother, wilder possibility that
kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it.
This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police at all, but from some kind of underground organization. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the girl was part of
it! No doubt the idea was absurd, but spirtungh
nto his
mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his
hand. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other,
more probable explanation had occurred to Anhdi
ven now,
though his intellect told him that the message probably meant death --still, that was not what he believed, and the

unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was
with difficulty that he kept his
fvrooimctrembling as he
murmured his figures into the speakwrite.
He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatictube. Eight minutes had gone by. He re- adjusted his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the neoxft batch work towards him, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He
flattened it out. handwriting:

I love you.

iOtnwas written, in a large unformed
For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating thing into tmheemory hole. When he did so,
although he knew very well the danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading itagaoinnc,ejust to make sure that the words were really there.
For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work. What waseven worse than having to focus his mind on a series
of niggling jobs was the need to conceal his agitation from the
telescreen. He felt as though a fire were burning in his belly.
Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise- filled cwaanst
rment.
He had hoped to be alone for a little while during the lunch hour, but as blaudck would have it the imbecile Parsons
flopped down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating
the tinny smell of stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week. He was particularly enthusiastic
about a papier- ma^che/ model of Big Brother's head, two metres
wide, which was being made for the occashiiosndaubgyhter's
troop of Spies. The irritating thing was that in the racket of voices Winston could hardly hear what Parsonssayiwnags, and
was constantly having to ask for some fatuous remark to be
repeated. Just once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other girls at the far end of tShhee aprpoeoamr.ed
not to have seen him, and he did not look in that direction again.
The afternoon was more bearable. Immediaatfetleyr lunch
there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hours annedcessitated putting everything else
aside. It consisted in falsifying a series of production
reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast discredit on
a prominent member of the Inner Pwahrot
as now under a
cloud. This was the kind of thing that Winston was good at, and for more than two hours he succeeded in shutting the girl out
of his mind altogether. Then the memory of her fbaaccek, came
and with it a raging, intolerable desire to be alone. Until he could be alone it was impossible to think tdheivselonpemwent
out. Tonight was one of his nights at the Community Centre. He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canhtuererni,ed off to
the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group', played two games taobfle tennis, swallowed several
glasses of gin, and sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to chess'. Hiswristohueld with
boredom, but for once he had had no impulse to shirk his
evening at the Centre. At the
osfi
he words Ilove

youthe desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the

taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.
nIott tiwlals
twenty-three hours, when he was home and in bed -- in the darkness, where you were safe even from the telesclroenegn so
as you kept silent -- that he was able to think continuously.
It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to
get in touch with the girl and arrange a
Hmee
dinngo.t
consider any longer the possibility that she might be laying
some kind of trap for him. He knew that it wabsecanuoste of her unmistakable agitation when she handed him the note.
so,
Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, shaes well might be. Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her
skull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no imHpeortance.
thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his
dream. He had imagined her a fool like
raelslt ofthtehem,
her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him! What he
feared more than anything else was that she would simply change
her mind if he did not get in touch with herButq
eckly.
physical difficulty of meeting was enormous. It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated. Whichever way you turned, the telescreen fyaocue.dActually, all the
possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to him
within five minutes of reading the note; but now, wtioth time
think, he went over them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments on a table.
Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this
morning could not be repeated. If she had worked in the Records
Department it might have been comparatively simple,
hbaudt he
only a very dim idea whereabouts in the building the Fiction
Departrnent lay, and he had no pretext for goingIf htehere.
had known where she lived, and at what time she left work, he could have contrived to meet her somewhere on her way home; but to try to follow her home was not safe, bewcoauulsdemeaint
loitering about outside the Ministry, which was bound to be noticed. As for sending a letter through the mails,outit was of the question. By a routine that was not even secret, all
letters were opened in transit. Actually, few people ever wrote
letters. For the messages that it was occasionally necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lipshtrsaseosf,
and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable. In any case
he did not know the girl's name, let alone her address. Finally he decided that the safest place was the canteen. If he could
get her at a table by herself, somewhere in thoef thmeiddle
room, not too near the telescreens, and with a sufficient buzz of conversation all round -- if these condeintdiuornesd for,
say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange a few words.
For a week after this, life was like a restlesOsn
dream.
the next day she did not appear in the canteen until he was leaving it, the whistle having alrbelaodwyn. Presumably she

had been changed on to a later shift. They passed each other without a glance. On the day after that she wacsantienen the
at the usual time, but with three other girls and immediately
under a telescreen. Then for three dreadfulshed
not
appear at all. His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sorttranosfparency, which
made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word
that he had to speak or listen to, an agony.sleEevpehe in
could not altogether escape from her image. He did not touch
the diary during those days. If there was any relief, it was in
his work, in which he could sometimes
hfiomrsgeeltf for ten
minutes at a stretch. He had absolutely no clue as to what had
happened to her. There was no enquiry he could mmaikgeh.t have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she
She
might have been transferred to the other end of
wOocresatnia:
and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.
The next day she reappeared. Her arm was outslionfg
the
and she had a band of sticking-plaster round her wrist. The
relief of seeing her was so
tghraetahe could not resist
staring directly at her for several seconds. On the following day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to hehre.camWehen
into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the
wall, and was quite alone. It was early, and the
npoltace was
very full. The queue edged forward till Winston was almost at
the counter, then was held up for two
bmeicnauutseessomeone
in front was complaining that he had not received his tablet of
saccharine. But the girl was still alone when Winston secured
his tray and began to make for her Het
lked casually
towards her, his eyes searching for a place at some table
beyond her. She was perhaps three metres away from him. Another
two seconds would
idto. Then a voice behind him called,
'Smith!' He pretended not to hear. 'Smith !' repeated the voice, more loudly. It was no use. He turned round. A
blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he
barely knew, was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table. Iwtas not safe to refuse. After having been
recognized, he could not go and sitat a table with an
unattended girl. It was too noticeaHbel
at down with a
friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pircikg-hatxinto
the middle of it. The girl's table filled up a few minutes later.
But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps
she would take the hint. Next day he took care to arrive early.
Surely enough, she was at a table in about the saamned
place,
again alone. The person immediately ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like man wfiltaht face
and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winston turned away from the
counter with his tray, he saw that the malni
slemaking
straight for the girl's table. His hopes sank again. There was a vacant place at a table further awasyo,metbhuitng in the

little man's appearance suggested that he would be sufficiently attentive to his own comfort to choose the emptiest table. With ice at his heart Winston followed. It was no use unless he
could get the girl alone. At this moment there was a tremendous
crash. The little man was sprawling on all fours,
hhaids tray
gone flying, two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across
the floor. He started to his feet with a malignant glance at
Winston, whom he evidently suspected of having trippuepd.
him
But it was all right. Five seconds later, with a thundering heart, Winston was sitting at the girl's table.
He did not look at her. He unpacked his
ptrroamyptlaynd
began eating. It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else came, but now a terrible fear hapdossteaskseinon
of him. A week had gone by since she had first approached him. She would have changed her msihnedmust have changed her
mind! It was impossible that this affair should end
successfully; such things did not happen in real life. He might have flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had not seen Ampleforth, thhaeiry-eared poet, wandering limply
round the room with a tray, looking for a place to sit down. In
his vague way Ampleforth was attached to Winston, and would certainly sit down at his tablhee caiufght sight of him.
There was perhaps a minute in which to act. Both Winston and
the girl were eating steadily. The stuff they were eating was a thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beansl.ow mIunrmuar
Winston began speaking. Neither of them looked up; steadily
they spooned the watery stuff into
mtohuetihrs, and between
spoonfuls exchanged the few necessary words in low expressionless voices.
'What time do you leave work?'
'Eighteen-thirty.'
'Where can we meet?'
'Victory Square, near the monument.
'It's full of telescreens.'
'It doesn't matter if there's a crowd.'
'Any signal?'
'No. Don't come up to me until you see melota
fong a
people. And don't look at me. Just keep somewhere near me.'
'What time?'
'Nineteen hours.'
'All right.'
Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another
table. They did not speak again, and, so far as it was possible
for two people sitting on opposite
osfi
same table,
they did not look at one another. The girl finished her lunch quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to smoke a
cigarette.
Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time. He wandered round the base of the enfolrumtoeudscolumn, at
the top of which Big Brother's statue gazed southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian aer(otphleanes Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years ago) in the
Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of waist there

a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent
Oliver Cromwell. At five minutes pasthoutrhthe girl had still not appeared. Again the terrible fear seized upon Winston. She was not comisnhge,had changed her mind! He
walked slowly up to the north side of the square and got a sort
of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin's Church, whose bells, when it had bells, had chimeodwe m'eYotuhree farthings.' Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or pretending retaod a poster which ran
spirally up the column. It was not safe to go near her until some more people had accumulated. Twheerreetelescreens all
round the pediment. But at this moment there was a din of shouting and a zoom of heavy vehfircolmesomewhere to the
left. Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square.
The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush. Winston followheedran,As
he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian
prisoners was passing.
Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of thesquare. Winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of scsrhiomvmeadg,e,
butted, squirmed his way forward into the heart of the crowd. Soon he was within arm's length of the gitrhle,waybuwtas
blocked by an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to fiomrpmeneatnrable wall of flesh. Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a
violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them. For a
moment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp
between the two muscular hitphse,n he had broken through,

sweating a little.

He was

next to the girl. They were shoulder

to shoulder, both

A long line of

staring trucks,

fixedly in front of them.

with wooden-faced guards armed with

sub-machine guns standing upright in each cowranse
assing
slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in
shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed ovoeurtthe sides of the
trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted
there was a clankclank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons. Truckload after truck-load of the sad pafsasceeds.
Winston knew they were there but he saw them only
intermittently. The girl's shoulder, and her arm rightto
down
the elbow, were pressed against his. Her cheek was almost near enough for him to feel its warmthh.ad iSmhmeediately taken
charge of the situation, just as she had done in the canteen. She began speaking in the same expressionless vobiecfeorea,s
with lips barely moving, a mere murmur easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks.
'Can you hear me?'
'Yes.'
'Can you get Sunday afternoon off?'
'Yes.'
'Then listen carefully. You'll have to remtehmibse.rGo

to Paddington Station-'
With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she outlined the route that he was to follow. A half-hour railway journey; turn left outside the stattiwoonkilometres along
the road: a gate with the top bar missing; a path across a field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes; traee dead with moss on it. It was as though she had a map inside her
head. 'Can you remember all that?' she murmured finally.
'Yes.'
'You turn left, threinght, then left again. And the gate's got no top bar.'
'Yes. What time?'
'About fifteen. You may have to wait. I'll get there by another way. Are you sure you remember everything?'
'Yes.'
'Then get away from me as quick as you can.'
She need not have told him that. But
mfoomrentt
hey
could not extricate themselves from the crowd. The trucks were
still filing post, the people still insatiably gAatp
eg.
start there had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, asnodon shtaodpped.
The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners,
whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were
oaf stkrianndge
animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners onneevergot more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanwgaerd-craisminals: te others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps.
The round Mogol faces had given way to faces of a more European
type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby
cheekbones eyes looked into Winston's, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an
end. In the last truck he could see
maann, haigsedface a
mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him, as thoughwerheeused to having them bound
together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part.
But at the last moment, while the crowd stillthehme
,ed
her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped togethheard.timHe
to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long
fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh utnhdeewrist. Merely from
feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the same instant
it occurred to him that he did not know what colour the girl's eyes were. They were probably brown, but people wihtahir dark
sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her would
have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, sttahreeyd steadily in
front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of
the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

x x x

Winston picked his way up the lane tdharpopulgehd light

and shade, stepping out into

pools of

gold wherever the

boughs

parted. Under the trees to

the left

of him the ground

was misty

with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss one's swkaisntheIt
second of May. From somewhere deeper in the heart of the wood came the droning of ring doves.
He was a bit early. There had bdeiefnficnuolties about
the journey, and the girl was so evidently experienced that he was less frightened than he would normally have been.
Presumably she could be trusted to find a safe place. In
general you could not assume that you werseafemru
the
country than in London. There were no telescreens, of course,
but there was always the daonfg
oncealed microphones by
which your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey by yourself without attracting
attention. For distances of less than 100 kilometres it was not
necessary to get your passport endors
sometimes there
were patrols hanging about the railway stations, who examined the papers of any Pamretmyber they found there and asked
awkward questions. However, no patrols had appeared, and on the
walk from the station he had made sure by cautious backward glances that he was not being followed. The trfauilnl ofwas proles, in holiday mood because of the summery weather. The wooden- seated carriage in whichtrahveelled was filled to overflowing by a single enormous family. ranging from a
toothless great-grandmother to a month-old baby,
oguoti
spend an afternoon with 'in-laws' in the country, and, as they freely explained to Winston, to get hold of a little
blackmarket butter.
The lane widened, and in a minute he came to the footpath she had told him of, a mere cattle-track which beptlwuenegned
the bushes. He had no watch, but it could not be fifteen yet.
The bluebells were so thick underfoot itt
as impossible
not to tread on them. He knelt down and began picking some partly to pass the time away, but also from idaea tvhaagtue
he would like to have a bunch of flowers to offer to the girl
when they met. He had got together a big bunch and was smelling
their faint sickly scent when a sound
baatck fhriosze him,
the unmistakable crackle of a foot on twigs. He went on picking
bluebells. It was the best thing to do. It might be the girl,
or he might have been followed after all. To look
troound was
show guilt. He picked another and another. A hand fell lightly on his shoulder.
He looked upI.t was the girl. She shook her head,
evidently as a warning that he must keep silent, then parted the bushes and quickly led the way along the narrionwto track the wood. Obviously she had been that way before, for she

dodged the boggy bits as thboyu
abit. Winston followed,
still clasping his bunch of flowers. His first feeling was relief, but as he watched the sstlreonndger body moving in
front of him, with the scarlet sash that was just tight enough
to bring out the curve
hoefrhips, the sense of his own
inferiority was heavy upon him. Even now it seemed quite likely
that when she turned round and looked at him she would draw
back after all. The sweetness of the air
garnedenntehses of
the leaves daunted him. Already on the walk from the station the May sunshine had mhaidmefeel dirty and etiolated, a
creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of London in the pores
of his skin. It occurred to him that till now she had probably never seen him in broad daylight in the open. Theythecame to fallen tree that she had spoken of. The girl hopped over and
forced apart the bushes, in which there did not bes
nem to
opening. When Winston followed her, he found that they were in a natural clearing, a tgirnayssy knoll surrounded by tall
saplings that shut it in completely. The girl stopped and turned.
'Here we are,' she said.
He was facing her at several paces' disAtsa did not dare move nearer to her.
te.he
'I didn't want to say anything in the lane,' she went on,
'in case there's a mike hidden there. I don't suppose there is, but there could be. There's always the chance ofothosoene
swine recognizing your voice. We're all right here.'
He still had not the courage to approach her. 'We're all right here?' he repeated stupidly.
'Yes. Look at the trees.' They were small ashesa,t
which
some time had been cut down and had sprouted up again into a forest ofpoles, none of them thicker than one's wrist.
smile on her face that looked faintly ironical, as though she were wondering why he was so slaocwt. Tthoe bluebells had
cascaded on to the ground. They seemed to have fallen of their own accord. He took her hand.
'Would you believe,' he said, 'ttihlaltthis moment I
didn't know what colour your eyes were?' They were brown, he
noted, a rather light shade of brown,darwki
ashes. 'Now
that you've seen what I'm really like, can you still bear to look at me?'
'Yes, easily.'
'I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wifIecant'htat get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth.'
'I couldn't care less,' said the girl.
The next moment, it was hard to say by whose waasct, she in his his arms. At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. The youthful body was straagianiendst his

own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes !
actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide
red mouth. She had clasped her arms hiasb
ck, she was
calling him darling, precious one, loved one. He had pulled her down on to the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do
what he liked with her. But the truth was that he had no
physical sensation, except that of mere conAtlalc
felt
was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened him, he was too muctho liuvsiendg
without women -- he did not know the reason. The girl picked herself up and pulled a blueobuetlof her hair. She sat
against him, putting her arm round his waist.
'Never mind, dear. There's no hurry. We've got the whole
afternoon. Isn't this a splendid hide-out? I itf I
got lost once on a community hike. If anyone was coming you could hear them a hundred metres away.'
'What is your name?' said Winston.
'Julia. I know yours. It's Winston -- Winston Smith.'
'How did you find that out?'
'I expect I'm better at finding things ouytou atrhea,n
dear. Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?'
He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst.
'I hated the sight of you,' he said. 'I wanted to rape you and thenmurder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought
seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imagined that ysooumethhaidng to do
with the Thought Police.'
The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise.
'Not the Thought Police! You didn't honestly think that?'
'Well, perhaps not exactly thBautt.from your general appearance -- merely because you're young and fresh and
healthy, you understand -- I thought that probably-'
'You thought I was a good Party member.
wPourrdeandin
deed. Banners, processions, slogans, games, community hikes all
that stuff. And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance
I'd denounce you as a thought-criminal and get you killed off?'
'Yes, something of that kind. A great many young girls are like that, you know.'
'It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said, ripping
off the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to a bouTghhe.n, as though touching her waist had
reminded her of something, she felt in the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolatber.okeSheit
in half and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even before he
had taken it he knew by the thsamte
was very unusual
chocolate. It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper. Chocolate normallwyas dullbrown crumbly stuff that
tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a
rubbish fire. But at some time or another he had tasted

chocolate like the piece she had given him. The firosft whiff its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin
down, but which was powerful and troubling.
'Where did you get this stuff?' he said.
'Black market,' she saiinddifferently. 'Actually I am

that sort of girl, to look at. I'm

good at games. I

was a

troop-leader in the Spies. I

do voluntary work

three evenings a

week for the Junior Anti-Sex

League. Hours and

hours I've spent

pasting their bloody rot all over Londaolnw.aysIcarry one
end of a banner in the processions. I always Iook cheerful and
I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what
I say. It's the only way to be safe.'
The first fragment of chocolate mehIatded on Winston's tongue. The taste was delightful. But there was still that memory moving round the edges ofconhsicsiousness, something strongly felt but not reducible to definite shape, like an object seen out of the corner of one's eye. Hiet awpauyshed from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action
which he would have liked to undo but could not.
'You are very young,' he said. ar'eY
en or fifteen
years younger than I am. What could you see to attract you in a man like me?'
'It was something in your face. I thought I'd take a
chance. I'm good at spotting people who don't
Abse
oong.
as I saw you I knew you were

tahgeami.n'st

Them,it appeared, meant the Party, and above all the Inner Party, about whom she twailtkhean open jeering

hatred which made Winston feel uneasy, although he knew that they were safe here if they cousladfe abneywhere. A thing
that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her
language. Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston himself very seldom dsiwdear, aloud, at any rate. Julia,
however, seemed unable to mention the Party, and especially the
Inner Party, without using the kind of words that you saw chalked up in dripping alley-ways. He diddislniokte it. It
was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all
its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and hleiaklet sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay. They had left the
clearing and were wandering again through the chesqhuaedree,d
with their arms round each other's waists whenever it was wide enough to walk two abreast.notHieced how much softer her
waist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone. They did not speak above a whisper. Outside the clearing, Julia said, it was
better to go quietly. Presently they had rtehaec the little wood. She stopped him.
'Don't go out into the open. There might be someone
ge of
watching. We're all right if we keep behind the boughs.'
They were standing
tihne shade of hazel bushes. The
sunlight, filtering through innumerable leaves, was still hot on their faces. Winston looked out into thebeyfoinedl,dand underwent a curious, slow shock of recognition. He knew it by sight. An old, closebitten pasture, wiftohotpaath wandering
across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on

the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred
ifnaintly
dense masses like women's hair. Surely somewhere nearby, but
out of sight, there must be a dace were swimming?
wsittrhe
reen pools where
'Isn't there a stream somewhere near here?' he whispered.
'That's right, there is a stream. It's at the edge of the
next field, actually. There are fish in it, great big ones. You can watch them lying thienpools under the willow trees,
waving their tails.'
'It's the Golden Country -- almost,' he murmured.
'The Golden Country?'
'It's nothing, really. A landscape I've seen sometimes in a dream.'
'Look!' whispered Julia.
A thrush had alighted on a
nbootu
ive metres away,
almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen
them. It was in the sun, they in the shade.
oIutt itsspread
wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisancseun,to the and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the
afternoon hush the volume of sound was starWtilnisntgo.n and Julia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishvianrgiations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometiimtestopped for a few
seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Wwiantscthoend it
with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching imta.de iWthat
sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? He wondered whetherafter all there was a
microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had spoken only in low whispers, and it would not pick up whhaadtsaitdh,ey
but it would pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small, beetle-like man was listening
intently -- listening tthat. But by degrees the flood
of music drove all speculations ouhtis moifnd. It was as
though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlightfiltthearted through the
leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt. The girl's waist
in the bend of his arm was soft and warm.
hHeer ropunldled
so that they were breast to breast; her body seemed to melt

into his. Wherever his hands moved

it

waassyiealdling as

water. Their mouths clung together;

it

was quite different from

the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved
their faces apart again both of them
dseiegphleyd. The bird
took fright and fled with a clatter of wings.
Winston put his lips against her ear'Now,' he whispered.
'Not here,' she whispered back. 'Come tob out. It's safer.'
hide-

Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back to the clearing.theWyh
ere once
inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him. They were both breathing fast. but the smile had reappeared round the
corners of her mouth. She stood looking at himinsftoarnt,an
then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was

almost as in his dream. Almost as

swifhtelhadaismagined

it, she had torn her clothes off, it was with that same magnificent gesture

and when she flung them by which a whole

aside

civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her glbeoadmyed white
in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his
eyes were anchored by the freckled faceitsw
int, bold
smile. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his
'Have you done this before?'
'Of course. Hundreds of times -- well scores of times anyway
'With Party members.'
'Yes, always with Party members.'
'With members of the Inner Party?'
'Not with those swine, no. But there's plenty that

wouldif they got half a chance. They're not so holy as they make out.'

His heart leapt. Scores tiomfes she had done it: he
wished it had been hundreds -- thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him wiwtihld haope. Who knew,
perhaps theParty was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and selfdenial simply a sham concealing iniquity.
If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! He pulled dohwenrso that they were
kneeling face to face.
'Listen. The more men you've had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?'
'Yes, perfectly.'

'I hate purity, I

hate goodness!

I don'atny vwiarntue

to exist anywhere. I

want everyone

to be corrupt to the

bones.

'Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I'm corrupt to the
bones.'
'You like doing this? I don't mean simplymeamnetheI
thing in itself?'
'I adore it.'
That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple
undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the
Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was no diffiPcruelsteyn.tly
the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed,
and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The sun seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reached
out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her.
Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.
Winston woke first. He satanduwatched the freckled
face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her

hand. Except for her mouth, you could nohter bceaalultiful.
There was a line or two round the eyes, if you looked closely.
The short dark hair
ewxatsraordinarily thick and soft. It
occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where she lived.
The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling. But the mitnednldeesrsness
that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was
singing, had not quite come back. He pulled the and studied her smooth white flank. In the old days, he
aosviedrealls
thought, a man looked at a girl'sandb
that it was
desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not
have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure,
because everything was mixed up
fweiatrhand hatred. Their
embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

x x x

'We can come here once again,' said Julia. 'It's generally safe to use any hide-out twice. But naontothfeorrmonth or
two, of course.'

As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed.

She

became alert and business-like, put her clothes

on,

knotted the

scarlet sash about her waist, and began arrtahneg
tails
of the journey home. It seemed natural to leave this to her.
She obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked, and she seemed also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the
countryside round London, stored away from innumerable
community hikes. The route she
hgiamvwas quite different
from the one by which he had come, and brought him out at a different railway station. 'Never go home the saamseyouway
went out,' she said, as though enunciating an important general
principle. She would leave first, and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her.
She had named a place where they meceotu
fter work,
four evenings hence. It was a street in one of the poorer quarters, where there was an open mwahrikcehtwas generally
crowded and noisy. She would be hanging about among the stalls,
pretending to be in search of shoelaces or sewing- thread. If she judged that the coast was cleawroulsdhblow her nose
when he approached; otherwise he was to walk past her without recognition. But with luck, in mitdhdele of the crowd, it
would be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting.
'And now I must go,' she said as soohnad maasstehreed
his instructions. 'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty. I've got to put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out
leaflets, or something. Isn't it bloody? Givebrumseh-daown,

would you? Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then good-bye, my love, good-bye!'
She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a moment later pushed her way through the
saplings and disappeared into the wood with very noliistet.le Even now he had not found out her surname or her address. However, it made no difference, for iitncownacseivable that
they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.
As it happened, they never went batchke clteoaring in
the wood. During the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually succeeded in makingThaltove. was in another hidlng-place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretcchounotfry where
an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good hiding-place when once you got there, but the getting there was very dangerous. For trheest they could meet only in the
streets, in a different place every evening and never for more
than half an hour at a
Itni
street it was usually
possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down the
crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never laoto
eng
another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked on aonfdf like the beams of a lighthouse,
suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform
or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abrupsthloyrt acsut
they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following day. Julia appearbeedquittoe
used to this kind of conversation, which she called 'talking by
instalments'. She was also surprisingly adept at speaking
without moving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings they managed to exchange a kiss. They were inpassing silence down a side-street (Julia would never speak when they
were away from the main streets) thwehreenwas a deafening
roar, the earth heaved, and the air darkened, and Winston found himself lying on his side, bruised and terrified. A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at hand. Suddenly he became aware
of Julia's face a few centimetres from his own, whdietaet,hly
as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! He
clasped her against him and found that
khiessiwnagsa live
warm face. But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips. Both of their faces were thickly coated with
plaster.
There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and
then had to walk past one another wai
because a
patrol had just come round the corner or a helicopter was
hovering overhead. Even if it had been less dangerous, it would still have been difficutlotfind time to meet. Winston's
working week was sixty hours, Julia's was even longer, and
their free days varied according to the proefs
rk and
did not often coincide. Julia, in any case, seldom had an evening completely free. She spaennastonishing amount of

time in attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing literature for the junior Anti-LSeeaxgue, preparing banners
for Hate Week, making collections for the savings campaign, and
such-like activities. It paid, she said, it was camouflage. If
you kept the small rules, you could thber
ones. She
even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munition work which was
done voluntarily by zealoPuasrty members. So, one evening
every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing boredom,
screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts of bomb fusesi,n a draughty, ill-lit workshop where the
knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.
When they met
tihne church tower the gaps in their
fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was a blazing
afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of dupnigg.eon
They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig- littered floor,
one or other of them getting up from
ttiimmeetotcoast a

glance through the arrowslits and

make

sure

that

no one was

coming.

Julia was twenty-six years

old.

She

lived

in a hostel with

thirty other girls ('Always in the stink of womIe
ateHow
women!' she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction
Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in
running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was 'not clever', but was fond of using her hfaenldtsatand
home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the gendeirraelctive issued by the
Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite
Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She
'didn't much care for reading,' she
Bsoaoikds.were just a
commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
She had no memories of anything before the early sixties
and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days befortehe Revolution was a grandfather who had
disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain
of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics tryoepahrys
two
running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior
Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character. She had even (iannfallibIe mark of good reputation) been
picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub- section of the Fiction
Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution
among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remaineydearf,or a
helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like

Spanking Stori

One Nightin a Girls'

School,to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under thiempression that they were buying something illegal.

'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously.

'Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only
have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was nevtehre Reiwnrite Squad.
I'm not literary, dear -- not even enough for that.'
He learned with astonishment that all the workers in
Pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were Thgeirls.
theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.
'They don't even like havmianrgried women there,' she
added. Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who isn't, anyway.
She had had her first love-affair shweh
as sixteen,
with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest. 'And a gjooobdtoo,' said Julia, 'otherwise
they'd have had my name out of him when he confessed.' Since
then there had been various others. asL
e saw it was
quite simple. You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the
Party, wanted to stop you having itb;rokyeothe rules as
best you couId. She seemed to think it just as natural that
'they' should want to rob you ofpleyaosuurres as that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party, and
said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism
of it. Except where it touched upon hleirfe sohwen had no interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones thatpashsaedd into everyday
use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organized agraeivnosltt
the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as
stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules
aalnidve stay
all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation peophlaed grwohwon up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else,
accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not
rebelling against its authority but siemvpaldying it, asa rabbit dodges a dog.
They did not discuss the possibility of getting married.
It was too remote to be
twhoirntkhing about. No imaginable
committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if
Katharine, Winston's wife, could somehow have been gooft. It was hopeless even as a daydream.
'What was she like, your wife?' said Julia.
'She was -- do you know the Newspeak word

goodthinkfulMeaning naturally orthodoxi,ncapable of thinking a bad thought?'

'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.'
He began telling her the story omfarrhiiesd life, but
rid
curiousIy enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already. She described to him, almost as though she had seen or
felt it, the stiffening of Katharine's body as soon as he
touched her, the way in which she still tos
e peudshing
him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were

clasped tightly round him. With Julia he felt no diifnficulty talking about such things: Katharine, in any case, had long
ceased to be a painful memory and became a dmiesrtealsyteful one.
'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,' he said. He toId her atbhoeufrigid little ceremony that
Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every
week. 'She hated it, but nothing would make her stiotp. She used to call it -- but you'll never guess.'
'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.
'How did you know that?'
doing
'I've been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens.And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into
you for years. I dare say it works in
caaselso.tButofof
course you can never tell; peopIe are such hypocrites.' She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia,
everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon waass this touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, shhead grasped the inner meaning of the
Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world itosfown which was outside the
Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more importwaanstthat sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be
transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The wapyut she it was:
'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feelhappy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want yobuursttoingbwith
energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering
and waving flags is simpIy sex gone sour. If you're happy
inside yourself, why should you get excited Biagb
other
and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'
That wasvery true, he thought. There was a direct
intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, alnudnattihcecredulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right
pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using
it as a driving force? The sex iwmapsu
ngerous to the
Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played
a similar trick with the instoifn
arenthood. The family
could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the
old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were
systematically turned against their parents and ttaou
on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. Itdevwiacse bya
means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katwhoaurlidne
unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she

had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unoofrthodoxy his opinions. But what really recalled her to him at this
moment was thsetifling heat of the afternoon, which had
brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began telling Julia
of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.
It was three or four months after they were
Tmhaeryried.
had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of bumtinutes, they took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves
pulled up short by the edge of an old chalkIt wqausarary.
sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the
bottom. There was nobody of whom they ascko
way. As
soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy. To be away from the noisoyf himkoebrs even for a
moment gave her a feeling of wrong- doing. She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start searchinogtheirn the direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks ofclitfhfebeneath them.
One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently
growing on the same root. He had
sneevneranything of the
kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and look at it.

'Look, Katharine near the bottom.

! Look

Do you

at those flowers. That clump down see they're two different colours?'

She

had

already

turned

to

go, but she

did rather fretfully

come

back

for a

moment.

She

even leaned

out over the cliff face

to see where he was pointing. He was stalnidtitnlge beahind
her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to himcomhpolwetely alone they
were. There was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awIankae.place like this the
danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very small,
and even if there
aw icrophone it would only pick up
sounds. It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon. The

sun blazed down

upon them, the sweat tickled his face.

And the

thought struck

him . . .

'Why didn't you give her a shgoovoed?' said Julia. 'I
would have.'
'Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I'd been the same person then as amInow. Or perhaps I would -- I'm not
certain.'
'Are you sorry you didn't?'
'Yes. On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.'

They were sitting side by side on the

dusty floor. He

pulled her closer against him. Her

head rested on his

shoulder,

the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeoSnhe dung.
was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did nuontderstand that to push aninconvenient
person over a cliff solves nothing.
'Actually it would have made no difference,' he said.
'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?'
'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this

game that we're playing, we can't win.kinSdosmof failure are better than other kinds, that's all.'
He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She
always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She
would not accept it as a law of nature
itnhdaitvidtuhael is
always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was
doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her
and kill her, but with another part
moifnd shheer believed
that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in
which you could live as you chose. All you needed anwdas luck cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory thleafarin
future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better toof yotuhrisneklf as a corpse.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.
'Not physically. Six months, a year -- five years,
conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably
you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously
pwuet itshall
off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death anadre tlhiefesame
thing.'
'Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't yofueelliinkge: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm
solid, I'm alive! Don't you

tlhiikse?'

She twisted herself round and prehsesrebosom against
him. He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls. Her body seemed to be pouring some yooufth aintds vigour into his.
'Yes, I like that,' he said.
'Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear,
we've got to fix up about the next time we meet. We may as well
go back to the place in the wood. We've ag
lointg
rest. But you must get there by a different way this time. I've got it all planned out. You take the train -- but look, I'll
draw it out for you.'
And in her practical
swhaeyscraped together a small
square of dust, and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the floor.

x x x

Winston looked rountdhe shabby little room aboveMr
Charrington's shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The
old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was taiwcakying on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the
glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed

softly out of the half-darkness.
In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and
two cups, provided by Mr Charrington. Wilnistt
he burner
and set a pan of water to boil. He had brought an envelope full
of Victory Coffee and some saccharine tablets. The clock's
hands said seventeen-twenty: it
nwianseteen- twenty really.
She was coming at nineteen-thirty.
Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious,
gratuitous, suicidal folly. Of
tahlelcrimes that a Party
member could commit, this one was the least possible to
conceal. Actually the idea had first floated inhteoad hiisn
the form of a vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table. As he had foreseen, Mr
Charrington had made no difficulty about letting the room. He was obviously glad of the few dollars that it wouhlidm. bring Nor did he seem shocked or become offensively knowing when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room for theof purpose a love-affair. Instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in generalities, with so delicate an airgivaestheto
impression that he had become partly invisible. Privacy, he
said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted
waherpelace
they could be alone occasionally. And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone eklnseew ofwho
it to keep his knowledge to himself. He even, seeming almost to
fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries to the house, one of them through the bawchkichyard,
gave on an alley.
Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun
was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a
monstrous woman, solid asNoraman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro betwaeenwashtuband a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babiesd'iapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful
contralto:
It was only an 'opeless fancy. It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred! They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
The tune had been haunting London for weeksIt wpast.
one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of
these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the
woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an
almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singtihneg and scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhertehe fianr distance a

faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
Folly, folly, folly! he thought again. It was
inconceivable that they could frequent this place for more than
a few weeks without being caught. But the temptation of having
a hiding-place that was truly their own, iannddo
ar at
hand, had been too much for both of them. For some time after
their visit to the church beiltf
ad been impossible to
arrange meetings. Working hours had been drastically increased
in anticipation of Hate Week. It was more than a month distant,
but the enormous, complex preparations
itth
ntailed were
throwing extra work on to everybody. Finally both of them
managed to secure a free afternoon on thdeay.s
ey had
agreed to go back to the clearing in the wood. On the evening
beforehand they met briefly in the stArse
ual, Winston
hardly looked at Julia as they drifted towards one another in the crowd, but from the short glance he gaveseehmeerd toit
him that she was paler than usual.
'It's all off,' she murmured as soon as she judged it safe to speak. 'Tomorrow, I mean.'
'What?'
'Tomorrow afternoon. I can't come.'
'Why not?'
'Oh, the usual reason. It's started early this time.'
For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that he hadknown her the nature of his desire for her had changed.
At the beginning there had been little true senisnu
.ity
Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will. But
after the second time it was different. The smell of her hair,
the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin
hsaeveemed to
got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt
that he had a right to. When she said that she cocmoeu,ld not
he had the feeling that she was cheating him. But just at this moment the crowd pressed them together and their hands
accidentally met. She gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invniottedesire but affection. It
struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal, recurring eavnednat;deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly
took hold of him. He wished that they were a marrioefd couple
ten years' standing. He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and
without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odednsds and
for the household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the
obligation to makleove every time they met. It was not
actually at that moment, but at some time on the following day, that the idea of renting Mr Charrington's room had occurred to him. Whenhe suggested it to Julia she had agreed with
unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that it was lunacy. It
was as though they were intentionally stepping neatrheerir to

graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought again of the cellars of the Ministry ofIt wLaosvec.urious
how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's consciousness. There it lay, fixed in ftuitmuerse, preceding
death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but
one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act,choosneeto shorten the
interval before it happened.
At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia burst into the room. She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse
brown canvas, such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and
fro at the Ministry. He started fotrow
ke her in his
arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly because she was still holding the tool-bag.
'Half a second,' she said. 'Just let me show you what I've
brought. Did you bring some of that
Vfiiclttohryy Coffee? I
thought you would. You can chuck it away again, because we shan't be needing it. Look here.'
She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it. Underneath were a numboefrneat paper packets. The first
packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely
familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of heavy,
sand-like stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.
'It isn't sugar?' he said.
'Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And herleo'asf
aof
bread proper white bread, not our bloody stuff -- and a little
pot of jam. And here's a tin of milk -- but
ilso
e! This
one I'm really proud of. I had to wrap a bit of sacking round it, because-'
But she did not need to tell him whhyadwrsahpeped it
up. The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation fromearhliyschildhood, but
which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself
mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.
'It's coffee,' he murmured, 'real coffee.'
'It's Inner Party coffee. There's a wholeherkei,lshe said.
'How did you manage to get hold of all these things?'
'It's all Inner Party stuff. There's nothing those swine don't have, nothing. But of cowuaristeers and servants and
people pinch things, and -- look, I got a little packet of tea as well.'
Winston had squatted dobwenside her. He tore open a corner of the packet.
'It's real tea. Not blackberry leaves.'
'There's been a lot of tea about lately. They've captured
India, or something,' she said vaguely. li'sBtuetn, dear. I
want you to turn your back on me for three minutes. Go and sit
on the other side of the bed. Don't go too near the window. And don't turn round till I tell you.'

Winston gazed abstractedltyhrough the muslin curtain.

Down in the

yard the red-armed woman was still marching

to and

fro between out of her

the washtub and the line. Shtewo mtoroek pegs mouth and sang with deep feeling:

They

sye

that time 'eals

all things,

They

sye

you can always

forget;

But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!
She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floateudpward with the sweet summer air, very
tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes
inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging
out diapers and singing rubbish. It shtirmu
a curious
fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It woeuvledn have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps itwas only when people were somewhere near the
starvation level that they had anything to sing about.
'You can turn round now,' said Julia.
He turned round, and for a second almost failed to
recognize her. What he had actually expweacst
see her
naked. But she was not naked. The transformation that had
happened was much more surprising than her face.
Sthhea
ad painted
She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and bought herself a complete set of make-up
materials. Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged,
her nose powdered; there was even a oft
ething under
the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done, but Winston's standards in such matters were not high. He had
never before seeonr imagined a woman of the Party with
cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of colour riignht ptlhaeces
she had become not only very much prettier, but, above all, far
more feminine. Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added to the effect. As he took her in his armosf syanthweatviec
violets flooded his nostrils. He remem bered the half-darkness

of

a basement

kitchen, and a

woman's cavmeoruntohu.sIt was

the

very same

scent that she

had used; but at the moment it did

not seem to matter.
'Scent too!' he said.
'Yes, dear, scent too. And do you know what I'm going to do next? I'm going to get holdreaolfwomaan's frock from
somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers. I'll
wear silk stockings and high-heeled shIone
his room I'm
going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.'
They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed. It wtahse first time that he had stripped

himself naked in her presence. Until now he had been too much
ashamed of his pale and meagre body,thew
ricose veins
standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch over his ankle. There were no sheets, but the blankeltay otnhewyas
threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them. 'It's sure to be full of bugs, but who cares?' said Julia. One never saw a double bed nowadays, except
in the homes of the proles. Winston had occassiloenpatl
one in his boyhood: Julia had never been in one before, so far as she could remember.
Presently theyfell asleep for a little while. When
Winston woke up the hands of the clock had crept round to nearly nine. He did not stir, because Julsilaeepwiansg with her head in the crook of his arm. Most of her make-up had
transferred itself to his own face or the bolsterl,ighbtut a
stain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone. A
yellow ray from the sinking sun fell across the foot of the bed

and lighted up the fireplace, where boiling fast. Down in the yard

the water in the pan the womsatnoppheaddsinging,

was

but the faint shouts of

children floated in from the street.

He

wondered vaguely whether in

the abolished past it had been a

normal experience to lie

in bed like thtihse,cooiln of a

summer evening, a man and a

woman with no clothes on, making

love when they chose, talking of what they nocth
eling
any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could neverbeehnaave
time when that seemed ordinary? Julia woke up, rubbed her eyes,
and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.
'Half that water's boiled away,' she said. 'I'll get up
and make some coffee in another moment. We've got an hour. What time do they cut the lights off at your flats?'
'Twenty-three thirty.'
'It's twenty-three at the hostel. But you hgaevteinto
earlier than that, because -- Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!' She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a
shoe from the floor, and sent it hurtling into thweithcorner
a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning dutrhienTwo Minutes
Hate.
'What was it?' he said in surprise.
'A rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting. There's a hole dtohwenre. I gave him a good fright, anyway.'
'Rats!' murmured Winston. 'In this room!'
'They're all over the place,' said Julia indifferently as
she lay down again. 'We've even got them in the ktihtechen at hostel. Some parts of London are swarming with them. Did you know they attack children? Ytehse,y do. In some of these
streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes.
It's the great huge brown ones that do it. And is that the brutes always-'
tthhieng nasty

'Don'tgo on!said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut.

'Dearest! You've gone quite pale. Whtahte'matter? Do they make you feel sick?'
'Of all horrors in the world -- a rat!'
She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round
him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of
Hheer body.
did not reopen his eyes immediately. For several moments he had had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life. It was always very much
the same. He was standing in front of a dawraklnlesso,fand on the other side of it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. Idnreatmhhis deepest
feeling was always one of self- deception, because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of darknesasdeadWliyth
effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the opaelnw.aysHwoke up
without discovering what it was: but somehow it was connected with what Julia had been saying when he cut her short.
'I'm sorry,' he said, 'it's nothindgo.n'tIlike rats, that's all.'
'Don't worry, dear, we're not going to have the filthy brutes in here. I'll stuff hotlheewith a bit of sacking before we go. And next time we come here I'll bring some
plaster and bung it up properly.'
Already the black instanof panic was half-forgotten. Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the
bedhead. Julia got out of bed, pulled on her overalls, and made
the coffee. The smetlhlat rose from the saucepan was so
powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive. Wheavten was
better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given
to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after years of saccharine. With one hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the otJhuelri,a wandered about the room,
glancing indifferently at the bookcase, pointing out the best way of repairing the gateleg table, pluhmeprisneglf down in
the ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and
examining the absurd twelve-hour clock with a stoorlteraonft
amusement. She brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to

have a look at it in a better light. He

took it out of

her

hand, fascinated, as always, by the

soft, rainwatery

appearance

of the glass.

'What is it, do you think?' said

Julia.

'I don't think it's anything-I mean, I don't twhaisnk it
ever put to any use. That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter. It's a
message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.'
'And thatpicture over there' -- she nodded at the
engraving on the opposite wall-'would that be a hundred years old?'
'More. Two hundred, daIre say. One can't tell. It's impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.'
She went over to look at it. 'Here's where that brute
stuck his nose out,' she said, kicking the wainscoting

immediately below the picture. 'What is this place? I've seen it before somewhere.'
'It's a church, or at leasutsedito be. St Clement
Danes its name was.' The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught him came back into his head, and he added
half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St
Clement's!"
To his astonishment she capped the line:
'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's, When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey -- '

'I can't

remember

how it goes on after that. BuIt anyway

remember it

ends up,

"Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"
It was like the two halveascouonftersign. But there
must be another line after 'the bells of Old Bailey'. Perhaps it could be dug out oCfharMrrington's memory, if he were
suitably prompted.
'Who taught you that?' he said.
'My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a
little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight -r-atea,t any he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,' she added
inconsequently. 'I've seen oranges. Theya' yellow fruit with a thick skin.'
ind of round
'I can remember lemons,' said Winston. 'They were quite
common in the fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them.'
'I bet that picture's got
bbeuhgisnd it,' said Julia.
'I'll take it down and give it a good clean some day. I suppose it's almost time we were leaving. I must start washing this
paint off. What a bore! I'll geltipstthieck off your face afterwards.'
Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room
was darkening. He turned over towards the light
gaanzdinglay
into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing
was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass
itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it
awsas almost
transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiwniyth iwtosrld atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get
inside it, and that in fact he was insaildoeng wiitt,h the
mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel
engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the
room he was in, and the coral was J
ea'asnd his own,
fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

x x x

Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from

work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next daynobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went
into the vestibule of the Records Departtom
ok at the
notice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme hoande. Ibteen
looked almost exactly as it had looked before -- nothing had
been crossed out -- but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
The weather was baking hot. Inlabtyhreinthine Ministry the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal
temperature, but outside the pavements scorched one'sandfeet the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours was a horror. The preparations for Hate Week were in full swintgh,e staanfdfs
of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displfaiylsm, shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had tobe erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs
written, rumours circulated, photographs faked. Julia's unit in
the Fiction Department had been taken off the production of
novels and was rushing
ao eries of atrocity pamphlets.
Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods
every day in going through back fil

he Toifmes and

altering and embellishing news items which were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. The rocket bombs
crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance there were enormous explosions which no one excpolualidn and about which there were wild rumours.
The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week
(the Hate Song, it was called) had ablereena
omposed and
was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens. It had a
savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by ofhundreds
voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The
proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnighitt competed with the still- popular 'It was only a hopeless
fancy'. The Parsons children playedat ailtl hours of the
night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper. Winston's evenings wefrueller than ever. Squads of
streets
volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for
Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously sliwnigriensgacross
the street for the reception of streamers. Parsons boasted that
Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred metres of
bunting. He was in his native element and as ah
k. as
The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for
reverting to shorts and an open shirt in the eHvee everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along with comradely
sngs.
exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.
A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had
no caption, and represented simply the monsftirgouurse of a

Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a
submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you
looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, mbayg
efied
foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even
outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally
apathetic about the war, were being lashedonei
ftotheir
periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocbkoemtbs had been killing larger
numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred viacmtoinmgsthe
ruins. The whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for
a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in
effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on
oaf
piece
waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry
demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of
copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and a number of shops werien thleooted
turmoil; then a rumour flew round that spies were directing the
rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extractiotnheihrahouse
set on fire and perished of suffocation.
In the room over Mr Charrington's shop, when they could
get there, Julia and Winston lay side by side on a stripped bed under the open window, naked for the sake of coolnreasts. The
had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty ortheclreoaonm,
was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle everything with pepper bought on bltahcek market, tear off
their clothes, and make love with sweating bodies, then fall
asleep and wake to find thatbugtshe massing for the counter-attack.
hadrallied and were
Four, five, six -- seven times they met during the month of June. Winston had dropped his habit of drinkaitnallgin hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided, leavinga broonwlny
stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased to be
intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make
tfhaeces at
telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that
they had a secure hiding- place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequenftolry and
a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the junk- shop should exist. To knoiwt watshatthere,
inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a
world, a pocket of the past where extinct
caonuilmda
alk.
Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He
usually stopped to talk with Mr Charrington for a few minutes
on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom out of doors, and on the other hand to have almost no
toorgonever

customers. He led a ghostlike existence between thedartkiny, shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and which contained, among other thingusn,belainevably
ancient gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the
opportunity to talk. Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had always vaguely the air of being a
collector ratherthan a tradesman. With a sort of faded
enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or that -- a
china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a
sbnruofkfebnox, a
pinchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby's
hair -- never asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he
should admire it. To talk towash
ike listening to the
tinkling of a worn-out musical-box. He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes. There was one about four twaenndty blackbirds, and another
about a cow with a crumpled horn, and another about the death
of poor Cock Robin.
j'uIstt occurred to me you might be
interested,' he would say with a deprecating little laugh
whenever he produced a new fragment. But he coulrdecanlelver more than a few lines of any one rhyme.
Both of them knew-in a way, it was never out of their
minds that what was now happening coulldastn
ong. There
were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they woultdogectlhienrgwith a
sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleaswuhreen the clock is within five
minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanelnocneg.asSo
they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could
come to them. Getting there was diffaincdu
angerous, but
the room itself was sanctuary. It was as when Winston had gazed into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that it
would be possible to get inside gltahsasty world, and that once inside it time could be arrested. Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of escTahpeei.r luck would hold
indefinitely, and they would carry on their intrigue, just like
this, for the remainder of their natural lives. Or Katharine would die, and by subtle manoeuvrings WinstoJnuliaanwould succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide
together. Or they woudlidsappear, alter themselves out of
recognition, learn to speak with proletarian accents, get jobs in a factory and live out their lives undetected in a
back-street. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality
there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable,
suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinninpgresoeuntt thaat
had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as aitrhere is available.
Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active
rebellion against the Party, but with no notion oftakheow to
the first step. Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a reality,

there still remained the difficulty of finding one's way into
it. He told her of the strange intimacy that existed, or seemed to exist, between himself and O'Brien, atnhde imopfulse he
sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's presence, announce that he was the enemy oPfarttyh,eand demand his
help. Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an
impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judginbgy
people
their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should
believe O'Brien to be trustworthy on the strenag
ingloef
flash of the eyes. Moreover she took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyonsee,cretly hated the Party and
would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition
existed or could exist. The tales about Goldstein and his underground army, she said, were simply a lot of whriucbhbish
the Party had invented for its own purposes and which you had
to pretend to believe in. Times beyond number, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations, she had shouted attop otfhe
her voice for the execution of people whose names she had never
heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the faintest belief. When public trials were happesnhienhad taken her
place in the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded the courts from morning to night, chanting at in'tDeeravtahls
to the traitors!' During the Two Minutes Hate she always
excelled all others in shouting insults at GoldYsette had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what
doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had gsrionwcne up
the Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles ofthe fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an
independent political movement was outside her imagination: and
in any case the Party was invincible. It would always exist,
and it would always be the same. You courledbelo
ainst

it by secret disobedience or, at most,

by isolated

acts of

violence such as killing somebody

In some ways she was far more

or blowing acute than

something up. Winsftaorn, and

less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in
some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that inopihneiron the war was not
happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Ocietasneilaf, 'just to
keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort inohimenvy
by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting laouugthing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she wasto arcecaedpyt the
official mythology, simply because the difference between truth
and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnitt at school, that the Party had
invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties,wasionly the helicopter
that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later,

when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the
aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the
steam engine.) And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and belfoonrge the Revolution,
the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what
did it matter who had invented aeroplanes?
rIatthewramore
of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that Ocefaonuirayears ago, had
been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sahpapma:renbtulty she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had
changed. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Esuhreasia,' said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of
aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover
in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was
grown up. He argued with her about it for perhaps
oaf
quarter
an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at onEeasttaismiea and not
Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. 'Who cares?' she siamipdatiently. 'It's always
one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.
Sometimes he talked to her of the RDeecpoarrdtsment and
the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thoughltiesobecoming truths. He
told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper whichhadhonce held between his
fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.
'Were they friends of yours?' she said.
'No, I never knew them.
wTehreeyInner Party members.
Besides, they were far older men than I was. They belonged to
the old days, before the RevolutIi sight.'
rely knew them by
'Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all the time, aren't they?'
He tried to make her understand. 'This
ewxacseptainonal
case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting yefsrtoemrday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few
solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of
glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the
Revolution and the years before Retvhoelution. Every record
has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten,
every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and
building has been renamed, every
hdaastbeen altered. And
that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists excepetndlaenss present
in which the Party is always rightknowI, of course,
that the past is falsified, but it would never be foprossible
me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After
the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence

is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any other human being sharesmemmoyries. Just in that one
instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event -- years after it.'
'And what good was that?'
'It was no good, because I thraewway aitfew minutes
later. But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it.'
'Well, I wouldn't!' said Julia. 'I'm quite ready to take risks, but only for something worth while, not for olbdits of newspaper. What could you have done with it even if you had
kept it?'
'Not much, perhaps. But it evwiadsence. It might have
planted a few doubts here and there, supposing that I'd dared
to show it to anyboId
on't imagine that we can alter
anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and thesrmeall-groups of
people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and
even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off.'
'I'm not interested interested inus .
tihne next generation, dear. I'm
'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.
She thought this brilliantlwitty and flung her arms round him in delight.
In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the
faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk
porfinctihpeles
of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, andusetNewspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thOinnegknew that it was all
rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and watshall one needed. If he
persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting
habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go
to sleep at any hour and in any position. toT
,inhge
realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what ortmheoadnotx.yIn a
way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on peopliencapable of understanding it. They
could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of
reality, because they never fully grasped the enormwihtayt of
was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of
understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did thheamrm,nbecause
it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

x x x

It had happened at last. The expmeecstseadge had come.
All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen.
He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and
he was almost at the spot where Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he became aware that someone largheirmsetlhfan
was walking just behind him. The person, whoever it was, gave a
small cough, evidently as a prelude to speaking. Winston stopped abruptly and turned. It was O'Brien.
At last they were face to facei,t seaenmded that his
only impulse was to run away. His heart bounded violently. He would have been incapable of speakOi'nBgr.ien, however, had
continued forward in the same movement, laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston's arm, so thtawto ofthtehem were
walking side by side. He began speaking with the peculiar grave
courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner
Party members.
'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talykoiun,g' to
he said. 'I was reading one of your Newspeak art

Timesthe other day. You take a scholarly interest in

Newspeak, I believe?'

eles in

Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. 'Hardly scholarly,' he said. 'I'm only an amateur. It's not my subject.
I have never had anything to do with the actual construction of the language.'
'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien.is 'That
not only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly exapnert. His name has slipped my
memory for the moment.'
Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was
inconceivable that this was anything other than a retfoerence
Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an

unpersonAny identifiable reference to

whoiumld have
been mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must obviously have been intended as a signal, a codeword. By shsamrailnlgacta
of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices.
They had continued to stroll slowly down the corridor, but now
O'Brien halted. With the curious, disarfmriinegndliness that
he always managed to put in to the gesture he resettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went on:
'What I had realilnytended to say was that in your
article I noticed you had used two words which have become
obsolete. But they have only become so very recentlyyo.u seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?'
'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued
Have
yet. We are still using the ninth in the Records Department.'
'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I
believe. But a few advance copies have been circulhaatveed. I
one myself. It might interest you to look at it, perhaps?'
'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where this tended.
'Some of the ndeewvelopments are most ingenious. The

reduction in the number of verbs -- that is the point that will appeal to you, I think. Let me see, shall I send a messenger to
you with the dictionary? But I am afraid I invariably forget
anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick it at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you my
address.'
fulpat at my
They were standing
firnont of a telescreen. Somewhat
absentmindedly O'Brien felt two of his pockets and then produced a smallleather-covered notebook and a gold ink-
pencil. Immediately beneath the telescreen, in such a position
that anyone who was watching at the other end of the instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbaldeddresasn, tore
out the page and handed it to Winston.
'I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said. 'If not, my servant will give you the dictionary.'
He was gone, leaving Winston holding the ofs
er,
which this time there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless he carefully memorized what was writotneit, and some hours
later dropped it into the memory hole along with a mass of other papers.
They had been talking onteoanother for a couple of
minutes at the most. There was only one meaning that the
episode could possibly have. It had been contrived aosf letting Winston know O'Brien's address. This was necessary, because except by direecntquiry it was never possible to
a way
discover where anyone lived. There were no directories of any
kind. 'If you ever want to setehism
where I can be
found,' was what O'Brien had been saying to him. Perhaps there
would even be a message concealed somewhere
diinctitohneary.
But at any rate, one thing was certain. The conspiracy that he
had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.
He knew that soonoerrlater he would obey O'Brien's
summons. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay -- he was not certain. What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first sbteeepn ahad
secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of
the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from
words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of LoHveehad accepted it. The end was
contained in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like libtetilneg a less alive. Even whiIe he was speaking to O'Brien, when the meaning of the words had sunk in, a shcuhdidlelrying feeling
had taken possession of his body. He had the sensation of
stepping into the dampness of a garnadv
was not much
better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.

x x x

Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily against himmu,rmuring something that might
have been 'What's the matter?'
'I dreamt-' he began, and stopped short. It was too
complex to be put into words. There was thietsedlrfe,aand there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.
He lay back wihtihs eyes shut, still sodden in the
atmosphere of the dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which
his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a
landscape on a summer evening after rain.
aIltl ochcaudrred
inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was
the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in which one could sieneterimnitnoable
distances. The dream had also been comprehended by -- indeed,
in some sense it had consisted in -- a gesture omfadethe arm
by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the small
boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blebwotht pieces.
oem
'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed
I had murdered my mother?'
'Why did you murder her?' said Julia, almost asleep.
'I didn't murder her. Not physically.'
In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his
mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back. Itmemwoarsy thaat
he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the dahteecoulbdutnot
have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had
happened.
His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he could not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical
panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the
piles of rubble everywherteh,e unintelligible proclamations
posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the
intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance -- above all, the
fact that there was never enougehat.tHe remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scrounging round dustbins
and rubbish heaps, picking
tohuetribs of cabbage leaves,
potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in
waiting for thpeassing of trucks which travelled overa
certain route and were known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad patchtehse roiand, sometimes
spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.
When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any
surprise or any violent grief, but a
cshuadndgeencame over
her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was

evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everytthhaitnwas needed --
cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted
the mantelpiece -- always very slowly and
cwuirtihousalack
of superfluous motion, like an artist's lay- figure moving of its own accordH.er large shapely body seemed to relapse
naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit
almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young as
,r,
ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made
simian by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and press him againstforhaerlong time without
saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and
selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.
He remembered the room where they lived, a dark,
closesmelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a
white counterpane. There was a gas ring
fienndetrh,eand a
shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He
remembered his mother's statuesque body benodvienrgthe gas ring to stir at something in a saucepan. Above all he
remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles
at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly, oovveerr
and
again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was
beginning tobreak prematurely and sometimes boomed in a
peculiar way), or he would attempt a snivelling note of pathos
in his efforts to get more than his share. His mother was quite ready to give him more than his share. She toogkranitted for
that he, 'the boy', should have the biggest portion; but
however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every
meal she would beseech him not to be
asnedl
oisrhemember
that his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it
was no use.
wHoeuld cry out with rage when she stopped
ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister's pklnaetwe. He that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it;
he even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger
in his belly seemed jutsotify him. Between meals, if his
mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.
One day a chocolate-ration was issued. Therbeeenhna such issue for weeks or months past. He remembered quite
clearly that precious little morosfechocolate. It was a
two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days)
between the three of them. It was obvious that
tiotbeought
divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demiannding
a loud booming voice that he should be given the whole piece.
His mother told him not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings. His tiny sistcelri,nging to her
mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking

over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the end
his mother broke off three-quarters of the choacnodl ve
it to Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The
little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was. Winston stood watching haemomefnotr.
Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of
chocolate out of his sister's door.
ahnadnwas fleeing for the
'Winston, Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come back! Give your sister back her chocolate!'
He stopped, but did not come
Hbiasc
other's anxious
eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was that was on the point of happening. His sisterc,onscious of having been robbed of
something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm round the chiladnd pressed its face against her breast.
Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He
turned and fled down the stairs. with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.
He never saw his mother again. After
dheevouhraedd the
chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several hours, until hunger drove him home.
When he came back his mother had disappeared. Tahlirseadwyas becoming normal at that time. Nothing was gone from the room except his mother ahnids sister. They had not taken any
clothes, not even his mother's overcoat. To this day he did not
know with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a
forced-labour camp. As for his sister, she might have been removed, like Winston himseltfo,one of the colonies for
homeless children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which
had grown up as a result of the civil war, or she might have
been sent to the labour camp along with his orm left somewhere or other to die.
The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the
enveloping protecting gesture of the ina
hich its whole
meaning seemed to be contained. His mind went back to another
dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother onh he
sat
dingy whitequilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she
had sat in the sunken ship, far undehrinme,a
nd drowning
deeper every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water.
He told Julia the stoofrhis mother's disappearance.
Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.
'I expect you were a beastly little swine idnayst,h'ose she said indistinctly. 'All children are swine.'
'Yes. But the real point of the story-'
From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again. He would have liked to ctoanltkiinnugeabout
his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, thatshe had been an unusual woman, still less an
intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility,

a kind of purity, simply because the standards tohbaetyedshe
were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you
loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothtiong else give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her waasrms. It no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or hbeurt itowsne;emed
natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also
covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of papetre.rriTbhlee thing
that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses,
mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time
robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felntot foerel,did
what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no
difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor
your actions were ever heard of againw.ereY
ifted clean
out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two
generations ago this would not have seemed all-important,
because they were not attempting to
hailstteorry. They were
governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely
helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spokdeyningto a
man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly
occurred to him, had remained in this condition. Thneoyt
were
loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life hedesdpiidse not
the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which
would one day spring to
alnidfregenerate the world. The
proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside.
They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn bcyonscious effort. And in thinking this he
remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he
had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.
'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud. human.'
n'oWte are
'Why not?' said Julia, who had woken up again.

He thought for a little while.

'Has it ever

occurred to

you. he said, 'that the best

thing for us

to do would be

simply

to walk out of here before it's too lanteev,er saened each
other again?'
'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm not going to do it, all the same.'
'We've been lucky,h'e said 'but it can't last much
longer. You're young. You look normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people like me, you might stay alive for another fifty years.'
'No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to
do. And don't be too downhearted. I'm alive.'
groaotdh
staying
'We may be together for another six months -- a year --

there's no knowing. At the end we're certbaeiapartto. Do
you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get hold of us thewriell be nothing, literally nothing, that
either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot
you, and if I refuse to confess, tshheoyo'tlyou just the

same.

Nothing

that I can

do

or say, or

stop myself from saying,

will

put off

your death

for

as much as

five minutes. Neither of

us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall
be utterly without powoefrany kind. The one thing that
matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although even that can't make the slightest difference.'
'If you mean confessing,' she sai'dw,eshall do that,
right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you.'
'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: feoenlliyngs matter. If they
could make me stop lovingyou -- that would be the real betrayal.'
She thought iotver. 'They can't do that,' she said
finally. 'It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything -any- thing -- but they can't make
you believe it. They can't get inside you.'
'No,' he said a little more hopefully,tha'tn'os;quite
true. They can't get inside you. If you

fecealn

that
staying human is worth whielvee,n when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.'
He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and daiyf,youbuktept your
head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding oauntothwehrat
human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true when you
were actually in their hands. One dikdnown
hat happened
inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs,delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning. Facts, at any corualtde,
not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they
could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was
not to stay alive but to stay
whhuamta
ifference did it
ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself,if yeovuenwanted
to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thoughtt;he ibnunter heart, whose
workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

x x x

They had done it, they had done it at last!

The room they were standing in was long-shapseodftlaynd
lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of
the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on
velvet. At the far end of the room
wOa'sB
itting at a
table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of papers on either side of him. He had not bothelroeodk uptowhen the servant showed Julia and Winston in.
Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted
whether he would be able to speak. They had
tdhoenyehadit,
done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; though
it was true that they had come by different routes and only met
on O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into such a place
needed an effort
tohfe nerve. Itwas only on very rare
occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner
Party, or even penetrated into the quarttehre towfn where
they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousneosfseverything, the unfamiliar
smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly
rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants
hurrying to and fro -- everything was intimidating. Although he had a good pretext for coming herwea,s hahuented at every
step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers, anhdim order
to get out. O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of
them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completeexlpyressionless face
which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which
he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was
intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human bodies.
O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying it intently. His heavy face, besnotthadtown
one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without
stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite towards him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:
'Items one comma five comma seven appfruolvlewdise stop suggestion contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stop unproceceodnstructionwise antegetting
plusfull estimates machinery overheads stop end message.'
He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across the soundless carpet. A little of the official
atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him with the
Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmerusutahla,nas
though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that
Winston already felt was suddenly shot throughstrbeyak oaf
ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he
had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in
reality that O'Brien was
kainnyd of political conspirator?
Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark:

beyond that, only hoiwsn secret imaginings, founded on a
dream. He could not even fall back on the pretence that he had
come to borrow the dictionary, becianu
hat case Julia's
presence was impossible to explain. As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike hismt.oppHeed, turned
aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap.
The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his pWainnisct,on was too much taken
aback to be able to hold his tongue.
'You can turn it off!' he said.
'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that privilege.'
He was opposite them now. His solid form towertehde
pair of them, and the expression on his face was still
over
indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sterfnolryWinston
to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivabIe
that he was simply a busy man wondering irwrhiyt
eblhyad
been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent.secTohneds marched
past, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his
eyes fixed on O'Brien's. Then suddenly the grim face broke down
into what might have been the beginnings of aWitshm
se.
characteristic gesture O'Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose.
'Shall I say it, or will you?' he said.
'I will say it,' said Winpsrtoomnptly. 'That thing is really turned off?'
'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.'
'We have come here because-'
He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of
his own motives. Since he did not iknnowf
at kind of
help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went on, conscious thahte wawshastaying
must sound both feeble and pretentious:
'We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some
kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it. We want to join it and woWrek for it. are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. arWeealso adulterers. I
tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy.
If you want us to incriminate ourselves are ready.'
oitnhera
ay, we
He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that thedoor had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in without knocking. Winston sahwe watshat
carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses.

'Martin is one of

us,'

said O'Brien impassively. 'Bring

the drinks over

here,

Martin. Put them on the round table. Have

we enough chairs? Then we may assitw
wn and talk in
comfort. Bring a chair for yourself, Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes.'
The little man sat down, quite at his ease, stainldl
yet

with a servant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege. Winston regarded him out of the corhniesreyeo.f
It struck him that the man's whole life was playing a part, and
that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality
even for a moment. O'Brien took the decanter by the neck and
filled up the glasses with a dark- red
Ilti
sed in
Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a hoarding -- a vast bottle compoofselectric lights which
seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass.
Seen from the top the stuff looked
ballamcoks,tbut in the
decanter it gleamed like a ruby. It had a sour-sweet smell. He saw Julia picukp her glass and sniff at it with frank
curiosity.
'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile. 'You
will have read about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to theOuter Party, I am afraid.' His face grew solemn again,
and he raised his glass: 'I think it is fittingshotuhladt we begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To Emmanuel
Goldstein.'
Winston took up his glass with a ceeargtearinness. Wine was a thing he had read and dreamed about. Like the glass paperweight orMr Charrington's half-remembered rhymes, it
belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he

liked to call

it

in his secret thoughts. For some

reason he had

always thought

of

wine as having an intensely sweet

taste, like

that of blackberry jam andimmaendiate intoxicating effect.
Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly
disappointing. The truth was that after
oyfe
n-drinking
he could barely taste it. He set down the empty glass.
'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he said.
'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do not know.'
and that you belong to it. I will come back to that presently.' He looked at his wrist-watch. 'It is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen ftohran hmaolrfe
an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and you will
have to leave separately. You, comrade' -- he bowed his head to Julia -- 'will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our disposal. You will understand that I must start by asking you
certain questions. In general terms, what arperepyaorued to do?'
'Anything that we are capable of,' said Winston.
O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that
he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take
it for granted that Winston could speak for hae
omenFtor
the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his
questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answekrnsownwere
to him already.
'You are prepared to give your lives?'

'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit murder?'
'Yes.'
'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?'
'Yes.'
'To betray your country to foreign powers?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to cheat,fortgoe, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases -- to do anything which is likely to cause
demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'
'Yes.'
'If, for example, it would somehow serve our inttoerests
throw sulphuric acid in a child's face -- are you prepared to do that?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to lose your identity anodut tlhieve rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-worker?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared, the two of you, to saenpda er see one another again?'
'No!' broke in Julia.
It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been ofdeprived
the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the
opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over
and over again. Until he had said
diitd,notheknow which
word he was going to say. 'No,' he said finally.
'You did well to tell me,' said O'Brien. 'It is necessary for us to know everything.'
He turned himself toward Julia and addedvoiicne wiath somewhat more expression in it:
'Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as
a different person?
mWaey be obliged to give him a new
identity. His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair -- even his voicebe dwiofufledrent. And
you yourself might have become a different person. Our surgeons
can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes we even amputate a limb.'
Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin's Mongolian face. There were no scarhse cotuhladt
see. Julia had turned a shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she faced O'Brien boldly.murSmhuered something
that seemed to be assent.
'Good. Then that is settled.'
There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather absent-minded air O'Brien pushed them towards the
others, took one himself, then stood up and began to pace

slowly to and fro, as though he thcionuklbetter standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the pOa'pBerri.en looked at
his wrist-watch again.
'You had better go back to your Pantry, Martin,' he said.
'I shall switch on in a quarter of an hour. Take a good look at these comrades' faces before you go. Yoube sweielilng them
again. I may not.
Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little man's dark eyes flickered over their fTahceerse.was not a
trace of friendliness in his manner. He was memorizing their appearance, but he felt no interestthemi,nor appeared to
feel none. Itoccurred to Winston that a synthetic face was perhaps incapable of changing its expression. Wistpheoaukting
or giving any kind of salutation, Martin went out, closing the
door silently behind him. O'Brien was stroulpl
nd down,
one hand in the pocket of his black overalls, the other holding his cigarette.
'You understand,' he said, 'that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always btehe dianrk. You will receive
orders and you will obey them, without knowing why. Later I
shall send you a book from which you will learn the true nature
of the society we live in, and the strategy
wbeyshawlhlich
destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full
members of the Brotherhood. But between the gaeinmesr
hat
we are fighting for and the immedi ate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything. I tell you that the Brotherhood
exists, but I cannot tell whyeotuher it numbers a hundred
members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge you will
never be able to say that it numbers even asa domzaenny. as
You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as they disappear. As this was your first contact,
it will be preserved. When you receive ordersw,illt me
from me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you, it
will be through Martin. When you are finally
ycoauu
confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will abnloettobe
betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you
will not even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a different person, with a different face.'
He continued to move to and fro over tchaerpesto.fIn
spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More
even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony. However much in earnest he might be, he had nothing of the single-mindednesbselotnhgast
to a fanatic. When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease, amputated limbs, and altefraecdes, it was with a faint air of persiflage. 'This is unavoidable,' his voice
seemed to say; 'this is what we have gotunftloincdhoi,ngly. But this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth
living again.' A wave of admiration, almost of wfolroswheidp,

out from Winston towards O'Brien. For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy figure of Goldstein. Whelnookyeoduat O'Brien's powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured face, so
ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe that he
could be defeated. There was no stratagem that he was not equal
to, no danger that he could not foresee. EvesneemJeudl be impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently. O'Brien went on:
'You will have hearrudmours of the existence of the
Brotherhood. No doubt you have formed your own picture of it.
You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly icnellars, scribbling messages on walls,
recognizing one another by codewords or by special movements of
the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one anotheirt,isand impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others. Goldstein himself, if he ftehlel into hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete
list of members, or any information that would letaoda
them
complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is nootrgaannization in the ordinary
sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is
indestructible. You will never have anytthoi
ustain you,
except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are cauygohutwill get no
help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely
necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cweillll. You have to get used to living without results and without hope.
You will work faowhile, you will be caught, you will
confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible
change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead.
Our only true life is in the future. We shall
itna
te part
as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away
that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area
of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectivcealny. We only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to
individual, generation after generation. thIenface of the
Thought Police there is no other way.'
He halted and looked for the third time at his wrist- watch.
'It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,' tohe said
Julia. 'Wait. The decanter is still half full.'
He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the stem.
'What shall it be this time?' he said, still with the same faint suggestion of irony. 'To cotnhfeusion of the Thought
Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?'
'To the past,' said Winston.
'The past is more important,' agreed O'Brien gravely.

They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood up to go. O'Brien took a small box from oftahecabtionpet
and handed her a flat white tablet which he told her to place
on her tongue.
wIats important, he said, not to go out
smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very observant. As
soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared existence. He took another pace or two up and down, then
stopped.
hteor
forget
'There are details to be settled,' he said. 'I assume that you have a hiding-place of some kind?'
Winston explained about trhoeom over Mr Charrington's shop.
'That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something elsefor you. It is important to change one's
hiding-place frequently. Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of

the boo

even O'Brien, Winstnoonticed, seemed to
pronounce the words as though they were in italics-
'Goldstein's book, you understand, as soon as possibmlaey. It
be some days before I can get hold of one. There are not many in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought Politcheem hunt
down and destroy them almost as fast as we can produce them. It
makes very little difference. The book is indestructible. If
the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almfoosrt word word. Do you carry a brief-case to work with you?' he added.
'As a rule, yes.'
'What is it like?'
'Black, very shabby. With two straps.'
'Black, two straps, very shabby -- good. One day in the fairly near future-I cannot give a date -- onemesosfagetshe among your morning's work will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a repetahte.folOlnowing day you
will go to work without your brief-case. At some time during
the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say
"I think you have dropped your brief-case.o"ne hTehegives
you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book. You will return it within fourteen days.'
They were silent for a moment.
'There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said
O'Brien. 'We shall meet again -- if we do meet again-'
Winston looked up at him. 'In the place where darkness?' he said hesitantly.
ntohere is
O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. 'In the place where there is no darkness,' he satihdo,ughahe had recognized the allusion. 'And in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say beforleeavyeo?uAny message?
Any question?.'
Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further
question that he wanted to ask:
lsetsisldid he feel any
impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of anything directly connected with O'Broirethe Brotherhood,
there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the
dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last dtahyes, and

little room over Mr Charrington's shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel engraviinnits rosewoodframe. Almost at random he said:
'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins
"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's"?'
Again O'Brien nodded. With a completed the stanza:
osfo
rave courtesy he
'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's, When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey
When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.'
'You knew the last line!' said Winston.
'Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is
time for you to go. But wait. You had bemtet one of these tablets.'
ivelyeotu
As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His powerful
grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm.
dAotor Wtihneston
looked back, but O'Brien seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind. He was waiting whiatnhd onhitshe
switch that controlled the telescreen. Beyond him Winston could
see the writing-table with itsgreen- shaded lamp and the
speakwrite and the wire baskets deep-
wliatdhepapers. The
incident was closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, O'Brien would be back at his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.

x x x

Winston was gelatinous with fatigGueel.atinous was the
right word. It had come into his head spontaneously. His body seemed to have not otnhleyweakness of a jelly, but its
translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the bllyomopdh hadnd
been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving
only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnifiHeids.overalls fretted his
shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creak.
He had worked more than ninety hours in five
hdaadys. So
everyone else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to do, Panroty work of any description,
until tomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in the
hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the
iSnl
ld,
direction of Mr Charrington's shop, keepingeyeo
pen for
the patrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was no danger of anyone interfering witThhe heiamv.y

brief-case that he was carrying bumped against his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his
leg. Inside it w

he book, which he had now had in his

possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at.
On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the proctehsesions, speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and soqfuealing
trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the
caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed ptlhaen
oming
of guns -- after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatEruerdasioafhad
boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got
their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who
bweere to
publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces -- at jumsotmentthis
it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war
with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Euraasnia was ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became knwoiwtnh,extreme suddenness
and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the
enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the
central London squares at the moment when it haIptp
sed.
night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of aboutthouasand schoolchildren in the
uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of
the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a larbgaeld skull over which a few lank locks
straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatrehde,gripped the neck of the
microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end
of a bony arm, clawed the air menacinglyhisa
d. His
voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings,
rapings, torture opfrisoners, bombing of civilians, lying
propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being cofnivrisntced and
then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd
boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowwnieldd
by a
beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the
schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps
twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He
apnldatform
unrolled and read it without pauisni
is speech. Nothing
altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddentlhye names were different. Without
words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next momenwtas athere
tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the

square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the
wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The ofa
stein
had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters
were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in
clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that
fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. Tohreator, still gripping the neck of the
microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand
clawing at the air, had gone straight on wsiptehechh.iOne minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting
from the crowd. The Hate continued exaasc that the target had been changed.
fore, except
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that
the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even
breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to
preoccupy him. It was during the moment of dwihsiolred he
posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not
see had tapped him on the shoaunldd
aid, 'Excuse me, I
think you've dropped your brief-case.' He took the brief-case
abstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it bew
before he had an opportunity to look inside it. The instant that thedemonstration was over he went straight to the
Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done lTihkeewise. orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to
their posts, were hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had beaelnways
at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reporrtescoradnsd
of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs -- all had to be rectified at
lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Deparitnmteenntded that within
one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existaennycwehere. The work
was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it
involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the
twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses
were brought up from
ctehlelars and pitched all over the
corridors: meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canEtaecehn.
time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, atnidme tehaacth he
crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered thleikedaesk snowdrift, halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the
floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat enough pile to give him room to worwka.s woWrhsat of
all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often

it was enough merely to substitute onefornanother, but
any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination.
Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring
the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
By thethird day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushing physitcaaslk, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless
neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to
remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every strokheis ionfk-pencil,
was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the
Department that the forgery should be perfectth.e moOrnning
of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as
much as half an hour nothing came
tohuettuboef; then one
more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time
the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the Department. A mighty dweheidc,h could never be
mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence that thweithwar Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was
unexpectedly announced that all workerstheiMinistry were free till tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the
brief-case containing thebook, which had remained
between his feet while he worked and under his body while he
slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.
With a sorotf voluptuous creaking in his joints he
climbed the stair above Mr Charrington's shop. He was tired,
but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, dilritty
the
little oilstove and put on a pan of water for coffee. Julia
would arrive presently: meanwhile there

thweas

book. He

sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid theof tshteraps brief-case.
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or
title on the cover. The print also
slloiogkhetdly irregular.
The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the book had passed through many handisn.scrTihpetion
on the title-page ran:

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

by

Emmanuel Goldstein

Winston began reading:

Chapter I

Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of
the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the
world, the High, tMhieddle, and the Low. They have been

subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different
names, and their relative numbers, as asw
eir attitude
towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has naelvteerred. Even after
enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gywriolslcope always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way
or the other.
The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable. . . Winston stopped reading, chiefly oridner to appreciate
the fact that hwas reading, in comfort and safety. He
was alone: no telescreen, no eatrhe kaetyhole, no nervous
impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summaeirr played against his cheek. From
somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children:
in the room itself there was no sound excienpstectt
oice
of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was Suedtdeemniltyy,.
as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he openead it at different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on
reading:

Chapter III War is Peace

The splitting up of the world into three great
super-states was an event which could be and indeed was
foreseen before the middle of the twentieth ceWnittuhr he
absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the
United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and
Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third,
Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three
super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they
follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the
owfh e
northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from
Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania compriseAsmertihceas,
the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smalletrhe than others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises
China and the countriteosthe south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or anothtehre,se three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past
twenty-five years. War, however, islonngoer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth centary. It iswarafare of limited aims between
combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no
material cause for fighting and are not divided gebnyuinaeny

ideological difference. This is not to say that either the
conduct of war, or
ptrheevailing attitude towards it, has
become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all couanntdries, such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals
against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when tchoemymitatreed
by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense wairnvolves very small numbers of people,
mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few
casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only
guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of
civilization war means no more thcaonntianuous shortage of

consumption goods, and the

occasional

crash of a

rocket bomb

which may cause a few

scores of

deaths. War

has in fact changed

its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged
have changed in their order of importance. Mwohtiicvhewere
already present to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth centuarhyave now become dominant and are
consciously recognized and acted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war -- for in
spite of the regrouping which occurs
feevwe
ears, it is
always the same war -- one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three
super-states could be definitively conquered even boythetrhe
two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their
natural defences are too formidable. Euriass
rotected by
its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and indus trioofusness
its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything tfoight about. With the establishment of
self-contained economies, in which production and consumption
are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars cohmaesto an end, while the
competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and
death. In any case each of the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almaolsltthe materials that it needs
within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a warlabfoourr power. Between the
frontiers of the super- states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, tlhieersea rough quadrilateral
with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong
Kong, containing within it about a fifth
poofpultahteion of
the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are
constantly struggling. In practice no one
epvoewrecontrols
the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly
changing hands, and it is the chance of
tsheiisz
rngthat
fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the

endless changes of alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield imporvteagnettable products such as
rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above allcontthaeiyn
a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countroifethe Middle East, or
Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of
the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of tahreesaes, reduced
more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually
from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, tmoorecapture territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more
armaments, to capture more territory, anodn insdoefinitely.
It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of flEouwrasia
back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly becianpgtured and recaptured by
Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between
Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Ptohlreee all powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are
largely unihabited and unexplored:
tbhuetbalance of power
always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate.
Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator
is not really necessary to the world's economy. They add
nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of wagiisng a war always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.
By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of
continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, andprotcheess by which it
maintains itself, would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles ofdoublethink, thisaim is simultaneously
recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the
Inner Party) is to use up the products maocfhintehwithout
raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problemwhaotfto do with the
surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial
society. At present, when few human beings even haveto enough eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not
have become so, even if no artificial procesdseesstruocftion had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world extihsatted before
1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future
to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future suoncbieeltiyevably
rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering
antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white c-o-ncrete

was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.
Science and technology were developing
partodiagious speed,
and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. Thisfailed to happen, partly because of the
impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions,
partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which coulsdurvniovte in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty yearsCeratgaoi.n backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been
developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped,
and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen- fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in
the machine are still there. From the momentthewhmeanchine
first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgaenrdytherefore to a great
extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine
were used deliberately for that
heunndg,er, overwork, dirt,
illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in facwti,thout being used for any such
purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible ndoitstrtiobute --
the machine did raise the living standards of the average
humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at
the end of the nineteenth and the begoifn centuries.
engtwentieth
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In ain whoirclhd
everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroaonmd a refrigerator, and possessed a
motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the mostimportant form of inequality would already have
disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of perspoonsaslessions and
luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power
remained in the hands a somfall privileged caste. But in
practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, thmeassgreat of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would
become literate and would learn to
ftohri
hemselves; and
when once they had done this, they would sooner or later
realize that the privileged minority had no functiotnh,ey and would sweep itaway. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible onbasais of poverty and ignorance. To
return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the
beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing,
awas not
practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization whichhad become quasi-instinctive throughout
almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which

remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense
and was bound to be dominated, directly or indibrye more advanced rivals.
tsy,
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happaened to great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly
between 1920 an1d940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital
equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were
prevented from working and kept half
bayl
ate charity.
But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted weorbeviously unnecessary, it made
opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real weoaftlhteh
world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be
distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destrucntoitonecessarily
of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring insttorattohsephere,
or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might
otherwise be used
mtaoke the masses too comfortable, and
hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of
war are not actually destroyed, their manufaicst
ill a
convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundredcargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as
obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody,
and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is
built. In principle the war effort is always so asp
oanned
eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the
population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of halnfecetshseities of life;
but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy
to keep even the favoured groups somewherethen
ink of
hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the
distinction between one group and another. By the standards of
the early twentieth century, even a member
Ionfnert
arty
lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the
better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food
and drink and tobacco, his two or three sehrivsa
vate
motor-car or helicopter -- set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members Ouotfer thPearty
have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged
masses whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of
horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And
at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and

therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of allto apower small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of
survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically
acceptable way. In principle it would be quite siwmapsltee to the surplus labour of the world by building temples and
pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up ora n
by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to
them. But this would provide
tohneleconomic and not the
emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned
here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at wotrhke,morbaulte of
the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to
be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he shouclrdedubleousa
and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is
necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whethwearr isthaectually
happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. isAll that needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of
the intelligence which the Party requires omfembietrss, and
which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher uprantkhseone goes, the
more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that

war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In

his

capacity as an administratorit is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or

that

item of

war

news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that

the

entire

war is spurious and is either not happeningbeionrg waigsed
for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of

doublethink.Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for

an instant in his mystical belief that t

se wraeral,

and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
All members of the InPnaerrty believe in this coming
conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more territory and so building up
an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the diosfcovery
some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons

continues unceasingly,

and is onetheovery few remaining

activities in which the can find any outlet.

inventive or speculative type of mind

In Oceania at the present day, Science,

in

the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is
no word for 'Science'.
eTmhpeirical method of thought, on
which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And
even technological progress only happens when its prcoadnucts
in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all

the useful arts the world is either standing still or going
backwards. The fields are cultivated
hwoirtshe-ploughs while
books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital
importance -- meaning, in effect, war and
epsopliiocneage --
the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to thceo
surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thoughTth.ere are therefore two
great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is
how to discover, against his will, what another humains
being
thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving wbaerfnoirneghand. In
so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is eimtihxetrureaof
psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary
minuteness the meaning
foafcial expressions, gestures, and
tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of
drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; isor he chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such
branches of his special subject as are relevtahnettaktiong
of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests,
or inthe Australian desert, or on lost islands of the
Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future
wars; others devise larger and larger rboocmkbest, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable
armour- plating; others search for new and degaadsleise,ror for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such
quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or
for breeds of diseagseerms immunized against all possible
antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore
its way under the soil like a submarine under the
awnater, or
aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others
explore even remoter possibilities such as foctuhsei
un's
rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in
space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tapping the heat at the earth's centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near
wtaivdeaslby
realization, and none of the three super-setvaetregains a
significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is that
all three powers already possess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon
far more powerful than any that
ptrheesiernt researches are

likely to discover. Although the

Party,

according to its habit,

claims the invention for itself,

atomic

bombs first appeared as

early as the nineteen- forties, and were first used on a large
scale about ten years later.thaAtttime some hundreds of
bombs were dropped on industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America.effTehcet was to convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more
atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society, and hence
of their own power. Thereafter, althnoou
ormal agreement

was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three powers merely continue to produce atomic bomsbtsoreand
them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe
will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years.
Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled
projectiles, and the fragile movable battleship has given way
to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise there has been littldeevelopment. The tank, the submarine, the
torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in usAen.d in spite of the endless slaughters
reported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate
battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in weaeksf,ehave never
been repeated.
None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre which involvesthe risk of serious defeat. When any large
operation isundertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally. The strategy that all three powers are
following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is
the same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting,
bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or otthheerrivoafl
states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival
and remain on peaceful terms sof
any years as to lull
suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally they will all be fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating
as to make retaliation impossible. It will then be time to sign
a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power, in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of
realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator and the Poilnev:asinoon of
enemy territory is ever undertaken. This explains the fact that
in some places the frontiers between the superstates are arbitrary. Eurasia,for example, could easily conquer the
British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other hand it would be possiblOeceafnoira to push its
frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this would violate the principlef,ollowed on all sides though never
formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to conquer
the areas that used once to be known as France andit Germany, would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a
task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate a
population of about a hundred million people, who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly onOcetahneic level.
The problem is the same for all three super-states. It is
absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extentw,ar with
prisoners and coloured slaves. Even the official ally of the

moment is alwayrsegarded with the darkest suspicion. War
prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes
on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact
with foreigners hweould discover that they are creatures
similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about
them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be
broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteouosnn
ich
his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or
Ceylon may change handtsh,e main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly
understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditiloinfse of
in all three super-states are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called IngsocE,uraisnia it is
called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a
Chinese name usually translated as Death- Worshipp,erhbaupts better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of
Oceania is not allowed to know anything
toefnettshof the
other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, thaensocial
systems which they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is tshaeme pyramidal structure, the same
worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and
for continuous warfare. It follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no
advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one anotherlikuepthree sheaves of
corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are Thdeoiirng.
lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the war should continue everlaasntdingly without victory. Meanwhile the fact that theris no
danger of conquest makes possible the deniraelaliotfy which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessaryrepteoat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally
changed its character.
In past ages, a war, almost by definwiatsi
mething
that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable
victory or defeat. In the past, also, war wastheo
ainof
instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with
physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a
false view of the world upon their follbouwte
ey could
not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. Sloong as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be
undesirable, the precautions against defeat had
Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or
steoriobues.
religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two migfhitve,make

but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to
make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficientwasinecessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly
osrooner
accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Neawnsdpapers history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practtoidsaeydwould have
been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far
as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most
important of all safeguards. While wars could
obreloswto,n
no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.
But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is thniong such as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the
most palpable facts can be denied or disregAasr
e h.ave
seen, researches that could be called scientific are still
carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a
kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show
irse
tlts
important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficieinntOceania except the Thought
Police. Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe withinalmwohsitcany perversion of thought can be safely practised. Reality only
exerts its pressure through the needs of everyda-y- thleife
need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping outtopo-fstorey windows, and
the like. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure
and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is
all. Cut off from contact with the outer anwdo
the
past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knwohwiicnhgdirection is up and
which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the
Pharaohs or the Caesars conuoltdbe. They are obliged to
prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at
the same low level of military technique asrivtahlesi;rbut once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.
The war, therefore, if we judgbey thiet standards of
previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they airnecapable of hurting one another. But
though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goodasn,d it helps to preserve the
special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internalIn tahfefair. past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the
destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are
not fighting against one another at all. Tihsewagweadr by

each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquteesrtrsitoorfy, but
to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate
to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The
peculiar pressure that it exerted on human
bbeetiwnegesn the
Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared
and been replaced
sboymething quite different. The effect
would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in peprepaecteu,al
each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each
would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from
the sobering influence of external danAg
ace that was
truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This --
although the vast majority of Party members understoannldy it in a shallower sense -- is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace.
Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewherreemotien
distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being

alone with the forbidden book,

in a room

with no telescreen,

had not worn off. Solitude

and safety

were physical sensations,

mixed up somehow with the tiredness of histheb
tness
of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window
that played upon his cheek. The book faschiinma,t
more
exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. whIatt hesaid
would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. waIstthe product of a mind
similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more
systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. juHset tuhranded
back to Chapter I when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair and started out of his chair to meet her. She dburmopwend her tool-bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was
more than a week since they had seen one another.
'I've gotthe book,' he said themselves.
tahsey disentangled
'Oh, you've got it? Good,' she said without much interest, and almostimmediately knelt down beside the oilstove to make
the coffee.
They did not return to the subject until they
ihnad been
bed for half an hour. The evening was just cool enough to make it worth while to pull up the counterpane. From betlhoew came familiar sound of singing and the scrape of boots on the
flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman
Wwihnosmton had seen
there on his first visit was almost a fixture in the yard.
There seemed to
nboehour of daylight when she was not
marching to and fro between the washtub and the line, alternately gagging herselwfith clothes pegs and breaking
forth into lusty song. Julia had settled down on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He reached
out for the book, which was lyitnhge floonor, and sat up

against the bedhead.
'We must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the
Brotherhood have to read it.'
'You read it,' she swaiitdh her eyes shut. 'Read it
aloud. That's the best way. Then you can explain it to me as you go.'
The clock's hands said smiexa,ning eighteen. They had
three or four hours ahead of them. He propped the book against his knees and began reading:

Chapter I

Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably stihnecend of
the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the
world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been
subdivided in many ways, they
bhoarvnee countless different
names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varfireodm age to age: but the
essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes,samtehe
pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will
always return to equilibnum, however far it is onpeu or the other
'Julia, are you awake?' said Winston.
yed
'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous.' He continued reading:
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the Higtho reimsain where they
are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they haaivme--afnor it is an
abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much
crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outsidetheir dailylives -- is to abolish all
distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is tihne same its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securelpyoweirn, but sooner or later
there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlLioswtonthe
their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty andjustice. As soon as they have reached their
objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High.
Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of tahnedmthe struggle begins over
again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even
temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It woaunld be exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no
progress of
maaterial kind. Even today, in a period of
decline, the average human being is physically better off than

he was a few centuraigeos. But no advance in wealth, no
softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the poviinetw ofof
the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
law of human life. This doctrine, of course, had always had its adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put forward
there was a significant change. Inpastththe need for a
hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon
them, andit had generally been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave. The
Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made
use of such terms as freejduosmt,ice, and fraternity. Now,
however, the concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not yet in positions of commmaenrde,ly but hoped to be so before long. In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality,theannhad estab
lished a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The newMiddle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny
beforehand. Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early
nineteenth century and was the last link in a
tchhoauignht of
stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still
deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each
variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900
tohnewards
aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. Thneew movements which appeared in the
middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly called,in
Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep tnhaemiers and pay lip-service to
their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest
progress and freeze history at a ch
ent. The familiar
pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As
usual, the High were to be turned out by the Miwdodulled, who

then

become

the High; but this

time, by conscious strategy,

the

High

would

be able to maintain

their position permanently.

The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation
of historicalknowledge, and the growth of the historical
sense, which had hardly existed before the ninecteenetnutrhy. The cyclical movement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and iwfas inttelligible, then it was alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as
early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality
had become technically possible. It stwialsl true that men
were not equal in their native talents and that functions had

to bespecialized in ways that favoured some individuals
against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier
ages, class distinctionhsad been not only inevitable but
desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was
altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or econloemviecls. Therefore, from
the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality waslonngoer an ideal to be
striven after, but a danger to be averted. In more primitive ages, whena just and peaceful society was in fact not
possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The idea of an
earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laawnsd without brute labour, had
haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. And this
vision had had a certain hold even on thewhog
ally
profited by each historical change. The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believtehdeirin own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech,
equality before the law, and the likeh,avea
ven allowed
their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourthdecade of the twentieth century all the main
currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exatchtelmoment when it
became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name
it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And
in the general hardening of outlook setth
round about
1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases
for hundreds of years -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, tortuerxetratcot confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations-not only became common agabiunt,were tolerated
and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.
It was only after a decade of nationalcivwialr
ars,
revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out
political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had
appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from prtehveailing chaos had long
been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was mfaodretheup
most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers,
journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose
origins lay in the salaried middle class aunpdpert
rades
of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized
government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past

ages, theywere less avaricious, less tempted by luxury,
hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This
last difference was cardinal. By comparison withexitshtaitng today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups waelrweays infected to some
extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the CCahtuhroclhic
of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of
the reason for this was that in the past no govertnhmeent had power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of printh,owever, made it easier to manipulate
public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, antdechtnhiecal
advance which made it possible to receive and transmit
simultaneously on the same instrument, private life ca
ne to
end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour dahyours a under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channoeflcommunication closed.
The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the
will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties,
society regrouped itself, as alwaiynst,o High, Middle, and

Low. But the new High group, unlike all its

forerunners, did

not act upon instinct but knew what was position. It had long been realized that

needed to safeguard the onlybassiescure

its

for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most
easily defended when they are possessed jointlys.o-cTahleled
'abolition of private property' which took place in the middle years of the century meant,effienct, the concentration of
property in far fewer hands than before: but with this
difference, that the new owners were a group instemaadss of a of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns
anything, except petty personal belonginCgosl.lectively, the
Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls
everything, and disposes of the products as it fitth.i
nks
the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposbeedc,ause the whole
process was represented as an act of collectivization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist classwere
expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists hadbeen expropriated. Factories, mines, land,
houses, transport -- everything had been taken away from them:
and since these things wneorlonger private property,it
followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its
phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the
Socialist programme; with trheesult, foreseen andintended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.

But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling
group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without,
or it governs so inefficiently that the masssetsirraerdeto
revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into beingo,r it loses its own self-confidence and
willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and
as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against altlhemowould remain in
power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.
After the middle of the present century, thedanfgierrst
had in reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now
divide the world
iinsfact unconquerable, and could only
become conquerable through slow demographic changes which a government withwide powers can easily avert. The second
danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never revolt of theiorwn accord, and they never revolt merely
because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standarodfscomparison, they never even
become aware that they are oppressed. The recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary annodt noawre permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations can and do happen withhoauvting political results, because
there is no way in which discontent can become articulate. As
fcr the problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society since thdeevelopment of machine technique, it is
solved bythe device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III), which isalso useful in keying up public morale to the
necessary pitch. From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-aoff of new group of able, underemployed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticismtheiinr own ranks. The
problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness boththeodirecting
group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of matshsees needs only to be
influenced in a negative way.
Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already, the general structure of Oscoecaineitcy. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, eavcehriyevement,
every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are heilsdsuetdirectly
from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big
Brother. He iasface on the hoardings, a voice on the
telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die,
and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was
born. Big Brother is the guise in whiPcahrtyt
hooses to
exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, reavnedrence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an

organization. Below Big Brothceormes the Inner Party. its
numbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per cent of the population of Oceania. Below the InnecromePsarty
the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the
brain of the State, may be justly likened hatnods.t
elow
that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the proles', numbering perhaps 85 per centthe poofpulation. In
the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the
Low: for the slave population of the equatorial lapnadsss
who
constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure.
In principle, membership
tohfese three groups is not
hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not
born into the Inner Party. Admission to
beriatnhcehrof the
Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or maarnkyed domination of
one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure
Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants ofthat area. In no part of Oceania do the
inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no
capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows.Except that English is its chief lingua

francaand Newspeak its official language, it is not

centralized in any way. Its rulersnota
eld together by
blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true
that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on

what

at

first sight appear to be hereditary lines.

There is far

less

to-

and-fro movement betwteheendifferent groups than

happened under capitalism or

Between the two branches

even in of the

the pre-industrial

Party there is a

age.

certain amount

of interchange, but only so much as will ensuwreeakltihnagts
are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the
Party. The most gifted among them,migwhhtopossibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police andeliminated. But this state of affairs is not
necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The
Party is not a class in the old sense of the worndo.t
It does
aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of keepinagbletshtepeople at the
top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new
generation from the ranks of the proletaIrni
crucial
years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of
Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something
called 'class privilege' assumed that
iwsh
ot hereditary
cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, norhe pdaiudse to reflect
that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived,

whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lastedfor hundreds or thousands of years. The
essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view cearntdainaway
of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is
a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The
Party is not concerned with perpetuaittisnblood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchicsatlructure remains always the
same.
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our tairmeereally designed to
sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day societyfrom being perceived. Physical
rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at
present not possible. From the proletarians noitsh
ongbe
feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to cenwtourrkyi,ng, breeding,
and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without
the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
They could only become dangerous if the aodfv
ndustrial
technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but,
since military and commercial rivalry are no
ilmopnogretrant,
the level of popu lar education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hollodo,kedion as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual
liberty because they have no intellect. In amemPbaerrt,yon

the

other hand, not even the

smallest deviation of opinion on

the

A

most unimportant subject

Party member lives from

can be tolerated.

birth to death under ofthe eye

the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure
that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep owrorkaiwnagke,

or resting, in his bath or

in bed,

he

can be inspected without

warning and without knowing

that he

is

being inspected. Nothing

that he does is indifferent. His friendshipsr,elahxiastions,
his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of
his face when he is alone, the words he mutters
eivnen sleep,
the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanour, but any
eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that coulpdossibly be the symptom of an inner
struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of
choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand his actions
are not regulated by law or by any clearly focromduel
fted
behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detectedm,ean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as
punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but
are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many

of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him arpelainnelvyer stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a napteurrsaolnly orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker)he will in all
circumstances know, without taking thought,
iwsh
he true
belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate
mental training, undergone
cihnildhood and grouping itself
round the Newspeak words crimestop,blackwhite,and

doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever.

A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasHme.is supposed to live in a
continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and selfabasement btehfeore
power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberatteulryned outwards and
dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or
rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired
inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be tauegvhetn to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop.Crimestop means the faculty of stoppinsghort, as though by instinct, at the
threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive leorgriocrasl,
of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical
to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading heirnetiacal direction.

Crimestop,in short, means protective stupidity. But

stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control oovneer's ownmental processes as
complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic
society rests ultimately on
btehleief that Big Brother is
omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipoatnednthe party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment faocfts. The keyword here is

blackwhite.Like so many Newspeak words, this word has

two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black isin white, contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it
means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party
discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to

believthat black is white,

maonrde, to know
that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed
the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thwohuigchhtreally embraces
all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as

doublethink.

The alteration of the past is necessartywo rfeoarsons,
one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The
subsidiary reason is that the Party member,like the

proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He mucsutt ofbfe from the
past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believhee isthbaettter
off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. Butfarbthe more important
reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to
safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be
constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases Itrishatl.so
that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever
be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, EuraEsaisatasoira
(whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country
must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered. hiTshtuosry is continuously
rewritten. This day- to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessarystatboilitthye
of the re/gime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc.
Past events, it is argued,
nhoa
bjective existence, but
survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since
the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full
control of the minds of its members, it follotwhse patshtat
is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been alatneyred in specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new viesrsion
the past, and no different past can ever have existed. This holds good even when, as often happens, the samheas teovent
be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a
year. At all times
Ptahrety is in possession of absolute
truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different
from what it is now. It will be seen
ctohnattrolt
the
past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment
is merely
maechanical act. But it is also necessary to

remembethat events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written records, then isinecessary to forget

that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique.isIt learnedby the
majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodIonxOldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 'reality control'. In Newspeak it is called

doublethinkthough doublethinkcomprises much

else as well.

Doublethinkmeans the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and

accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks wrietahlity; but by the exercise of

doublethinkhe also satisfies himself that reality is

not violated. The process has to be conscious, or
niott
would
be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethinlies at the very heart of
Ingsoc, sincethe essential act of the Party is to use
conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose
that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberatwehilleies
genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to
draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to
deny the existence of objective reality antdhe wahlille to
take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word

doublethink it is necessary to exercise

doublethinkFor by using the word one atdhmaittone

is tampering with reality; by a fresh

daocutbleotfhink

one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie
always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means
of doublethink that the Party has been able
m-a-y, and

for all we

know, continue to be able for thousands

of years

--

to arrest

All past

the course of history.

oligarchies have fallen from power eithe

r because

they ossified or because they
sgorfetw. Either they became
stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became lainbderal cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force,
and once again were overthrown.
fTehlely, that is to say,
either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Patrothave produced a system of
thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual bacsoiusld the dominion of the
Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue
ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combbienleiefain one's own
infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.
It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of

doublethink are thosweho invented doublethink

and know that it is a vast system of mental

cheating. In

our

society, those who have the best knowledge

of what is

happening

are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is.
In general, the greattehre understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear
illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in
intensity asone rises in the social scale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the
subject peoples of the disputed territorTioe
hese people
the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a
matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a

change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat thesmamein the manner as the old ones. The slightly more favoured workers whom
we call 'the proles' are only intermittently conscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into offrenzies fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable
of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is
in the ranks of the Party, and above thaelInneorf Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is
believed in most firmly by those who know iitmpotsosibblee.
This peculiar linking-together of opposites -- knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism-is one of the chief
distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even wthheenre is no practical
reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every
principle for which the Socialmiosvtement originally stood,

and it chooses to

do this

in the name of

Socialism. It

preaches

a contempt for the

working

class unexampled

for centuries

past,

and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time
peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that Itreason. systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name whiacdireicst appeal to the
sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four
Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal thoeffacts. The Ministry of
Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with
lies, the Ministry of Love with toarntdu
he Ministry of
Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not
accidental, nor do they result
ofrrdoimnary hypocrisy; they
are deliberate exercises idoublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be
broken. If human equality is to be for ever aviefrthed -- High, as we have called them, are to keep their places
permanently -- then the prevailmienngtal condition must be controlled insanity.
But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored. It is; whyshould human equality be
averted? Supposing that the mechanics of the process have been rightly described, what is the motive for this huge, accurately
planned effort to freeze histaotr time?
particular moment of
Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen. the mystique of the Partayn,d above all of the Inner Party,
depends upon doublethink. But deeper than this lies the
original motive, the never-questioned instinct to the seizure of power and broughdoublethink, the
ftihrastt led
Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existencaefterwards. This motive really
consists . . . Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound. It seemed to him that Julia had been very still for some time past. She was lying on her side, naked from
the waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed on her
ohnaend and

dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Her breast rose and fell slowly and regularly.
'Julia.
No answer.
'Julia, are you awake?'
No answer. She waassleep. He shut the book, put it
carefully on the floor, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them.
He had stillh,e reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood how;he did not understand

whyChapter I, like Chapter III, had not acttouladlly

him anything that he did not know, it had merely systematized the knowledge that he possessed already. But reaafdtienrg it
he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not mmaakde. Thyeorue
was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not yemlaldo.w beAam
from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The hissufaceonand
the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong,
sleepy, confident feeling.
wHaes safe, everything was all
right. He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,' with the feeling that this remark containietda pirnofound
wisdom. When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept
for a long time, but a glance at the old-fcalsohciko ld
him that it was only twenty- thirty. He lay dozing for a while;
then the usual deep- lunged singing struck up from the yard below;

'It

was only an 'opeless fancy,

It

passed like an Ipril dye,

But

a look an' a word an' the dreams

they

stirred

They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!'
The driveling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still heard it all over the plachea.d ouItlived the Hate
Song. Julia woke at the sound, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of bed.
'I'm hungry,' she sai'dL.et's make some more coffee.
Damn! The stove's gone out and the water's cold.' She picked the stove up and shook it. 'There's no oil in it.'
'We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.'
'The funny thing is I made sure it was full.
tIo'm going
put my clothes on,' she added. 'It seems to have got colder.' Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable
voice sang on:
'They sye that time 'eals all things, They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!'
As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across

to thewindow. The sun must have gone down behind the houses;
it was not shining into the anyya
onger. The flagstones
were wet as though they had just been washed, and he had the
feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman marched
to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singifnagllianngd
silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come
across to his side; together they gazedwitdhoawnsort of
fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he looked at the
woman in her characteristic attitude, her
atrhmiscreaching
up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that sbheeautwiafsul. It had
never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty,
blown up to monstrous dimensionsby childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till itcoawrasse in the grain
like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thougwhhty,not? The solid, contourless
body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rtohsee-hip to rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?
'She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her wafslagainst his. Out of
their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing
they could never do. Only by word of mouth, fromminmdi,nd to

could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had

no

mind, she had only strong arms, aheawratr,mand a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given

birth to.

It

might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary

flowering,

a

year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly
swollen like a fertilized fruit graonwdn hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she wsaisngisntgi.ll
The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, starweatyching behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was
curious to think that the sky was thfeor esvaemreybody, in
Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the
sky were also very much the same -- everaylwlh
er the

world, hundreds of thousands

of millions of people just like

this, people ignorant of

one another's existence, held apart

by

walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost
tehxea --
people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and musclepsowetrhthat would
one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the
proles ! Without having read to the

tehned

boofok, he

knew that that must be Goldstein's final message. The future
belonged to the proles. And could he btehats
en their
time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien
to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because
at the least it would be a ofw
ity. Where there is
equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength wouldchange into consciousness. The proles were
immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In thteheiernawakening would
come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the oddbsi,rdsl,ike passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did
not share and could not kill.
'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush thatto us,ang that first day, at the edge of the wood?'
'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.'
The birds sang, the proles sang. the Parntoyt sidnigd.
All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and
Brazil, and itnhe mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the
frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages
of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan
-- everywhere stood the same solid unconquefriagbulree, made
monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death
and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of
conscious beings must one day come. You wedreead,t
heirs
was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, anodn thpeassed
secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.
'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.

They sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to

have

turned into ice. He could see the white

all round

the

irises of

Julia's eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. Tohfe smear
rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.
'You are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.
'It was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.
'It was behintdhe picture,' said the voice. 'Remain
exactly where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.' It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do
nothing except stand gazing into one another's eyes. To run for
life, to get out of the house before it was too late -- no such thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice
from the wall. There was a sntahpougahsa catch had been
turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it.
'Now they can see us,' said Julia.
' Now we can see you,' said the voice. ' Statnhde
out in
middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one another.'
They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could

feel Julia's body shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking of hisown. He could just stop his teeth from chattering, but
his knees werbeeyond his control. There was a sound of
trampling boots below, inside the house and outside. The yard seemed to be full of men. Somethinbgeinwgadragged across
the stones. The woman's singing had stopped abruptly. There was
a long, rolling clang, as though the washtub had been flung
across the yard, and then a confoufs ended in a yell of pain.
gry shouts which
'The house is surrounded,' said Winston.
'The house is surrounded,' said the voice.
He heard Julia snap her teeth together. 'I suppose we may as well say good-bye,' she said.
'You may as well say good-bye,' said the Anvdo en
another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which
Winston had the impression of having heard bsetfrourcek,in;
'And by the way, while we are on the subject, "Here comes a
candle to light you to bed, here comes a toc your head"!'
p orff
Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The head ofa ladder had been thrust through the window and had
burst in the frame. Someone was clitmhbrionuggh the window.
There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shodon tbhoeoitrs
feet and truncheons in their hands.
Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he
barely moved. One thing alone mattered; to keep stkielelp, to still and not give them an excuse to hit you ! A man with a smooth prizefighter's jowl in which the mouth waassliotnly paused opposite him balancing his truncheon meditatively
between thumb and forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The feeling
of nakedness, with one's hands behind one's head and one's face and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. Tphreotrmuadned
the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and then passed on. There was craansoht.her Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and
smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.
The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. Howthosumgahltl,
Winston, how small it always was! There was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received a violent kick anoknle wthiech
nearly flung him off his balance. One of the men had smashed his fist into Julia's solar pledxouusb,ling her up like a
pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting for breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a
millimetre, but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within
the angle of his vision. Even in his terror it was as though he could feel the pain in hisbodoyw,nthe deadly pain which
nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to get back her breath. He knew what it was like; the terrible, apgaoinnizing which was there all the while but could not be suffered yet,
because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe.

Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and
asnhdoulders,
carried her out of the room like a sack. Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contortedt,he ewyietsh
shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that
was the last he saw of her.
He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts
which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind. He wownhdeetrheedr they had
got Mr Charrington. He wondered what they had done to the woman

in the yard. He

noticed

that he

badly wanted to

urinate, and

felt a faint

surprise,

because

he had done so

only two or

three

hours ago. He noticed that the clotchke maontelpiece said
nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light seemed too strong.
Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hourAsuguosnt an evening? He wondered whether after all he and Julia had
mistaken the time -- had slept the clock rotuhnodughatnit
was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning. But he did not pursue the thought further.
It was not interesting.
There ws another, lighter step in the passage. Mr
Charrington came into the room. The demeanour of the black- uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Somethinaglsohad changed in Mr Charrington's appearance. His eye fell on the
fragments of the glass paperweight.
'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply.
A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared;
Winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that
heardhad
a few moments ago on the telescreen. Mr Charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, buthaihri,swhich had been
almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing his
spectacles. He gave Winston a single
gslhaanrcpe, as though
verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer. His body had straightened, seaenmded to have grown
bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black
eyebrows wereless bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole
lines of the face seemed to have altered; even shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about
steheemednose
five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the first time
in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a
Thought Police.

* Chapter Three *

x x x

tmheember of

He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the
Ministry of Love, but there was no
mwaakyingocertain. He
was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealleadmps flooded it with
cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound which he supposed had something to do with the air subpepnlcyh., orA
shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken
only by the door and, at the end opposite thelavdaotoorr,y a
pan with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in each wall.
There was a dull aching in his belhlayd.beeInt there
ever since they had bundled him into the closed van and driven
him away. But he was also hungry,
gwniatwhinga, unwholesome
kind of hunger. It might be twenty-four hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did noptrobkanbolwy,
never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when
they arrested him. Since he was arrested he had not been fed.

He sat as

still as he could on the narrow behnicsh,

with

hands crossed

on his knee. He had already learned to

sit still.

If you made unexpected movements they yelled at you from the
telescreen. But the craving for food was growing upon him. What
he longed for above all was a piece of bhraeda that there were a few breadcrumbs in the pocket of his
idHeea
overalls. It was even possible -- he thought this frboemcause time to time something seemed to tickle his leg -- that there
might be
saizeable bit of crust there. In the end the
temptation to find out overcame his fear; he slipped a hand into his pocket.
'Smith!' yelled a voice from the telesc'r6e0e7n9.Smith
W.! Hands out of pockets in the cells!'
He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Before
being brought here he had been
ttoa
other place which
must have been an ordinary prison or a temporary lock-up used by the patrols. He did not know hohwe haldonbgeen there;
some hours at any rate; with no clocks and no daylight it was
hard to gauge the time. It
nwoaissy,aevil-smelling place.
They had put him into a cell similar to the one he was now in, but filthily dirty and at all times crowded orbfifteenn
people. The majority of them were common criminals, but there were a few political prisoners among thehma.d saHte silent
against the wall, jostled by dirty bodies, too preoccupied by
fear and the pain in his belly tmoucht
terest in his
surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference in demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others. The Party prisoners were always silent and terrifbiuetdthe ordinary
criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults at the guards, fought back fiercely when their
belongings were impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled food which they produced from mysterious
hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the
telescreen when it tried to restore ordetrh.e
Oonther hand
some of them seemed to be on good terms with the guards, called

them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle cigarettes through the spyhole in thdeoor. The guards, too, treated the common
criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle them roughly. There was much talk about the
forced-labour camps to which most of the prisoners expected to be sent. It was 'all right' in the camps, he gatlhoenrged, so
as you had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery,
favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was homosexuality and prostitution, there was even ilalliccoihtol
distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only
to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the
murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals.
There was a constant come-ando-fgprisoners of every
description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-
marketeers, drunks, prostitutes. Some
tohfe drunks were so
violent that the other prisoners had to combine to suppress them. An enormous wreck owfomaan, aged about sixty, with
great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come downin her struggles, was carried in, kicking and
shouting, by four guards, who had hold of her one at each corner. They wrenched off the boots whwiicthhshe had been
trying to kick them, and dumped her down across Winston's lap, almost breaking hitshigh-bones. The woman hoisted herself
upright and followed them out with a yell of 'F -- bastards!' Then, noticing that she was sittinsgomeotnhing uneven, she
slid off Winston's knees on to the bench.
'Beg pardon, dearie,' she said. 'I wouldn't 'a sat on you, only thebuggers put me there. They dono 'ow to treat a lady,
do they?' She paused, patted her breast, and belched. 'Pardon,'
she said, 'I ain't meself, quite.'
She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.
'Thass better,' she said, leaning back clwoistehd eyes.
'Never keep it down, thass what I say. Get it up while it's fresh on your stomach, like.'
She revived, turned to have another atl
nston and
seemed immediately to take a fancy to him. She put a vast arm round his shoulder and drew him towards her, breathing beer and vomit into his face.
'Wass your name, dearie?' she said.
'Smith,' said Winston.
'Smith?' said the woman. 'Thfausnsny. My name's Smith
too. Why,' she added sentimentally, 'I might be your mother!' She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about
the right age and physique, anwdas pirtobable that people
changed somewhat after twenty years in a forced-labour camp.
No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent the ordinary criminals ignored the Party prison'eTrhse.polits,'
they called them, with a sort of uninterested contempt. The
Party prisoners seemed terrified of speatkoi
nybody, and
above all of speaking to one another. Only once, when two Party members, both women, were pressed close together on the bench,
he overheard amid the din of voifceewshurariedly-whispered

words; and in particular a reference to something called 'room one-ohone', which he did not understand.
It might be two or three hours ago thhaatd brtohuegyht
him here. The dull painin his belly never went away, but sometimes it grew better and sometimes worse, atnhdoughhitss expanded or contracted accordingly. When it grew worse he
thought only of the pain itself, and
doefsirheifor food.
When it grew better, panic took hold of him. There were moments
when he foresaw the things that would happen to him with such

actuality that

his

heart galloped andbrehaitsh stopped. He

felt the smash on his shins;

of he

truncheons on his elbows and iron-shod boots saw himself grovelling on the floor, screaming

for mercy through broken teeth. He hardly thought ofHe Julia.
could not fix his mind on her. He loved her and would not betray her; but that was only a knfoawcntas he knew the
rules of arithmetic. He felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered what was happening to her. He thought ofoftener O'Brien, with a flickering hope. O'Brien might know that he had
been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried to save its members. But there wasraztohreblade; they would
send the razor blade if they could. There would be perhaps five
seconds before the guard could rush into the cell. The blade
would bite into him with a sort of burning caonldd
ns,
the fingers that held it would be cut to the bone. Everything
came back to his sick body,
swhhriacnhk trembling from the
smallest pain. He was not certain that he would use the razor blade even if he got the chance. It was moreto enxaitsutral
from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes' life even
with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it.
Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain
bricks in the walls of the cell. It should have bbeuetn easy, he always lost count at some point or another. More often he wondered where he was, and what tidmaey itofwas. At one
moment he felt certain that it was broad daylight outside, and
at the next equally certain that it was pitch darkness. In this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would netvuerrnedbe
out. It was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O'Brien
had seemed to recognize the allusion. In the Moifn
ery
there were no windows. His cell might be at the heart of the
building or against its outer wiatl
ight be ten floors
below ground, or thirty above it. He moved himself mentally from place to place, and tried to determine febeylintghof
his body whether he was perched high in the air or buried deep underground.
There was a sound of marcbhoiontgs outside. The steel
door opened with a clang. A young officer, a trim black-
uniformed figure who seemed to glitter allwitohv
olished
leather, and whose pale, straight-featured face was like a wax
mask, stepped smartly through the doorway. He mot
o tehde
guards outside to bring in the prisoner they were leading. The poet Ampleforth shambled into the cell. Thecladnogoerd shut
again.

Ampleforth made one or two uncertain movements from side
to side, as though having some idea that there was another door
to go out of, and then began to wander up and down the cell. He had not yet noticed Winston's presence. His troublewdereeyes
gazing at the wall about a metre above the level of Winston's
head. He was shoeless; large, dirty toes were sotuitc
fing
the holes in his socks. He was also several days away from a shave. A scrubby beard covehriesdface to the cheekbones,
giving him an air of ruffianism that went oddly with his large weak frame and nervous movements.
Winston roused hirnself a litftrloem his lethargy. He must speak to Ampleforth, and risk the yell from the telescreen. It was even conceivatbhlaet Ampleforth was the
bearer of the razor blade.
'Ampleforth,' he said.
There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth paused, mildly startled. His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston.
'Ah, Smith!' he said. 'You too!'
'What are you in for?'
'To tell you the truth -- ' He sat down
oanw
eardly
bench opposite Winston. 'There is only one offence, is there not?' he said.
'And have you committed it?'
'Apparently I have.'
He put a hand to his forehead and pressed hisfortemples a moment, as though trying to remember something.
'These things happen,' he began vaguely. 'I have been able to recallone instance -- a possible instance. It was an
indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive
edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word "God" to remain at the end of a line. I cohuelldp itn!o't he added
almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. 'It
was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was "yrooud". Do realize that there are only twelve rhymes to "rod" in the
entire language?For days I had racked my brains. There

wano other rhyme.'

The expression on his face changed. The annoyance passed
out of it and for a moment he looked almost pleaseodf. A sort intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out
some useless fact, shone through the dirt and scrubby hair.
'Has it ever occurred to you,' he 'tshaaitdthe whole
history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?'
No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston.
Nor, in the circumstances, did it strike him or interesting.
iamsporvtearnyt
'Do you know what time of day it is?' he said. Ampleforth looked startled again. 'I had hardly thought
about it. They arrested me -c-oulidtbe two days ago --
perhaps three.' His eyes flitted round the walls, as though he half expected to find a window somewhere. 'There is no
difference between night and day in this place. I do not see

how one can calculate the time.'
They talked desultorily for smoimneutes, then, without apparent reason, a yell from the telescreen bade them be
silent. Winston sat quietly, his hands crossed. Ampleforth, too
large to sit in comfort on the narrow bench, fidgeted from side
to side, clasping his lank hands
rfoiurnsdtone knee, then
round the other. The telescreen barked at him to keep still. Time passed. Twenty minutes, an houirt wa-s- difficult to
judge. Once more there was a sound of boots outside. Winston's

entrails contracted.

Soon, very soon, perhaps

inminfuitvees,

perhaps now, the tramp had come.

of boots would mean that

his own turn

The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped into
the cell. With braief movement of the hand he indicated
Ampleforth.
'Room 101,' he said.
Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards, his face vaguely perturbed, but uncomprehending.
What seemed like a long time passed. The pain in Winston's belly had revived. His mind sagged round and roundsamoen the
trick, like a ball falling again and again into the same series
of slots. He had only six thoughts. The pain in his belly; a
piece of bread; the blood and the screaming; ;O ia

the razor blade. There was another

spasm in

his entrails, the

heavy boots were approaching. As

the door

openewda,ve otfhe

air that it created brought in a

powerful

smell of cold sweat.

Parsons walked into sports-shirt.

the

cell. He

was wearing khaki shorts and a

This time Winston

was

startled

into self-forgetfulness.

'Yohere!' he said.

Parsons gave Winston a glance in which watsh
ither
interest nor surprise, but only misery. He began walking
jerkily up and down, evidently unable to keep stiltli.me Each
he straightened his pudgy knees it was apparent that they were trembling. His eyes had a wide-open, staring look, as though he could not prevent himseflrfom gazing at something in the
middle distance.
'What are you in for?' said Winston.
'Thoughtcrime!' said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone
of his voice implied at once a complete admissionguiolft and a sort of incredulous horror that such a word could be applied tohimself. He paused opposite Winston and began
his
eagerly appealing to him: 'You don't think they'll shoot me, do
you, old chap? They don't shoot you if you haven't actually
done anything -- only thoughts, which you heclapn?'
know
they give you a fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that!
They'll know my record, won't they? You know what chkaipnd of
I was. Not a bad chap in my way. Not brainy, of course, but
keen. I tried to do my best for the Party,
Id'ildln et I?
off with five years, don't you think? Or even ten years? A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in a labour-camp. They wouldn't shoot me for going off the rails just once?'
'Are you guilty?' said Winston.

'Of course I'm guilty !' cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. 'dYoonu't think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?' His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a slisgahntcltyimonious expression.
'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,' he said
sententiously. 'It's insidious. It can get hold
woifthoyuotu
your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that's a fact. There I was, working away, trying to
do my bit -- never knew I had any bad stuff in almly.
mind at

And then I

started talking in

my sleep. Do

you know what they

heard me

saying?'

He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical
reasons to utter an obscenity.
"Down with Big Brother!" Yes, I said Satihda
over
and over again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I'm glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I'm
going to say to them when I go up betfroirbeunatlh?e"Thank
you," I'm going to say, "thank you for saving me before it was too late."
'Who denounced you?' said Winston.
'It was my little daughter,' said Parsons
swoirtthofa
doleful pride. 'She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I donh'etr anbyeagrrudge
for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.'
He made a few more jerky movemenatnsd douwpn, several
times, casting a longing glance at the lavatory pan. Then he suddenly ripped down his shorts.
'Excuse me, old man,' he said. 'I can't help waiting.'
tihte. It's
He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory pan. Winston covered his face with his hands.
'Smith!' yelled the voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith
W! Uncover your face. No faces covered in the cells.' Winston uncovered his facPea.rsons used the lavatory,
loudly and abundantly. It then turned out that the plug was defective and the cell stank abominably for hours afterwards.
Parsons was removed. More prisoners came and went,
mysteriously. One, a woman, was consigned to 'Room 101', and, Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel and turn a dicfofleoruernt
when she heard the words. A time came when, if it had been morning when he was brought here, it would be afterinfoon; or
it had been afternoon, then it would be midnight. There were
six prisoners in the cell, men and women.
vAelrly stsialtl.
Opposite Winston there sat a man with a chinless, toothy face exactly like that of sloamrege, harmless rodent. His fat,
mottled cheeks were so pouched at the bottom that it was difficult not to believe thathadhlittle stores of food
tucked away there. His pale-grey eyes flitted timorously from face to face and turqnueidckly away again when he caught
anyone's eye.
The door opened, and another prisoner was brought in whose

appearance sent a momentary chill through Winston. He was a commonplace, mean-looking man who might have anbengineer
or technician of some kind. But what was startling was the emaciation of his face. It was lsikkuell.aBecause of its thinness the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large, and the eyesseemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable
hatred of somebody or something.
The man sat down on the bench at a little distance from
Winston. Winston did not look at him again,
tbourtmenttheed,
skull-like face was as vivid in his mind as though it had been straight in front of his eyes. Suddenrleyalihzeed what was
the matter. The man was dying of starvation. The same thought
seemed to occur almost simultaneously to everyone
cienll.the
There was a very faint stirring all the way round the bench. The eyes of the chinless man kept flitting towards the
skull-faced man, then turning guiltily away, then being dragged
back by an irresistible attraction. Presently he began to fidget on his seat. laAstt he stood up, waddled clumsily
across the cell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls, and,
with an abashed air, held out a grimy piece of bread to the skull- faced man.
There was a furious, deafening roar thfer
elescreen.
The chinless man jumped in his tracks. The skull-faced man had quickly thrust his hands behind his back, as though
demonstrating to all the world that he refused the gift.
'Bumstead!' roared the voice. '2713 Bumstead J.! Let fall that piece of bread!'
The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor.
'Remain standing where you are,' said the voice. 'Face the door. Make no movement.'
The chinless man obeyeHdi.s large pouchy cheeks were
quivering uncontrollably. The door clanged open. As the young officer entered and stepped aside, tehmeerreged from behind
him a short stumpy guard with enormous arms and shoulders. He
took his stand opposite the chinless man, and then, at a signal
from the officer, let far
rightful blow, with all the
weight of his body behind it, full in the chinless man's mouth. The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the floor. His body was flung across the cell and fetacghaeidnstuthe
base of the lavatory seat. For a moment he lay as though
stunned, with dark blood oozing from his mouth and nose. A very faint whimpering or squeaking, which seuenmceodnscious, came
out of him. Then he rolled over and raised himself unsteadily

on hands

and knees.

Amid

a stream

of

blood and satlwiova, the

halves of

a dental

plate

fell out

of

his mouth.

The prisoners sat very still, their hands crossed on their
knees. The chinless man climbed back into his place. Down one
side of his face the flesh was darkening. His mouth had swollen
into a shapeless cherry-coloured mass with a black middle of it.
thhoele in
From time to time a little blood dripped on to the breast
of his overalls. His grey eyes still flitted from face to face,

more guiltily than ever, as though he were tot
over
how much the others despised him for his humiliation.
The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indicated the skull-faced man.
'Room 101,' he said.
There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston'Tshe msainde.
had actually flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hand clasped together.
'Comrade! Officer!' he cried. 'You don't hatvaeke mteo
to that place! Haven't I told you everything already? What else is it you want to know? There's nothing I wouldn't confess,
nothing! Just tell me what it is and I'll confess straight off.
Write it down and I'll sign it -- anything! Not room 101 !'
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man's face, already very pale, turned a colour Winston would not have believed possible. It was definitely,
unmistakably, a shade of green.
'Do anything to me!' he yelled. 'You've been starving me
for weeks. Finish it off and let mSehoodti
e. Hang me.
Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you
want me to give away? Just say
iwshandiIt'll tell you
anything you want. I don't care who it is or what you do to
them. I've got a wife and three children. The ofb
mest
isn't six years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch
it. But not Room 101!'
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man looked frantically round atothtehreprisoners,
as though with some idea that he could put another victim in his own place. His eyes settletdhe somnashed face of the
chinless man. He flung out a lean arm.
'That's the one you ought to be taking, not me!' he
shouted. 'You didn't hear what he was saying aftbearshetdhey
his face. Give me a chance and I'll tell you every word of it.

He'the one that's againtshte Party, not me.' The

guards stepped forward. The man's voice rose to a shriek. 'You
didn't hear him!' he repeated. 'Something went wiwtrho he
telescreen. He's the one you want. Take him, not me!'
The two sturdy guards had stooped to take him by the arms. But justat this moment he flung himself across the floor of
the cell and grabbed one of the irotnhatl
pported the
bench. He had set up a wordless howling, like an animal. The guards took hold of him to wrench him loohseeclunbguton
with astonishing strength. For perhaps twenty seconds they were
hauling at him. The prisoners sat quiet, their hands crossed on their knees, looking straight in front of them. The howling
stopped; the man had no breath left for anything except hanging
on. Then there was a different ofk
y. A kick from a
guard's boot had broken the fingers of one of his hands. They dragged him to his feet.
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with head sunken,

nursing his crushed hand, all the fight had gone out of him.
A long time passed. itIhad been midnight when the
skull-faced man was taken away, it was morning: if morning, it was afternoon. Winston was alone, and had been alone for hours. The pain of sitting on the narrow bench was such thheat often
got up and walked about, unreproved by the telescreen. The
piece of bread still lay where the chinless man had dropped it.
At the beginning it needed a hard effort not to look at it, but presently hunger gave way to thirst. His moustthickwyaand
evil-tasting. The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a sort of faintness, an empty feeling inshiedaed. his
He would get up because the ache in his bones was no longer
bearable, and then would sit down again almost
baetcauosnece
he was too dizzy to make sure of staying on his feet. Whenever his physical sensations were a little under contrtoelrrotrhe
returned. Sometimes with a fading hope he thought of O'Brien and the razor blade. It thwianskable that the razor blade
might arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed. More dimly he thought of Julia. Somewhere or other she was suffering perhaps far worse than he. She might be screaming waitth pain
this moment. He thought: 'If I could save Julia by doubling my
own pain, would I do it? Yes, I would.' But that
awnas merely
intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to
take it. He did not feel it. In this place
nyootufeeclould
anything, except pain and foreknowledge of pain. Besides, was
it possible, when you were actually suffering any reason that your own pain should increase? But that
question was not answerable yet.
wiits,h fotro
The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O'Brien came in.
Winston started to his feet. The shotchke siogfht had
driven all caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot the presence of the telescreen.
'They've got you too!' he cried.
'They got me a long time ago,' said O'Brien with a mild,
almost regretful irony. He stepped aside. from behind him there emerged a broad-chested guard with a bllaocnkgtruncheon in
his hand.
'You know him, Winston,' said O'Brien. 'Don't deceive
yourself. You did know it -- you have always known it.'
Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But
ntohere was
time to think of that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the guard's hand. It might fall anywhere; on the crown, on the
tip of the ear, on the upper arm, on the elbow-
The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, paarlamloyssted,
clasping the stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that
one blow could cause such pain! The light clearedcoualndd he
see the other two looking down at him. The guard was laughing at his contortions. One questaitoany rate was answered.
Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing:shotuhladt it
stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the

face of pain there are no heroes, no
hhee
ght over
and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.

x x x

He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed,
except that it was higher off the ground and thaftixehde was down in some way so that he could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usuawlas falling on his face. O'Brien was
standing at his side, looking down at him intently. At the other side of him stoomdan ian a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe.
Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings
only gradually. He had the impression of swimming
tuhpis into
room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater
world far beneath it. How long he had betehnered
ewndid
not know. Since the moment when they arrested him he had not seen darkness odraylight. Besides, his memories were not
continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of consciousness that one has in sleespt,oppheadddead
and started again after a blank interval. But whether the intervals were of days or weeks or only secondsw,as ntohere way of knowing.
With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had
started. Later he was to realize thatthata
hen happened
was merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected. There was a lonogf crimes -- espionage, sabotage, and the like -- to which
range
everyone had to confess as a matter of
Tchoeu
fession
was a formality, though the torture was real. How many times he had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could
not remember. Always thewreere five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it watsruncheons, sometimes it was steel rods,
sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about
the floor, as shameless as an animal, wrhiitsh
dy this
way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge the kicks, and simply inviting more and yet more kicks, in his ribs, in
his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, grionin,hisin his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine. There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked,
unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could nothirfnosreclef into losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve so forsook him
that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began,
when the mere sight of a fist drawn back for aenobulgohw was to make him pour forth a confession of real and imaginary
crimes. There were other times whesntarhteed out with the

resolve of confessing nothing, when every word had to be forced out of him between gasps of pain, and there were times when he feebly tried to compromise, when he sahiidmsetlof: 'I will
confess, but not yet. I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable. Three more kicks, two more kicks, anIdwiltlhen tell them what they want.' Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardly stand, then flung like a spaoctkatooefs on to
the stone floor of a cell, left to recuperate for a few hours, and then taken out and beaten aTghaeirne.were also longer
periods of recovery. He remembered them dimly, because they
were spent chiefly in sleep or stHuep
membered a cell
with a plank bed, a sort of shelf sticking out from the wall,
and a tin wash-basin, and moefa
ot soup and bread and
sometimes coffee. He remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop his hair, and businesslike,
unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse, tapping his
reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over
him in search for broken bones, and shooting arm to make him sleep.
inneteod s
The beatings grew less frequent, and became mainly a
threat, a horror to which he could be sent anbya
omenat
when his answers were unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not ruffians in black uniforms but Party intellecltiutatllse,
rotund men with quick movements and flashing spectacles, who worked on hiimn relays over periods which lasted -- he
thought, he could not be sure -- ten or twelve hours at a
stretch. These other questioners
tsoait that he was in

constant slight pain, but it

was

not chiefly pain that they

relied on. They slapped

his

face, wrunegarsh.ipulled his

hair, made him stand on shone glaring lights in

one his

leg, refused him leave to urinate, face until his eyes ran with water;

but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his
power of arguing arnedasoning. Their real weapon was the merciless questioning that went on and on, hour after hour,
tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything that
he said, convicting him at every step of lies and
self-contradiction until he began weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a single session. Most of the time they screamed abuse at
him and threatened at every hesitation to delivoevrer thoim the guards again; but sometimes they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeahlim itno the name of
Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even
now he had not enough loyalty to thelefPta
otymake him
wish to undo the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags after hours of questioning, even this appeal could reduce him
to snivelling tears. In the end the nvaogigciensgbroke him
down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed,
whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was toout find what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly,
before the bullying started anew. He confessed to the

assassination of eminent Party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlemenotf public funds, sale of
military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the Egaosvtearsnimaennt as far
back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an
admirer of capitalism, and a sexual pervert. He confessed that
he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife was alsitviel.lHe confessed
that for years he had been in personal touch with Goldstein and
had been a member of an underground organization which had included almost every human being heevehraknown. It was
easier to confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides,
in a sense it was all true. It was truehadt
en thhee
enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed.
There were also memories of another kind.stoTohdeout
in his mind disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all round them.
He was in a cell which
hmaivgehbeen either dark or
light, because he could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near at hand some kind of instrument was ticking slowly and
regularly. The eyes grew larger and more luminous. Shueddenly
floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes, and was swallowed up.
He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, under
dazzling lights. A man in a white coat was three s.
There was a tramp of heavy boots outside. The door clanged open. The waxed-faceodfficer marched in, followed by two guards.
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not look at Winston either; he was looking only at the dials.
He was rolling down a mighty corridkoirl,omeatre wide,
full of glorious, golden light, roaring with laughter and
shouting out confessions
tahte top of his voice. He was
confessing everything, even the things he had succeeded in holding back under the tortuHreewas relating the entire
history of his life to an audience who knew it already. With him were the guards, the other questionersm,en itnhewhite
coats, O'Brien, Julia, Mr Charrington, all rolling down the corridor together and shoutiwnigth laughter. Some dreadful
thing which had lain embedded in the future had somehow been
skipped over and had not happened. Everywtahsi
ll right,
there was no more pain, the last detail of his life was laid bare, understood, forgiven.
He was startinugp from the plank bed in the half-
certainty that he had heard O'Brien's voice. All through his
interrogation, although he had never seen him,
hhaed thead
feeling that O'Brien was at his elbow, just out of sight. It
was O'Brien who was directing everything. It was he who set the guards on to Winston and who prevented thekmillfirnogmhim.
It was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain,
when he should have a respite, when he should whbeen hefed,

should sleep, when the drugs should be pumped into his arm. It
was he who asked the questions and sugtghees
swers. He
was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend. And once -- Winston could not remember
whether it was in drugged sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in
a moment of wakefulness -- a voice murmured in
'hDiosn'tear:
worry, Winston; you are in my keeping. For seven years I have
watched over you. Now the turning-point has come.
sIaveshall
you, I shall make you perfect.' He was not sure whether it was
O'Brien's voice; but it was the same thvaoti
ad said to
him, 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' in that other dream, seven years ago.
He did not remember any ending to his interrogation. There was a period of blackness and then the cell, or whriocohm, in
he now was had gradually materialized round him. He was almost
flat on his back, and unable to move. His body was held down at every essential point. Even the back of his head was gripped in some manner. O'Brien was looking down at him gravely and rather
sadly. His face, seen from below, looked coarse anwdithworn, pouches under the eyes and tired lines from nose to chin. He was older than Winston had thought him; he was perhaps
forty-eight or fifty. Under his hand there was a dial with a lever on top and figures running round the face.
'I told you,' said O'Brien, 'that if we met again it would be here.'
'Yes,' said Winston.
Without any warning except a slight movemeOn'tBrioefn's
hand, a wave of pain flooded his body. It was a frightening pain, because he could not see what was happenihneghadand
the feeling that some mortal injury was being done to him. He
did not know whether the thing was really happening, or whether the effect was electrically produced ; but hiwsas beoidnyg
wrenched out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart.
Although the pain had brought the sweat out on his forehead,
the worst of all was the fear that his
wbaasc bo to
snap. He set his teeth and breathed hard through his nose, trying to keep silent as long as possible.
'You are afraid,' said O'Brien, watchingfachei,s'that
in another moment something is going to break. Your especial fear is that it will be your backbone. You havemenatalvivid picture of the vertebrae snapping apart and the spinal fluid
dripping out of them. That is what you are thinking, is it not,
Winston?'
Winston did not answer. O'Brien drew back the lever on the
dial. The wave of pain receded aalsm come.
ickly as it had
'That was forty,' said O'Brien. 'You can see that the numbers on this dial runto auphundred. Will you please remember, throughout our conversation, that I have it in my power to inflict pain on yoauny maotment and to whatever
degree I choose? If you tell me any lies, or attempt to
prevaricate in any way, or even fall below your usuoafl level intelligence, you will cry out with pain, instantly. Do you

understand that?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien's manner becamleess severe. He resettled his
spectacles thoughtfully, and took a pace or two up and down. When he spoke his voice was gentle and patient. Heairhad the of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and
persuade rather than to punish.
'I am taking trouble with you, Winston,' he said, 'because
you are worth trouble. You
pkenrofwectly well what is the
matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You meanrteally deranged. You
suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real
events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened. Fortunately it is curable. You have never cured yourself of it, because you did not choose to. There was
a small effort of the will that yonuot rweardey to make.
Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue. Now tawkee anwill
example. At this moment, which power is Oceania at war with?'
'When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with Eastasia.
'With Eastasia. Good. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, has it not?'
Winston drew in his breath. He opened histo smpoeuatkh
and then did not speak. He could not take his eyes away from the dial.
'The truth, please, Winsto

our truth.Tell me

what you think you remember.'
'I remember that until only a week before I was arrested,
we were not at war with Eastasia at
waelrle.inWaelliance
with them. The war was against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. Before that -- '
O'Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand.
'Another example,' he said. 'Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You belietvheadt three men, three
onetime Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford men
who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession -- were not guiolfthye crimes
they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their
confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you haadhallucination. You believed that you had
actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.'
An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's
fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was
twhiet
gle of
Winston's vision. It was a photograph, and there was no
question of its identity. It

thweas

photograph. Iwtas
another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford at the party functionNewiYork, which he had
chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, twhaesnoutitof sight
again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He
made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrencthop htahlef of

his body free. It was impossible to moveso much as a centimetre inany direction. For the moment he had even
forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in
his fingers again, or at least to see it.
'It exists!' he cried.
'No,' said O'Brien.
He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail
slip of paper was whirling away on the current of
iwtarm air;
was vanishing in a flash of flame. O'Brien turned away from the wall.
'Ashes,' he said. 'Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.'
'But it did exist! It does exist! It exmiesmtosry.iIn remember it. You remember it.'
'I do not remember it,' said O'Brien.
Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a
feeling of deadly helplessness. If he couldbeehna
ertain
that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his
denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting.
How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that
lunatic dislocation in the mind could really htahpapte as the thought that defeated him.
O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher takinwgithpa wnasyward
but promising child.
'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,' he said. 'Repeat it, if you please.'
"Who controls the past controls the fuwthuor
ontrols
the present controls the past," repeated Winston obediently. "Who controls the present controls the past," said
O'Brien, nodding his hewaidth slow approval. 'Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?'
Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston.
His eyes flitted towards the dial. Hoenlyn
id not know
whether 'yes' or 'no' was the answer that would save him from
pain; he did not even know which answer he belbiee true one.
O'Brien smiled faintly. 'You are no metaphysician,
ed to
Winston,' he said. 'Until this moment you hadconnseivdeerred
what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, spiance? Is there somewhere or
other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?'
'No.'
'Then where does the past exist, if at all?'
'In records. It is written down.'
'In records. And- ?'
'In the mind. In human memories.
'In memory. Very well, then. We,Partthye, control all
records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?'

'But how can you stop people remembering things?' cried
Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. 'It is
involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!'
O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
'On the contrary,' he said, 'youhave not
controlled it. That is what has brought you here. heYroeu are because you have failed in humility, in self- discipline. You would not make the act of submiwshsiicohnis the price of
sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existinigts oiwnn
right. You also believe that the nature of reality is
self-evident. When you delude yourself into thitnhkaitnyou see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell Wiynosut,on, that reality is not
external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mitnhde Paorfty, which is
collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reexacleiptty
by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that
you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self- destruction, an effort of the will.musYtohumble yourself before you can become sane.'
He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to sink in.
'Do you remember,' he went on, ' wirni
diary,
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four"?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
'Four.'
'And if the party says that it then how many?'
'Four.'
fiosur bnuot five --
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial
had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had oustp
lngover
Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not
stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still exHteended. drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly
eased.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four.'
The needle went up to sixty.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'
The needle must have risen again, but he
ldoiodk atnot
it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood beufpore his eyes like pillars,

enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Five! Five! Five!'
'No, Winston, that is no use.areY
ying. You still
think there are four. How many fingers, please?'
'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!
Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brairemn
ound his
shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt
very cold,he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a
moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously cboymforted the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that
O'Brien was his protector, that patihnewas something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it.
'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.
'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How canseeIinghelp what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.
Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are atlhlem aotf once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.'
He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbs
tightened again, but the pain had ebbed away
tarnedmbltihneg
had stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold. O'Brien motioned with his head to the man in the white coat, who had stood
immobile throughout the proceedings. The man in thecoawthite
bent down and looked closely into Winston's eyes, felt his
pulse, laid an ear against his chest, then he nodded to O'Brien.
'Again,' said O'Brien.
htearpep
nd there,
The pain flowed into Winston's body. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there,stialnldfour. All that
mattered was somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over. He
had ceased to notice whether he was crying out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O'Brien had drawn back the lever.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four. I suppose there are four. I seweo could. I am trying to see five.'
ve if I
'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?'
'Really to see them.'
'Again,' said O'Brien.
Perhaps the needle was eighty -- ninety. Winston could not
intermittently remember why the pain was happening.
hBieshind
screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a
sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one

another and reappearing again. He was trying to counhte
them,
could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to
count them, and that this was sodmueeh
the mysterious
identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was sttihlel seeing same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still
streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He
shut his eyes again.
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'I don't know. I don't know. You will
ikfi
ou dmoe
that again. Four, five, six -- in all honesty I don't know.'
'Better,' said O'Brien.
A needle slid into Winston's arm. Almost in the same
instant a blissful, healing warmth spread all through his body. The pain was already half-forgotten.opeHneed his eyes and
looked up gratefully at O'Brien. At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligheinstheart seemed to turn
over. If he could have moved he would have stretched out a hand
and laid it on O'Brien arm. He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling, that it bottom it did not matter whether
O'Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back. O'aBrien was person who could be talked to. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. O'Brien had torttuored him the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was certain, he would send him to his death. Itno dmiafdfeerence. In some
sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates:
somewhere or other, although the actual
mwiogrhdtsnever be
spoken, there was a place where they could meet and talk. O'Brien was lookindgown at him with an expression which
suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind. When he spoke it was in an easy, conversational tone.
'Do you know where you are, Winston?' he said.
'I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.'
'Do you know how long you have been here?'
'I don't know. Daywse,eks, months -- I think it is months.'
'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?'
'To make them confess.'
'No, that is not the reason. Try again.'
'To punish them.'
'No!' exclaimed O'Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern
and animated. 'No! Not merely to extract
coynofuerssion, not
to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you ! To make you sane ! Will you uWnidnesrtsotna,nd,
that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands
uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimyeosu
that
have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not mereloyur destroy enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by

that?'
He was bending ovWeirnston. His face looked enormous
because of its nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover it was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity. Again Winston's heart shrank. If it had been
possible he would have cowered deeper into the bed. He felt certain that O'Brien was about to twist the doifasheeorut wantonness. At this moment, however, O'Brien turned away. He took a pacoer two up and down. Then he continued less
vehemently:
'The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms. You have rtehaedreloifgious persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisitlon. It was a failure. It set out to ehreardeiscya,te and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at
the stake, thousands of others rose up. Wthhyat?w
ecause
the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them
because they were unrepentanMte.n were dying because they
would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Iwnhqouisitor burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the
totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis
and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. Andimatghienyed that
they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at
any rate, that one must not make martyrs. thBeeyf
posed
their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches,
confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves withabuse, accusing and sheltering behind one
another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years
the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotOtnecne.again, why
was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they
had made were obviously extorted and unWter
oe.
notmake
mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered
here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow
the dead to rise up against us. Yosutopm
agining that
posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean otuhte stfreoamm of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain yoouf, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be
annihilated in the past as weliln thaes future. You will never have existed.'
Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a momentary bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as though
Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came
nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.
'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing thastay oyroudo can

make the smallest difference -- in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first? That iysou wehraet
thinking, was it not?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien smiled slightly. 'You are a flaw in the pattern,
Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persectuhteors of
past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with
the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us,
it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: losnog as he resists us we never
destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we
reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusionhimo;uwe of
bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him oonuerseolfves before we kill
him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should
exist anywhere in the world, however saencdr
owerless it
may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days hetrheetic walked to the stake
still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could recbaerlrlyion locked
up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect befbolroew itweout.
The command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The command of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt"c.ommOaunrd is

"Thou art". No one whom we bring to this place ever

stands out against us. Everyonewasihsed clean. Even those
three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed
-- Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford -- in the end
twheem broke
down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them
gradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping -i-n
and
the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By
the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they
had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touscehei ow to
they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean.'
His voice had grown almdorsetamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not
pretending, thought Winston, he is not a hypocrite, he believes
every word he says. What most oppressed him was the
consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched
the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision. O'Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had evercouhladd, or
have, that O'Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mincontained Winston's mind. But in that
case how could it be true that O'Brien was mad? Ihte, must be
Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had grown stern again.
'Do not imagine thyaotu will save yourself, Winston,
however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once

gone astray is ever spared. And even chiofse twoe let you
live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever.
Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the
point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if yoautholuisvaendd
years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. agNaeivnewill
you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or
laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrityw.illY
hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.'
He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston was aware of some heavy piece of appbaeriantgupushed into
place behind his head. O'Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face was almost on a level with Winston's.
'Three thousand,' he said, speaking over Winston's head to the man in the white coat.
Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped
themselves against Winston's temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O'Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.
'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes fixed on mine.'
At this moment there was a devastating explosiwohna,t or
seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blindinogf
flash
light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing happheanded, he
a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that position. A terrific painless blow had flattened him outs.omeAtlhsiong
had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and rtehceognized
face that was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there
was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.
'It will not last,' said O'Brien. 'Loionkthemeeyes. What country is Oceania at war with?'
Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania and
that he himself was a citizen of OcHeea
remembered
Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war.
'I don't remember.'
'Oceania is at war with EastaDsoi now?'
'Yes.'
ou remember that
'Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the
beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of histortyh,e war has continued without a
break, always the same war. Do you remember that?'
'Yes.'
' Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been condemned to deathtrefaocrhery. You pretended

that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent.
No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the vearty moment which you first invented it. Do you remember that?'
'Yes.'
'Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?'
'Yes.'
O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?'
'Yes.'
And he did see them, for a flienesttianngt, before the
scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old
fear, the hatreda,nd the bewilderment came crowding back

again.

But there had been

a moment --

he did not know how long,

thirty

seconds, perhaps --

of luminous

certainty, when each new

suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and
become absolute truth, and when twotwoa
ould have been
three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had
faded but before O'Brien had dropped his buhta
ough he
could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers
a vivid experience at some period of one's life when one was in effect a different person.
'You see now,' said O'Bri'etnh,at it is at any rate possible.'
'Yes,' said Winston.

O'Brien stood up with

a satisfied air. Over to

his left

Winston saw the man

in the white coat break

an ampoule and draw

back the plunger of a syringe. O'Brien turned to Winston with a
smile. In almost the old manner he resettled his spoenctacles his nose.
'Do you remember writing in your diary,' he said, 'that it did notmatter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you andbe tcaolukledd to?
You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to
me. It resembles my own
emxicnedpt that you happen to be
insane. Before we bring the session to an end you can ask me a few questions, if you choose.'
'Any question I like?'
'Anything.' He saw that Winston's eyes were upon the dial.
'It is switched off. What is your first question?'
'What have you done with Julia?' said Winston. O'Brien smiled again. 'She betrayed you, Winston.
Immediately-unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recogniizfeyouhesraw
her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her
dirty-mindedness -- everything has been burned ohuetr. Iotf was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.'
'You tortured her?'
O'Brien left this unanswered. 'Next question,' he said.
'Does Big Brother exist?'

'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.'
'Does he exist in the same way as I exist?
'You do not exist,' said O'Brien.
Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him. He
knew, or he could imagine, the arguments which hipsrowned nonexistence; but they were nonsense, they were only a play on words. Did not the statement, 'Yonuot edxoist', contain a
logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so? His mind shrivelled as he thought thoefunanswerable, mad arguments
with which O'Brien would demolish him.
'I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my
own identity. I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can
occupy the same point simultaneously. In that
Brother exist?'
'It is of no importance. He exists.'
'Will Big Brother ever die?'
dsoeenss ig
'Of course not. How could he die? Next question.'
'Does the Brotherhood exist?'
'That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set
you free when we have finished with you, and if yobue
live to
ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer

Winston

lay silent. His breraosste and fell a little

faster. He

still had not asked the question that had come

into

his mind

the first. He had got to ask yeittit waansdas

though his tongue would not utter amusement in O'Brien's face.

it. There was a trace of

Even his spectacles seemed to

wear

an ironical

gleam. He knows,

thought Winston suddenly, he

knows

what I am him:

going to ask! At

the thought the woorudtsofburst

'What is

in Room 101?'

The expression on O'Brien's face did not change. He
answered drily:
'You know what is in what is in Room 101.'
1R0o1o,mWinston. Everyone knows
He raised a finger to the man in the white coat. Evidently the sessionwas at an end. A needle jerked into Winston's arm. He sank almost instantly into deep sleep.

x x x

'There arethree stages in your reintegration,' said
O'Brien. 'There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time forto eynotuer upon the second
stage.'
As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his bondswere looser. They still held him to the bed, but he

could move his knees a little and could turn his head from side to side and raise his arms from the elbow. The dihaald, also,
grown to be less of a terror. He could evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he showed
stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they got through a whole session without use of the dcioaull.d noHte
remember how many sessions there had been. The whole process
seemed to stretch out over a long, indetfiimnei
weeks,
possibly -- and the intervals between the sessions might
sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or two.
'As you lie there,' said O'Brien, 'you have often wondered you have even asked mewhy-the Ministry of Love should
expend so much time and trouble on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived noitn, but
its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, "I understandhow : I do not understand why"? It was when
least. Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?'
'You have read it?' said Winston.
'I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.'
'Is it true, what it says?'
'A description, yes. Theprogramme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret accumulation knoofwledge -- a gradual
spread of enlightenment -- ultimately a proletarian rebellion
-- the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw ytohuarts at
was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand yearmsilloiron.aThey cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason: you know it already. If you haevveer cherished any dreams of violent
insurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way in which

the

Party

can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is for

ever.

Make

He

that came

the starting-point of your thoughts.' closer to the bed. 'For everre!p'eatheed. 'And

now let us get back to the question of "how" and "why". You
understand well enoughow the Party maintains itself in
power. Now tell me why we cling to power. ouWrh
otivies?
Why should we want power? Go on, speak,' he added as Winston remained silent.
Nevertheless Winston did not speak for anmootmheenrt or
two. A feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come back into O'Brien's face. He knew
in advance what O'Brien would say. That the Party sedeikd not
power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it soughptower because men in the mass were frail
cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled oversysatnedmatically deceived by
others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness,thaatn,dfor the
great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the party was
the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil

that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness
otfo that
others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O'Brien said this he would believe it. You could see it in his face. O'Brien knew everythtihnogu.sanAd times
better than Winston he knew what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human bleiivnegdsand by what
lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had
understood it all, weighed it all, and into dimfafderence:
all was justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you do,
thought Winston, against the lunatic isw
ore intelligent
than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
'You are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly.
'You believethat human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore-'
He started and almost cried out. A pang
hoafd shpoatin
through his body. O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.
'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he
'sYaoiudshould
know better than to say a thing like that.' He pulled the lever back and continued:
'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its owWne arseake.
not interested in the good of others ; we are interested solely
in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only
power, pure power. What pure power
ymoeua
ill understand
presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the
past, in that we know what we are doing. otAhlelrs,t
ven
those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came vertyo us in their methods, but they never had the courage to
close
recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhapsevetnhey believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and thjautst round the corner there lay a
paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not
like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the
intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a meiasn end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to
n, it
safeguard a revolution; one makes the revoliunt
der to
establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is
persecution. The object of torture is torTthuer
bject of
power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?' Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the
tiredness of O'Brien's facIet.was strong and fleshy and
brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled
passion before which
fheelt himself helpless; but it was
tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O'Brien leaned over him, deliberbartienlgying
the worn face nearer.
'You are thinking,' he said, 'that my face is old and
tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and noytet I am even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not

understand, Winston, that the individual is a coenlly? The
weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?'
He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his pocket.
'We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But
at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It
is time for you to gather some idea
poofwerw
ans. The
first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in soas hfearceases to be an
individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery". Has it ever occurred to you that it is revSelrasviebrlyeis
freedom. Alone -- free -- the human being is always defeated.
It must be so, because every
bheuimnagnis doomed to die,
which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make
complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so tihsatthehe
Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing
for you to realize is that power isovepro
man beings.
Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter
-- external reality, as you would call it --impiosrtannott. Already our control over matter is absolute.'
For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise himself intsoittaing position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully.
'But how can you control matter?' he burst out. 'You don't even controlthe climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death-'
O'Brien silenced hibmy a movement of his hand. 'We
control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside
the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitatiaonnyth-i-ng. I
could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I
do not wish to, because the Party does niott. Yowuismhust
get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of
Nature. We make the laws of Nature.'
'But you do not! You are not even masters ploafnett.his
What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.'
'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suiAtnsd
us.
if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.'
'But the world itself is only a speck of dust.is And man tiny helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.'
'Nonsense. The earth is as old as wneo oladrer,. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'
'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals --
mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles long before man was ever heard of.'
lwihviecdhhere
'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not.
Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Befmoarnethere

was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.'
'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars ! Some ofthem are a million light-years away. They are out of
our reach for ever.'
'What are the stars?' sOa'iBdrien indifferently. 'They
are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could thbelmoout. The earth is the
centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.'
Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not sayanything. O'Brien continued as though answering a
spoken objection:
'For certain purposes, of course, that itsruen.oWhen
we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes rsouunnd the
and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres
away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce
a dual system of astronomy? The stars can
obredisnteanrt,
according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?'
Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whahtee
id, the
swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he

knewthat he was in the right. The belienfothtihnagt

exists outside your own mind -- surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false?it nHoatd been exposed
long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the cornOe'rBsrieonf's
mouth as he looked down at him.
'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word aryeotrying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism.
Collective solipsism, if you liBkuet.that is a different
thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,' he added in a different tone. 'Thepowreera,lthe power we
have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'
Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.
'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obediencneot einsough.
Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying
your will and not his own?
iPso
nerinflicting pain and
humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and
putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of worlcdreawteinga?re
It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that
the old reformers imagined. A world ofandf
eachery is
torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will gronwot less but moremerciless as it
refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatoruerdworlIdn
there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-

abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child
and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.
No one dares trust a wife or a chiflrdienodranya longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from tmhoetihrers at birth, as one
takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated.
Procreation will be an annual formality like the
orfeanewal
ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are
at work upon it now. There will be no
elxocyeapltt
oyalty
towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of
Big Brother. There will be no laugehxtceerp,t the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no
literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no
more need of science. Thweirlel be no distinction between
beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of theprocess of life. All competing pleasures will be
destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, consitnacnrtelaysing
and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there
will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you wpainctturae of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.'
He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston
had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bHeed again. could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien went on:
'And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretice,nemtyhof society,
will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated
over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands -- all thatconwtiilnlue, and worse. The
espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. Itbe awill world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the
Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the
opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his
heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculsepda,t upon and yet
they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be playoevder aonudt over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here amercoyu,r screaming
with pain, broken up, contemptible -- and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our fheiestownof accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victotrryi,umph after triumph after
triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve
of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. Buttheiend you will do more than
understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of

it.'
Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to s'pYeoauk. can't!' he said weakly.
'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?'
'You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.'
'Why?'
'It is impossible to foau
ivilization on fear and
hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.'
'Nonsense. You are under
itmhperession that hatred is
more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were,
what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose twheaquicken the tempo of
human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference
would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The party is immortal.'
As usual, the voice had battered Winston into
helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments,notwhiitnhg
to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.
'I don't know -- I dcoanr'et. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.'
'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is somethcianlgled human nature which
will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we
create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps
you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the
slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put
oiftyouorutmind.
They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside -- irrelevant.'
'I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you atrhee,n thaenyd will
tear you to pieces.'
'Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it should?'
'No. I believe it.knoIw that you will fail. There
is something in the universe -- I don't know, some spirit, some principle -- that you will never overcome.'
'Do you believe in God, Winston?'
'No.'
'Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?'
'I don't know. The spirit of Man.'
'And do you consider yourself a man?.'
'Yes.'
'If you are a man, Winston, yotuhe laarset man. Your
kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone?You are outside history, you are
non-existent.' His manner changed and he said more harshly:
'And you consider yourself morally supetroi
s, with our

lies and our cruelty?'
'Yes, I consider myself superior.'
O'Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment Winston recognized one of thhiesmowna.s It
was a sound-track of the conversation he had had with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled himstehlefBroitnherhood.
He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to
disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face. O'Brien made a small impatient gesture, as thsoauygh to that the demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned
a switch and the voices stopped.
'Get up from that bed,' he said.
The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself to the floor and stood up unsteadily.
'You arethe last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the
guardian of the human spirit. You shall see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes.'
Winston undid the bit of sttrhiantgheld his overalls
together. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. He could not rememwbheerther at any time since his
arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped fiwlitthhy yellowish rags,
just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid them to the ground he saw that therethrweaes-siaded mirror
at the far end of the room. He approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.
'Go on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand bettwheeewings of the mirror. You shall see the side view as well.'
He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, greycoloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towhairmd.sIts
actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that
he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The
creature's face seemed to be protrud
cause of its bent
carriage. A forlorn, jailbird's face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and
battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouthdrahwand-ina
look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it
registered would be different from the heo
elt. He had
gone partially bald. For the first moment he had thought that
he had gone grey as well, but it was
socnallyp thtahte was
grey. Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body was grey all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Htehreere and
under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds, and near the
ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it. But the truly frighttheinnignwas the
emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as
that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. He noswawhat O'Brien had meant
about seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine was

astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forwaarsdtoso make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be
bending double under the weight of the
Astkaulglu.ess he
would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease.
'You have thought sometimes,' said O'Brien, 'thfaatce my
-- theface of a member of the Inner Party -- looks old and worn. What do you think of your own face?'
He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing him.
'Look at the condition you are in!' he said. 'Look at this filthy grime all over your body. Look at the dirtyoubretween toes. Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that you stink like a goat? Probabhlayve cyeoaused to
notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see? I can make my
thumb and forefinger meet round your bicep. Isnacpo ur
neck like a carrot. Do you know that you have lost twenty-five kilograms since you have been in our hands? Evheanir iysour
coming out in handfuls. Look!' He plucked at Winston's head and
brought away a tuft of hair. 'Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How many had you when ytoouus?caAmned the few you have left are dropping out of your head. Look
here!'
He seized one of Winston's remaining
tfereotnhtbetween
his powerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot

through

Winston's jaw. O'Brien had wrenched the

loose tooth out

by the

roots. He tossed it across the cell.

'You are rotting awayh,e'said; 'you are falling to
pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look
into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facTihnagt
you?
is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.'
Winston began to dress himself with slow mosvteimfefnts.
Until now he had not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was. Only one thought stirred in his mind: that he must have been in
this place longer than he had imagined. Then suddenly as he
fixed the miserable rags round himself a foefe it
for
his ruined body overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing he had collapsed on to a small stool that stood bbeesdide the and burst into tears. He was aware of his ugliness, his
gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting
weeping in thhearsh white light: but he could not stop
himself. O'Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly.
'It will not last for ever,' he said. 'You can escape from it whenever you choose. Everything depends on yourself.'
'You did it!' sobbed Winston. 'You reduced me to this state.'
'No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you set yourself up against the Party. It was all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened tdhiadt you
not foresee.'
He paused, and then went on:
'We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You

have seen what your body is like.minYdo
in the same
state. I do not think there can be much pride left in you. You
have been kicked and flogged and insuylotue
ave screamed
with pain, you have rolled on the floor in your own blood and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed
everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation
that has not happened to you?'
Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still oozing out of his eyes. He looked up at O'Brien.
'I have not betrayed Julia,' he said.
O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfu'lNloy,.' he said;
'no; that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.' The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed
able to destroy, flooded Winston's heart again. How intelligent, he thought, how intelligent! Never did O'Brien
fail to understand what was said to him. Anyoonneearetlhse
would have answered promptly thathadhe
betrayed Julia.
For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under the torture? He had told them everything he knew about her, her
habits, her character, her past life; he had coinnfte most trivial detail everything that had happened at their
meetings, all that he had said to hsehre toanhdim, their
esed
black-market meals, their adulteries, their vague plottings
against the Party -- everything. And yet, in the sense in which he intended the word, he nohtabetrayed her. He had not
stopped loving her; his feelings towards her had remained the same. O'Brien had seen whheameant without the need for
explanation.
'Tell me,' he said, 'how soon will they shoot me?'
'It might be a long time,' said O'Brien. 'You are a difficult case. But dong'itve up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.'

x x x

He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger every day, if it was proper to speak of days.
The white light and the humming
wseoruenthe same as
ever, but the cell was a little more comfortable than the
others he had been in. There was a pillow and a mattress on the plank bed, and a stool to sit on. They hhaidm agbiavtehn,
and they allowed him to wash himself fairly frequently in a tin
basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They had given him new underclothes and a clean souvietralolfs. They
had dressed his varicose ulcer with soothing ointment. They had
pulled out the remnants of his teeth and given him a new set of dentures.
Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to keep count of the passage oiff hetihmaed,
felt any interest in doing so, since he was being fed at what

appeared to be regular intervals. Hegetwtaisng, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he wondered
dimly whether he was getting them by night or by fodoady. The was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once
there was even a packet of cigarettes. He mahtacdhesn,obut
the never-speaking guard who brought his food would give him a
light. The first time he tried to smoke it
smiacdke, buhtim
he persevered, and spun the packet out for a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal.
They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil
tied to the corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he was awake he was completely torpid. Often he would lie from one meal to the next almwoistthout stirring, sometimes asleep,
sometimes waking into vague reveries in which it was too much
trouble to open his eyes. He had longusegdr
ownsleeping
with a strong light on his face. It seemed to make no difference, except that one's drewaemrse more coherent. He dreamed a great deal all through this time, and they were
always happy dreams. He was in the Golden Cooru
etrwya,s
sitting among enormous glorious, sunlit ruins, with his mother, with Julia, with O'Brien -- not doing anything, merely sitting
in the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such thoughts as he had
when he was awake were mostly about his
Hder
ed to
have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the
stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, nohe had desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be
clean all over, was completely satisfying.
By degrees he came to spend lessin stliemep, but he
still felt no impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was to lie quiet and feel the strength gatherhiinsgbodiyn. He
would finger himself here and there, trying to make sure that
it was not an illusion that his mwuesrcel
rowing rounder
and his skin tauter. Finally it was established beyond a doubt that he was growing fattheirs;thighs were now definitely
thicker than his knees. After that, reluctantly at first, he began exercising himself regularly. In a little whciolueld he walk three kilometres, measured by pacing the cell, and his bowed shoulders wergerowing straighter. He attempted more
elaborate exercises, and was astonished and humiliated to find what things he could not do. He could not movaewaloku,t of
he could not hold his stool out at arm's length, he could not stand on one leg without falling over. He squatted hidsown on
heels, and found that with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he
could just lift himself to a standing position. He lay flat on his belly and tried to lift his weihgihsthanbdys. It was
hopeless, he could not raise himself a centimetre. But after a few more days -- a few more mealtiemveesn th-a-t feat was
accomplished. A time came when he could do it six times
running. He began to grow actually proud
boofdy,h
nd to
cherish an intermittent belief that his face also was growing
back to normal. Only when he chanced
htios hapnudt on his

bald scalp did he remember the seamed, ruined face that had looked back at him out of the mirror.
His mind grew more active. He sat down ploannk btehde,
his back against the wall and the slate on his knees, and set to work deliberately at the task of re-educating himself.
He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now, he had been ready to capitulate long behfaodrtakehne
the decision. From the moment when he was inside the Ministry
of Love -- and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julia
had stood helpless while the
vioriocne from the telescreen
told them what to do -- he had grasped the frivolity, the shallowness of his attempt to set himself up agaipnoswter the of the Party. He knew now that for seven years the Thought police had watched him like a beetle under a magglnaisfsy.ing
There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had
not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary they had carefully replaced. They plhaayded sound-tracks to
him, shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of
Julia and himself. Yes, even . . . He cfoiuglhdt agnaoitnst
the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must beso; how could the immortal, collective brain be
mistaken? By what external standard could you check its
judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought. Only !
The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began
to write down the thoughts that came inhteoad.h first in large clumsy capitals:
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
wrote
Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it: TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE
But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though
shying away from something, seemed untaob
oncentrate. He
knew that he knew what came next, but for the moment he could not recall it. When he did recall it, it was only by
consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not come of its own accord. He wrote:
GOD IS POWER
He accepted everything. The past was alterTahbel
ast
never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. AaJroonnesso,n, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen phtohteograph that disproved their
guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, btuhtose were false memories,
products of selfdeception. How easy it all was! Only surrender,
and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a

current that swept you backwards howheavredryou struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the
current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your
own attitude: the predestined thing happeneadny cianse. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except !
Anything could be true. The so-called laws of weNraeture nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float offflotohrilike a soap
bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'Ifthihneks he floats
off the floor, and if I simultane
Isee him
do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of
submerged wreckage breaking the surface of wtahtee
hought
burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed thtohueght under instantly.
The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' whweorrel'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What
knowledge have we of anything, save through our ownAllminds?
happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
He had no difficulty in disposing of the faanldl
was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized,
ecy,
nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred
Tthoe
him.
mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive.

Crimestopthey called it in Newspeak.

He set twoork to exercise himself in crimestop. He
presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the
earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water'
-- and trained himself in not seeing
uonrdernsottanding the
arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisatTihoenarithmetical
problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make five' were beyond his intellegcrtausapl. It needed
also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to
make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logiecrarlors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how
soon they would shoot him. 'Everyth
pends on yourself,'
O'Brien had said; but he knew that there was no conscious act
by which he could bring it neIatr
ght be ten minutes
hence, or ten years. They might keep him for years in solitary
confinement, they might send him to a labourt-hceaym release him for a while, as they sometimes did. It was
ight
perfectly possible that before he was shot thedrawmhao
his arrest and interrogation would be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that death never cameexpeacttedan moment. The tradition -- the unspoken tradition: somehow you
knew it, though you never heard it said-was that tyhoeuy shot
from behind; always in the back of the head, without warning,

as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell.
One day -- but 'one day'notw
he right expression;
just as probably it was in the middle of the night: once -- he
fell into a strange, blissful reverie. He was walkitnhge
down
corridor, waiting for the bullet. He knew that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed out,
reconciled. There were no more doubtsm,orenarguments, no
more pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He
walked easily, with a joy of movemenwtithaand
feelingof
walking in sunlight. He was not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry Loovfe, he was in the enormous
sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down which he had seemed to
walk in the delirium induced by drugwsa.s inHe
Country, following the foot- track across the old
theGolden
rabbit-cropped pasture. He could feel shtohret springy turf
under his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face. At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring, and
somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dacethelay in green pools under the willows.
Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat broke out on his backbone. He had heard himself cry aloud:
'Julia ! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!'
For a moment he had had an overwhheallmliuncgination of
her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she had gtohte teixntuore of
his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had
ever done when they were together and free.
kAnleswothahte
somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What had he done? How many years had he ahdidseservtiotude by
that moment of weakness?
In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots
outside. They could not let
asnu
utburst go unpunished.
They would know now, if they had not known before, that he was breaking the agreement he had made thweimt.hHe obeyed the
Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old days he had hidden a heretical mind beneathappaenarance of conformity.
Now he had retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart
inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but he preferred to be in the wrong. They would understandO'Btrhiaetn-would
understand it. It was all confessed in that single foolish cry.
He would have to start all over again. It might take years. He ran a hoavnedr his face, trying to familiarize himself with the new shape. There were deep furrows in the
cheeks, the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose flattened. Besides,
since last seeing himself in the
hgel
been given a
complete new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve
inscrutability when you did
knnootw what your face looked
like. In any case, mere control of the features was not enough. For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a
secret you must also hide it from yourself. Ykonuow amlulst

the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must
never let it emerge into your consciousness
sihnapea
hat
could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. Atnhde whaille he
must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter
which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.
One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It was always from bweahliknidn,g down a
corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world
inside him could turn over. And then suddenly, aw
dout
uttered, without a check in his step, without the changing of a
line in his face -- suddenly the camouflage would be down and
bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. woHualtdr
ill
him like an enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same
instant bang! would go the bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces before theryeclcaoiumld
it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown athehiorle in own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.
He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual discipline. It was a question of degrading
himself, mutilating himself. He had got to plunge into the
filthiest of filth. What was the most horrible, sickening thing
of all? He thought of Big Brother. The efnaocrem
ecause
of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as
being a metre wide), with its
bhleaacvkymoustache and the
eyes that followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his
mind of its own accord. What were his true feelings towards Big
Brother?
There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel door swung open with a clang. O'wBarlikeend into the cell.
Behind him were the waxen-faced officer and the black-uniformed
guards.
'Get up,' said O'Brien. 'Come here.'
Winston stood opposite him. O'Brien took Winston's
shoulders between his strong hands and looked at him closely.
'You have had thoughts of deceiving hem
id. 'That
was stupid. Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.' He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:
'You are improving. Intellectually there is very little
wrong with you. It is only emotionally that you havteo
failed
make progress. Tell me, Winston -- and remember, no lies: you
know that I am always able to detect a lie -- tell me, what are your true feelings towards Big Brother?'
'I hate him.'
'You hate him. Good. Then the timceomeh
or you to
take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.'
He released Winston with a little push towards the guards.
'Room 101,' he said.

x x x

At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building.
Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure. The
cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level.
The room where he had been interrogated by O'Brien
uwpas high
near the roof. This place was many metres underground, as deep down as it was possible to go.
It was bigger than most of the cells he
ihna.dButbeen
he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that
there were two small tables straiing
ront of him, each
covered with green baize. One was only a metre or two from him, the other was further away, near the door. He was strapped
upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nontothing, even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind,
forcing him to look straight in front of him.
For a moment
whaes alone, then the door opened and
O'Brien came in.
'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101.
I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'
The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something
made of wire, a box or basket of some kind.
dHoewn osnet it
the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.
'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by
fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fiftdyeatohtsh.er

There are

cases

where it

is some quite trivial thing, not even

fatal.'

He had

moved

a little

to one side, so thathadWainston

better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire
cage with a handle on top for cairtr
.ngFixed to the
front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided
lengthways into two compart ments, and that there was some kind
of creature in each. They were rats.

'In your

case, said O'Brien,

'the worst thing in the

world

happens to

be rats.'

A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain
what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at motmheinst the meaning of the
mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His
bowels seemed to turn to water.
'You can't do that!' he cried out in a high cracked voice.
'You couldn't, you couldn't! It's impossible.'
'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that used tooccur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in

front of you, and a roasroiunngd in your ears. There was
something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.'
'O'Brien!' said Winston, making an efforctonttrool his
voice. 'You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?'
O'Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometiamfefsected. He looked
thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an
audience somewhere behind Winston's back.
'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will staangdainosuttpain,
even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something
unendurable -- something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involvIefdyou are falling from a
height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come
up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destriosyed. It
the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are
a form of pressure that you cannot withstand. even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.
'But what is it, what is it? How can ifII ddoon'tit know what it is?'
O'Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the
nearer table. He set it
cdaorwenfully on the baize cloth.
Winston could hear the blood singing in his ears. He had the
feeling of sitting in utter loneliness. He was in the middle of a great empty plain,flaat desert drenched with sunlight,
across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances.
Yet the cage with the rats was not twoawamye ro
him.
They were enormous rats. They were at the age when a rat's muzzle grows blunt and fierce hiasnfur brown instead of
grey.
'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience, 'although a rodent, is carnivorous. You areof aware
that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor
quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even fomrinuftievse. The rats
are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will
strip it to the bones. They also attack
dsyiicnkg peoorple.
They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.'
There was an outburst of squeals from the csaegeem.ed It
to reach Winston from far away. The rats were fighting; they
were trying to get at
oetahcehr through the partition. He
heard also a deep groan of despair. That, too, seemed to come from outside himself.
O'Brien picked up the cage, andh,e diads so, pressed
something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made a
frantic effort to tear himself loose thfer
hair. It was
hopeless; every part of him, even his head, was held immovably.
O'Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a metre from

Winston's face.
'I have pressetdhe first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You
understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit
over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starvinwgillbrutes
shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They wlielalp on to your face and bore
straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.'
The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of shrill cries which appearebde octcourring in
the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his
panic. To think, to think, even with a split secondto left -- think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a vcioonlveunltsion of
nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything
had gone black.For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out ofblatchkeness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself. He must
interpose another human being,

btohdey of another human

being, between himself and the rats.
The circle of the mask was large enoutgohshuntowout
the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of
hand-spans from his face. The rats knewwasw
ming now.
One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of thseewers, stood up, with his pink hands
against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could
see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. thAeg
ack panic
took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.
'It was a common punishment in Imperial China,' said
O'Brien as didactically as ever.
The mask was closing on his
Tfhaec
ire brushed his
cheek. And then -- no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Tloaote, perhaps too late. But he had
suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just

onperson to whom he could transferpunhiisshment --

onebody that he could thrust between himself rats. And he was shouting frantically, over

and and

the over.

'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! JNuoltia!mIe!don't

care what you do to her. bones. Not me! Julia!

Tear her

Not me!'

face off, strip her to the

He was falling backwards, into enormous depths,froamway
the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through
the earth, through the oceatnhsr,ough the atmosphere, into
outer space, into the gulfs between the stars -- always away, away, away from the raHteswas light years distant, but
O'Brien was still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of wire against his cheek. But throduagrhknetshse that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew
that the cage door had clicked shut and not open.

x x x

The Chestnut Tree was almeomsptty. A ray of sunlight
slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hourof fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the
telescreens.
Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at faace wvhaiscth eyed
him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the
caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and fillgeldassh
with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle witha quill through the cork. It was saccharine
flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the cafe/.

Winston was listening to the

telescreen.

At present only

music was coming out of it,

but there

was a possibility that

at

any moment there might be a special bulletin fMrionmisttrhye
of Peace. The news from the African front was disquieting in the extreme. On and off he had been worrying aboudtay.it all A Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with Eurasia: Oceania had always been awtar with Eurasia) was moving southward at
terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin had not mentioned any
definite area, but it was probable that atlhree
uth of
the Congo was a battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger. One did not have to look at the mwahpat itto see meant. It was not merely a question of losing Central Africa:
for the first time in the whole war, the toefr ia itself was menaced.
A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of
undifferentiated excitement,flared up in him, then faded
again. He stopped thinking about the war. In these days he
could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and dartaained it
gulp. As always, the gin made him shudder and even retch slightly. The stuff was horrible. clTohvees and saccharine, themselves disgusting enough in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell; and whawtorswtaof all was
that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him night and day, was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the smell of those-
He never named them, even in his thoughts, faarnas so
it was possible he never visualized them. They were something that he was half-aware of, hovering close to his smfealcle, a
that clung to his nostrils. As the gin rose in him he belched through purple lips. He had grown fsaitntceerthey released
him, and had regained his old colour -- indeed, more than regained it. His features had thickened, the snkoisne anodn
cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald scalp was too deep a
pink. A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue oThe Times, with the page turned down at
the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston's glass was empty,

he brought the gin bottle and filled it. Thereneewdato no
give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always waiting for him, his corner twaabslalways reserved; even
when the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitttionogclose to him. He never even
bothered to count his drinks. At irregular intervals they
presented him with a dirty slip of paperthewyh the bill, but he had the impression that they always
id was
undercharged him. It would have made no diffiefrie been the other way about. He had always plenty of money
tnchead
nowadays. He even had a job, a sinecure, more higthhlayn-paid his old job had been.
The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took
over. Winston raised his head to listen. No bulletitnhse front, however. It was merely a brief announcement from the
from
Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter, it aptpheeared, Tenth ThreeYear Plan's quota for bootlaces had been
overfulfilled by 98 per cent.
He examined the chess problem and set opuitecetsh.eIt
was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.' Winston looked upporattraitthe
of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged.
In no chess problem since the beginning of the wbolralcdk
has
ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazeadt hibma,ckfull of
calm power. White always mates.
The voice from the telescreen paused and added in a
different and much graver tone: 'You are warned to stand by for an important announcement at fifteen-thirFtiyf.teen- thirty!
This is news of the highest importance. Take care not to miss it. Fifteen-thirty !' The tinking music struck up again.
Winston's heart stirred. That was butlhleetin from the
front; instinct told him that it was bad news that was coming. All day, with little spurts of excitetmheenthought of a
smashing defeat in Africa had been in and out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Eurasian swaarrmmying across the
never-broken frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa
like a column of ants. Why had it not been possible to outflank
them in some way? The outline of the West coAafsrti
ood
out vividly in his mind. He picked up the white knight and
moved it across the boa

ere wasthe proper spot.

Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he saw another force,mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in
their rear, cutting their comunications by land and sea. He
felt that by willing it he was bringing thaftorcoet to
existence. But it was necessary to act quickly. If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if tahieryfiehladds and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in two. It
might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivoifs
world, the destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath. An extraordinary medleyof feeling-but it was not a medley,

exactly; rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layerundwearsmost struggled inside
him.
The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place, but for the moment he could not setttloeserdioowuns
study of the chess problem. His thoughts wandered again. Almost
unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table: 2+2=
'They can't get inside you,' she had said. Bcuotuldthey
get inside you. 'What happens to you he or
iever,'
O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you cnoeuvledr recover. Something was
killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no danger in it. He knew as tihnosutgihnctively that they now
took almost no interest in his doings. He could have arranged
to meet her a second time if
oefithem had wanted to.
Actually it was by chance that they had met. It was in the Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when twhaes liekaerth iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud
anywhere except a few crocuses which had
tphuesmhseedlves up
to be dismembered by the wind. He was hurrying along with
frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw
theenrmetnroets
away from him. It struck him at once that she had changed in
some ill-defined way. They almost passed one another
awithout
sign, then he turned and followed her, not very eagerly. He knew that there was no danger, nobody wouladny itnatkerest
in him. She did not speak. She walked obliquely away across the
grass as though trying to get rid of him, then seemed to resign herself to having him at her side. Presently they were in among
a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for
concealment or as protection from the wind. They halted. It was vilely cold. The wind whistled throughtwitghseand fretted
the occasional, dirty-looking crocuses. He put his arm round her waist.
There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden
microphones: besides, they could be seen. It did not matter,
nothing mattered. They could have lain down
gornountdhand
done thatif they had wanted to. His flesh froze with
horror at the thought of it. She made no
wrheastpeovnesreto
the clasp of his arm ; she did not even try to disengage
herself. He knew now what had chiann
er. Her face was
sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion of a
rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had been astonished not only biyncrtehdeible weight of
the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which
made it seem more like stone than flesh. Her body felt like
that. It occurred to him that the texture of her sbkein would quite different from what it had once been.
He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As

they walked back across the grass, she looked daitr
mtly
for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of
contempt and dislike. He wondered whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it was inspbiyred also
his bloated face and the water that the wind kept squeezing from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chaibryssideside
but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak.
She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig. Her fseeeetmed to have grown broader, he
noticed.
'I betrayed you,' she said baldly.
'I betrayed you,' he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something something you can't stand up to, can'tthienvkeabout. And
then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it
to So-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that
it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that triusen.'At the time
when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're qrueiatdey to save yourself
that way. Yowant it to happen to the other person. You
don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.'
'All you care about is yourself,' he echoed.
'And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other person any longer.'
'No,' he said, 'you don't feel the same.'
There did not seem to be anything msoarye. Thteo wind
plastered their thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing to sit thesrielenicne: besides,
it was too cold to keep still. She said something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.
'We must meet again,' he said.
'Yes,' she said, 'we must meet again. '
He followed irresolutely forlitatle distance, half a
pace behind her. They did not speak again. She did not actually
try to shake him off, but walked at just such a speed as to
prevent his keeping abreast of her. Hmeadeh
his mind
that he would accompany her as far as the Tube station, but suddenly this process of trailailnogng in the cold seemed
pointless and unbearable. He was overwhelmed by a desire not so
much to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree
Cafe/, which had never seemed so attractive as at this moment.
He had
naostalgic vision of his corner table, with the
newspaper and the chessboard and the everflowing gin. Above
all, it would be warm in there. The next moment, not altogether by accident, he allowed himself to become separated from her by
a small knot of people. He made a halfhearted atctaetmcpht to up, then slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite direction. When he had gone fifty metrleosokehdeback. The
street was not crowded, but already he could not distinguish
her. Any one of a dozen hurrying figures might hhaevres. been

Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no longer recognizable from behind.
'At the time when it happens,' she had said, me'aynou do
it.' He had meant it. He had not merely said it, he had wished it. He had wished that she and not he should be ovdeerlivered
to the-
Something changed in the music that trickled from the
telescreen. A cracked and jeering nao
ellow note, came
into it.And then -- perhaps it was not happening, perhaps it
was only a memory taking on the semblance of as was singing:
'Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me '
ce --
The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed that his glass was empty and came back with the gin bottle.
He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had
become the element he swam in. It was his life, hainsd
death,
his resurrection. It was gin that sank him into stupor every
night, and gin that revived him every moWrhneinn
woke,
seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids and fiery
mouth and a back that seemed to be broken,
hiatve bweoeunld
impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the bottle and teapcluapced beside the bed overnight.
Through the midday hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the telescreen. From fifteen to
closing-time he was a fixture in the Chestnut Tree. No one cared what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no
telescreen admonished him. Occasionally, perhaps twice a week,
he went to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of
Truth and did a little work, or what wasworcka.l
e had
been appointed to a sub-committee of a sub-committee which had sprouted from one of the innumercaobmlmeittees dealing with
minor difficulties that arose in the compilation of the
Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. Theyengwaegreed
in producing something called an Interim Report, but what it was that they were reporting on he haddefnienvietrely found
out. It was something to do with the question of whether commas
should be placed inside brackets, or outside. There were four others onthe committee, all of them persons similar to
himself. There were days when they assembled and then promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to anoonteher that there
was not really anything to be done. But there were other days when they settled down to their work almost emaagkeirnlgya,
tremendous show of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never finished -- when the argutmoent as what they were supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggolvienrgdefinitions,
enormous digressions, quarrels threats, even, to appeal to
higher authority. And then suddenly the life gowoutldof

them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.
The telescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his
head again. The bulletin! But no, they were merely changing the music. He hatdhe map of Africa behind his eyelids. The
movement of the armies was a diagram: a black arrow tearing vertically southward, and a white arrow horizonetaasltlwyard, across the tail of the first. As though for reassurance he looked up at the imperturbable factehe pionrtrait. Was it
conceivable that the second arrow did not even exist?
His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of gin, picked up the white knaingdhmade a tentative move.
Check. But it was evidently not the right move, because
Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a candle-lit room with a vast white-counterpaned bed, and
himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on the floor, shaking a dice-box, and laughing excitedly. His mother was sitting
opposite him and also laughing.
It must have been about a month before she disappeared. It was amoment of reconciliation, when the nagging hunger in his belly was forgotten ahnids earlier affection for her had
temporarily revived. He remembered the day well, a pelting, drenching day when the water streamed down the windaonwd-pane
the light indoors was too dull to read by. The boredom of the two children in the dark, crabmepderdoom became unbearable.
Winston whined and grizzled, made futile demands for food, fretted about the room pulleivnegrything out of place and kicking the wainscoting until the neighbours banged on the
wall, while the younger child wailed intermittently. In the end
his mother said, 'Now be good, and I'Il buy you a toy. A lovely toy -- you'll love it'; and then she had gone oruatin,in the
to a little general shop which was still sporadically open
nearby, and came back with a cardboard box containing an outfit of Snakes and Ladders. He could still remember the smell of the damp cardboard. Iwtas a miserable outfit. The board was
cracked and the tiny wooden dice were so ill-cut that they
would hardly lie on their sides. Winston
alto
e thing
sulkily and without interest. But then his mother lit a piece
of candle and they sat down on the floor to phlea as
Soon
wildly excited and shouting with laughter as the tiddly-winks climbed hopefully up the ladders and then came slidtohwenring the snakes again, almost to the starting- point. They played
eight games, winning four each. His tiny sisteyro,ungt o
understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against a bolster, laughing because the otwheerreslaughing. For a
whole afternoon they had all been happy together, as in his earlier childhood.
He pushed the picture out ofminhdi.sIt was a false
memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knefwor wthaetm they were.
Some things had happened, others had not happened. He turned
back to the chessboard and picked uwphittehknight again.

Almost in the same instant it dropped on to the board with a clatter. He had started as though a pin had run into him.
A shrill trumpet-call had piertcheedair. It was the
bulletin! Victory! It always meant victory when a trumpet- call preceded the news. A sort of electric drill ran through the
cafe/. Even the waiters had started and pricked up their ears.
The trumpet-call haldet loose an enormous volume of noise. Already an excited voice was gabbling from the
telescreen, but even as it started it was almost bydarowned roar of cheering from outside. The news had run round the
streets like magic. He cohueladr just enough of what was issuing from the telescreen to realize that it had all happened, as hhead foreseen; a vast seaborne armada had
secretly assembled a sudden blow in the enemy's rear, the white
arrow tearing across the tail of the black. Fragments of triumphant phrases pushed themselvtehsrough the din: 'Vast
strategic manoeuvre -- perfect co-ordination -- utter rout -- half a million prisoners -- complete demoralizaticoonntr-o-l
of the whole of Africa -- bring the war within measurable distance of itesnd victory -- greatest victory in human history -- victory, victory, victory !'
Under the table Winston's feet made convulsive movements. He had not stirred from sehaits, but in his mind he was
running, swiftly running, he was with the crowds outside, cheering himself deaf. He looked up agatihne poarttrait of
Big Brother. The colossus that bestrode the world ! The rock
against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain ! He thought how ten minutes ago-yes, only ten minutes -h-ad there
still been equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the
news from the front would be of victory or defeat. Ah, it was more than a Eurasian army that had perishedh!ad cMhuacnhged
in him since that first day in the Ministry of Love, but the final, indispensable, healing change had never happuennteidl,
this moment.
The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty slaanudghter, but the shouting
outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back
to their work. One of
atphpermoached with the gin bottle.
Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with evfeorrygtihvienng,
his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybodyH.e was walking down the
white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his backl.ongThhoeped-for bullet was
entering his brain.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him tolearn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. Ocruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn,
self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears
trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right,
everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

* APPENDIX. The Principles of Newspeak *

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been
devised to meet the ideological noefe
ngsoc, or English
Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who
used Newspeak as his sole moefa
ommunication, either in
speech or writing. The leading articles iThe Times
were written in it, but this

twoausr

adeforce which
could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that
Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard
English, aswe should call it) by about the year 2050.
Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatciocnasltructions more and
more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in thNeinth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak
Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many
superfluous words and archaic formations which werteo bedue suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are
concerned here.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to ap iu
of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to
the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other
tmhooduegsht of
impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc --
should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as isthought
dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to
give exact and often very subtle expretsos
ery meaning
that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding allother meanings and also the possibility of
arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating
undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of
unorthodox meanings, and so far as pososfi
ll secondary
meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word

frestill existed in Newspeak,

ibtucould only be
used in such statements as 'This dog is free from lice' or

'This field is free from weeds'.

It could usneodtinbiets

old sense of ' politically free' political and intellectual freedom no

or 'intellectually free' longer existed even as

since

concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart
from the suppression of definitely heretwiocradls, reduction
of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowseudrvitvoe. Newspeak
was designed not to extend butdimtionish the range of
thought, and this purpose was indireacstsliysted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now

know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not
containing newly-created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocatbhuelBary, vocabulary (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary. It will be simpler to discuss each secplaarsastely, but the
grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, sinscaeme rtuhlees
held good for all three categories.

The A vocabulary.

The A vocabulary consisted of the
words needed for the business of everyday life -- for such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on cloonteh'ess, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening,
cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words
that we already possess wolridkse hit,run, dog, tree, sugar,house, field -- but in comparison with the
present-day English vocabulary their number was extremely
small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined. All
ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged thoeumt. of
So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simplya staccato sound expressing oneclearly
understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literpaurryposes or for political or
philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concorbejteects or physical actions.
The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities. The firstof these was an almost complete interchangeability
between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in
principle this applied even vetroy abstract words such as

ifor whe

could be used either as verb, noun,
adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and the nouwnhenform,
they were of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word thought,for example, did not exist in
Newspeak. Its place was takenthibnyk, whichdid duty
for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was followed
here: in some cases it was the originatlhatn
chosen
for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and verb of kindred meaning were not etymologically connoenceted,
or other of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for
example, no such word as cut,its meaning being
sufficiently covered by the noun-ve

nife. Adjectives

were formed by adding the suffu
t-o the noun-verb,
and adverbs by adding -wis
Thus for example,

speedfulmeant 'rapid' and speedwisemeant

'quickly'. Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as

good, strong, bigblack,soft, were retained,

but their total number was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival meaning coaurlrdivebde
at by adding- ful to a noun-verb. None of the
now-existing adverbswas retained, except for a very few already ending in-wise: the -wisetermination was invariable. The worwell, for example, was replabcyed

goodwise.

In addition, any word -- this again applied in principle
to every word in the language -- could be nbeygad the affix un-or could be strengthened by the affix

plus

or, for still greater emphasis,

doubleplus-.Thus, for example, uncoldmeant

'warm', whilepluscold anddoublepluscold meant,
respectively, 'very cold' and 'superlatively cold'. It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of
almost any word by prepositional affixes suchantaes,-

post

up- ,down- , etc. By such methods it

was found possible to bring about an enormous diminution of
vocabulary. Given, for instance, was no need for such a wordbada,s
wtohred good,there since the required
meaning was equally well in-d-eed, better -- expressed by

ungood.All that was necessary, in any case where two

words formed a natural pair of opposites, of them to suppress. Dark,for example, could be replaced byunlight, orlight by undark,
according to preference.
dweacsidetwhich
The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity. Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned
below all inflexions followed
stahmee rules. Thus, in all
verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in- ed. The preterite of stealwas

stealed, the preterite of thinkwas

thinkedand so on throughotuhte language, all such

forms as swa

gave, brought,spoke,

takenetc., being abolishedA.ll plurals were made by adding-s or-es as the case might be. The plu an

life,were mans,oxes, lifes. Comparison of

oxf,

adjectives wasinvariably made by adding- er,-est (good,

gooder, goodest

rregular forms and t

ore, most

formation being suppressed.
The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularlywere the pronouns, the relatives, the
demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these
followed their ancient usage, except t

om had been

scrapped as unnecessary, and thsehall,should tenses had been dropped, all their uses being coverewillby and would. There weraelso certain irregularities in
word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy
speech. A word which was difficult to utter, lioarblew
be incorrectly heard, was held to

ibpeso facto a bad

word: occasionally therefore, for the
osfa
uphony, extra
letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was
retained. But this need made itself felt cihni
nexion
with the B vocabulary. Why so great an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be madelatcelre this essay.

The B vocabulary.

The B vocabulary consisted of
words which had bedeenliberately constructed for political
purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every
case a political implication, but
iwnetreended to impose a
desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases they couId be
translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taketnhe Afrom vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and
always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were
a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas
into a few syllables, and at the sammeoret forcible than ordinary language.
curate and
The B words were in all cases compound words.

They consistedof two or more words,

or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a
noun-verb, and inflected according to ortdhienary rules. To
take a single example: the

gwoordthink, meaning, very

roughly, 'orthodoxy', or, if one chose to regard it as a verb,
'to think in an orthodox manner'. inTfhliescted as follows:
noun-verb, goodthink;past tense and past participle,

goodthinked; present participle, good- thinking; adjective, goodthinkful;adverb, goodthinkwiseverbal noun,goodthinker.

The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of which they were macdoeuldube any parts of
speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronwohuinlceeindicating their derivation. In the wordcrimethink (thoughtcrime), for
instance, the thinkcame second, whereas in

thinkpolThought Police) it came first, and in the

latter wordpolice had lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficuIty in securing euphony, irregular
formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A
vocabulary. For example, the adjectfiovrems of Minitrue, Minipax, and Miniluv were, respectively, Minitruthful,Minipeaceful, and Minilovely,
simply because-trueful,-paxful, and-lovefulwere
slightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B

words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.
Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the laasnaguage whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a

Timesleading article as Oldthinkersunbellyfeel

Ingsoc.The shortest rendering that one could make of this

in Oldspeak would be: 'Those whose ideas were formed before the
Revolution cannot have a full emotiuonndaelrstanding of the principles of English Socialism.' But this is not an adequate translation. To begin with, in order to
Compound wordssuch as speakwrite,
were of course to be found in the A vocabulary, but these were merely convenient abbreviations and hadspencoial ideologcal
colour.
grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted
above, one would have to have a clear idea of whatby is meant

Ingsoc.And in addition, only a person thoroughly

grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force woorfd

bellyfeel,which implied a blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word

oldthink,which was inextricably mixed up with the idea

of wickednessand decadence. But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of whicoldthink was one, was not so much to exprmeesasnings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings
the
extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries
of words which, as they were sufficiently covear
inglbey
comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak
Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to makethasturies,to
say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.
As we have already seen in the case of the word free,
words which had once borne a heretical mweearnei
ometimes
retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the
undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless woortdhser such as honour,justice, morality, internationalism,

democracy, scienc

nd religion hadsimply ceased
to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themsreoluvnedsthe
concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained
in the single wo

rimethink, while all worgdrsouping

themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained itnhe single word oldthink.Greater
precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a
Party member was an outlook simtiol
hat of the ancient
Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations
other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. He did know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch,
tnoot need
Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less haebouktn the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the
hem

commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with
other names or other attributes were
gfoadlss.eIn somewhat
the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generaltiezremds he knew
what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life,
for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words sexcrime (sexualimmorality) and goodsex(chastity).

Sexcrimecovered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It

covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other
perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for
its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately,
since they were all equally culpable, ina
inciple, all
punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which consisted of
scientific and technical words, it might be necteos specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the
ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by

goodse-- that is to snaoyr,mal intercourse between

man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part owfomatnh:eall else
was sexcrime.In Newspeak it was seldom possible to
follow a heretical thought further than the perceptioint was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.
No word in the B vocabulary was ideologniecuatlrlayl. A
great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as

joycam(forced-labour camp) oMinipax Ministry

of Peace, i. e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appearedmeatno. Some words, on the
that
other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was

prolefeed,meaning the rubbishy entertainment and

spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses. Other words, again, were ambivalent, havtihnegconnotation 'good'
when applied to the Party and 'bad' when applied to its enemies. But in addition thweerree great numbers of words which at first sight appeared to be mere abbreviations and
which derived their ideological colour not from metahneiinrg, but from their structure.
So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kinfdittweadsinto
the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of
people, or doctrine,
cooruntry, or institution, or public
building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation. In the
Ministry of Truth, feoxrample, the Records Department, in
which Winston Smith worked, was called Recdepthe
Fiction Department was call

icdep, the Teleprogrammes

Department was calleTeledep, and so on. Twhaissnot
done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped wordpshraasneds
had been one of the characteristic features of political

language; and it had been nottihcaetdthe tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizationEsx.amples were such words as Nazi,Gestapo, Comin- tern,Inprecorr,

AgitpropIn the beginning the practice had been adopted as

it were instinctively, but Neiwnspeak it was used with a

conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by

abbreviating cutting

a

out most of the associations that would otherwise cilti.ng to
The wordsCommunist International, for instance, call up
a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word

Comintern,on the other hand, suggests merely a

tightly-knit organization and a well-defined boddyoctorfine. It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as
limited in purpose, as a chair or a

Cotmaibnltee.rn is

a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phraosveer which
one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way,
the associations called up by a word

Mlinkietrue are

fewer and more controllable than those called

ofTruth. This accounted not only for the habit of

Miunpistbryy

abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that wtaasken to makeevery word easily pronounceable.
In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularitygraomfmar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so,
since what was required, above all for political puwrapsoses,
short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be
uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of ine
hees
speaker's mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearlyof tahlelm were very much
alike. Almost invariably these words

go-o-dthink, Minipax,

prolefeed,sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc,bellyfeel, thinkpol,and countless others -- were words of two or

three syllables, with the strdeissstributed equally between
the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monoAtnodnous. this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subjecitdeonlootgically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or
sometimes necessary, to reflect before speakbiuntg
Party
member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as
automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His
training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the wordst,heiwrith
harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.
So did the fact of having very few wcohrodosse ftroom.

Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constabnetilnyg devised. Newspeak,
indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller insteoafdlarger every year. Each
reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the
smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without
involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly
admitted in the Newspeak w

ckspeak, meaning' to

quack like a duck'. Like various other words in the B
vocabulary, duckspeakwas ambivalent in meaning.
Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox
ones, it implied nothing but praise, and

ThwehenTimes

referred to one of the orators of the Party as a

doubleplusgoodduckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

The C vocabulary.

The C vocabulary was supplementary
to theothers and consisted entirely of scientific and
technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use
today, and were constructed from the same roots, care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of
ubsuutal the
undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammartuilceasl
as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C
words had any currency either in everyday speech or in
political speech. Any scientific worker or technician could
find all the words he needed in thdeevoltiesdt
tohis own
speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. Only a very fweewre words
common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the
function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought,
irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no
word for 'Science', any meaning
itth
ould possibly bear
being already sufficiently covered by the

Inwgosrodc.

From the foregoing account it will be seen that in
Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opiniaobnosv,e a very
low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible
to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy.
It would have been possible, for example,

Btiog

s rother

is ungoo

ut this statement, whitcohan orthodox ear
merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argumenbte,cause the necessary words
were not available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and coulbde naomneldy
in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned whole groups of heresies withoduetfining them in doing so. One
could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by

illegitimately translating some of the words back into
Oldspeak. For exampleAll mans are equawas a possible
Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in

men areredhaired is a possibOlledspeak sentence.

Alwlhich

It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth-i.e. that all men are of siezqeu,aweight, or strength. The concept of political equality no longer
existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged
out of the wo

qual. In 1984, when Oldspeak stwialsl

the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one remmiegmhbter their original meanings. In practice it was not difficult for any
person well grounded

dionublethink to avoid doing this,

but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such
a lapse would have vaished. A person growwiintgh Neuwpspeak
as his sole language would no more know

eqtuhalt

had
once had the secondary meaning of 'politically equatlh'a,t or

freehad once meant 'intellectually free', than for

instance, a person who had never heard of chess of the secondary meanings attaching to queenand

rookThere would be many criamnedserrors which it

awwoaurled be
would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was fotroesebeen
that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more
pronounced -- its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings
more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.
When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the
last link with the past would have
sbeeveenred.History had
already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long
as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was
tpoossible
read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced
to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatablwea.s It
impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak
unless it either referred to
tseocmhenical process or some
very simple everyday action, or wasalready orthodox

(goodthinkfulwould be the NewsPeak expression) in

tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole.
Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to
ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well
as language. Take for example the well-known pfarsosma he
Declaration of Independence:

Wehold these truths to be self-evident, that all men

are created equal, that they are endowed by theirwitchreator certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, andthe pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights,

Governments are instituted ammoenng, deriving their powers fromthe consent of the governed. That whenever any form of

Government becomes destructive of those ends, thietrigihst

ofthe People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new

Government. . .

It would have been quite impossiblreendteor this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doinwgoulsdobe to swallow the
whole passage up in the single w

rimethink. A full

translation could only be an ideologtircaanlslation, whereby
Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.
A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of
prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, whilaet the same time bringing their
achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, MiltSowni,ft, Byron, Dickens,
and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writingsa,ll with else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult
business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twentcye-nftiurrsyt.
There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian
literature -- indispensable technical manuals, and the-- like
that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the
final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as
2050.

Last-modified:Sat, 27 Jun 199815:53:44 GMT

Table of Contents

Chapter I

Chapter III War is Peace

Chapter I