George Orwell's "1984" Part 2 (comprehensive) 2441 words

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.

Nor did
one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as
war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour
camps.

Foreigners,
whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal.

Soon he was within arm's length of the girl,
but the way was blocked by an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous
woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of
flesh.

He noticed that she never used Newspeak words
except the ones that had passed into everyday use.

In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups,
provided by Mr Charrington.

She might have been vaporized, she might
have committed suicide, she might have been transferred to the other end
of Oceania: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her
mind and decided to avoid him.

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.

Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the
mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use
Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid
any attention to that kind of thing.

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle,
and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne
countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude toward...

There was a gas ring
in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside
there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms.

Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she
was singing in a powerful contralto:


It was only an 'opeless fancy.

He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big
Brother's head, two metres wide, which was being made for the occasion by
his daughter's troop of Spies.

The weather was baking hot.

Already on the walk from the station the May sunshine had made him
feel dirty and etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of
London in the pores of his skin.

In the early twentieth century, the vision of
a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient--a
glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete--was
part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.

He wandered round
the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother's
statue gazed southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the
Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years
ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was
a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver
Cromwell.

The world of today is a bare, hungry,
dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and
still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of
that period looked forward.

Sometimes it stopped
for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its
speckled breast and again burst into song.

A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine
guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street.

Sometimes it stopped
for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its
speckled breast and again burst into song.

He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys
in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of
cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust
from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting
for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were
known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad
patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.

But Syme was not only dead,
he was abolished, an unperson.

A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the
cover.

Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one
knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it
at a different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on reading:


Chapter III
War is Peace

The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event
which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth
century.

Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was
the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions
of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages.

It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's
consciousness.

Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in
fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable through slow
demographic changes which a government with wide powers can easily avert.

'They were quite common in the
fifties.

The June sun was still high in the sky,
and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman
pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her
middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies' diapers.

But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under
the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back.

In spite of the
bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements.

Under the
trees to the left of him the ground was misty with bluebells.

It consisted in falsifying a
series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast
discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a
cloud.

I've
got varicose veins.

Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise-filled
canteen was torment.

That was in another hiding-place known to Julia,
the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country
where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle,
and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne
countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude toward...

A little
Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the
microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony
arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head.

Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all!

I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting.

Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one
knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it
at a different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on reading:


Chapter III
War is Peace

The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event
which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth
century.

It consisted in falsifying a
series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast
discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a
cloud.

'And that picture over there'--she nodded at the engraving on the opposite
wall--'would that be a hundred years old?'

Already on the walk from the station the May sunshine had made him
feel dirty and etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of
London in the pores of his skin.

Then,
as though touching her waist had reminded her of something, she felt in
the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate.

It
eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the
special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.

Neither of them looked up; steadily they spooned the
watery stuff into their mouths, and between spoonfuls exchanged the few
necessary words in low expressionless voices.

It was hopeless even as a daydream.

They were very good cigarettes, very thick and
well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper.

But at this moment Winston noticed some
tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them.

He wandered round
the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother's
statue gazed southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the
Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years
ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was
a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver
Cromwell.

I've
got varicose veins.

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.

He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in
fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table,
and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself.

She might have been vaporized, she might
have committed suicide, she might have been transferred to the other end
of Oceania: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her
mind and decided to avoid him.

Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania
by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity
and industriousness of its inhabitants.

It was like struggling with some crushing physical task,
something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless
neurotically anxious to accomplish.

The orator,
still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward,
his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech.

They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost
flat on her face.

The cyclical movement of history was now
intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it
was alterable.

But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an
almost pleasant sound.

If Oceania were
to conquer the areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it
would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great
physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred
million people, who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly on
the Oceanic level.

Nor did
one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as
war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour
camps.

Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one
knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it
at a different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on reading:


Chapter III
War is Peace

The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event
which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth
century.

She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only
person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the
Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight.

Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or
pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column.

His body seemed to have not only the
weakness of a jelly, but its translucency.

There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was
threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished
both of them.

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle,
and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne
countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude toward...

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle,
and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne
countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude toward...

It was one of countless
similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of
the Music Department.

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle,
and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne
countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude toward...

Processions, meetings,
military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen
programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies
built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs
faked.

Katharine would unquestionably
have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too
stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions.

A half-hour railway journey; turn left outside
the station; two kilometres along the road; a gate with the top bar
missing; a path across a field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes;
a dead tree with moss on it.

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.

There were no telescreens, of course, but there
was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might
be picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey
by yourself without attracting attention.

The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the
moment when it became realizable.

The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the
interior of the glass itself.

That was in another hiding-place known to Julia,
the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country
where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.

Every new political theory, by whatever
name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation.

He
sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the brief-case.

Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanter
and glasses.

The Parsons children
played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a
piece of toilet paper.

He had hoped to be alone for a little while during
the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped
down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of
stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week.

The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor,
studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions,
gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of
drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist,
physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special
subject as are relevant to the taking of life.

I know, of course, that the
past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even
when I did the falsification myself.

He led a ghostlike existence between the
tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his
meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient
gramophone with an enormous horn.

In the last truck he could see an
aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists
crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound
together.

He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at
the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the
page with his hand.

For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets
and read it at once.

He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys
in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of
cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust
from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting
for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were
known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad
patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.

Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface,
its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing
iniquity.

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it
was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and
therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared.

Some are
concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise
larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more
and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier
gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities
as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease
germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce
a vehicle that shall bore its wa...

Chapter 9



Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.

He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of
the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube
stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations
posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same
colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent
machine-gun fire in the distance--above all, the fact that there was
never enough to eat.

To know
that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it.

The
heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed
in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality
before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be
influenced by them to some extent.

Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that
the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented
Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and
willingness to govern.

However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that
they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.

The June sun was still high in the sky,
and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman
pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her
middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies' diapers.

If he had known where she lived, and at what time she left work,
he could have contrived to meet her somewhere on her way home; but to try
to follow her home was not safe, because it would mean loitering about
outside the Ministry, which was bound to be noticed.

The trucks were still filing past,
the people still insatiably gaping.

The air in the
little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt
overpoweringly of pigeon dung.

They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost
flat on her face.

Books were
just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

Cut off from contact with the outer world,
and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar
space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down.

Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with
a cobblestone, but that was of no importance.

It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were
luridly floodlit.

From over scrubby cheekbones eyes
looked into Winston's, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away
again.

Probably
she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of the big kaleidoscopes
on which the plots of novels were 'roughed in'.

Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides
of the trucks utterly incurious.

To understand the nature of the present war--for in spite of the regrouping
which occurs every few years, it is always the same war--one must realize
in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive.

His solid form towered over the pair of them,
and the expression on his face was still indecipherable.

I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting.

He had hoped to be alone for a little while during
the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped
down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of
stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week.

They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost
flat on her face.

At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU
the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor
risks suddenly seemed stupid.

The train was full of proles, in holiday mood because of
the summery weather.

The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a
summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description.

As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific
are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a
kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important.

Every record has been
destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has
been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed,
every date has been altered.

'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds
of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution,
to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause
demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'

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.

Some are
concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise
larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more
and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier
gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities
as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease
germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce
a vehicle that shall bore its wa...

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!"

It consisted in falsifying a
series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast
discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a
cloud.

And in the Youth Movement.

He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of
her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street,
and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the
room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.

Even the humblest Party member is
expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow
limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant
fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic
triumph.

Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political
meaning.

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.

A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that
would build several hundred cargo-ships.

He was everywhere at once,
pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along
with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what
seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.

'Five minutes,' he told himself,
'five minutes at the very least!'

What was even
worse than having to focus his mind on a series of niggling jobs was the
need to conceal his agitation from the telescreen.

It consisted in falsifying a
series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast
discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a
cloud.

Sometimes it stopped
for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its
speckled breast and again burst into song.

But there
was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he
tried vainly to suppress it.

The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all
countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized
society, and hence of their own power.

They had only lagged behind
the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and
presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk
quarry.

A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at
hand.

Chocolate normally was
dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it,
like the smoke of a rubbish fire.

They're a kind
of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.'

Nor did
one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as
war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour
camps.

At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on
industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and
North America.

He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried
off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group',
played two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and
sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to
chess'.

It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go
to the lavatory.

'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.

It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go
to the lavatory.

One never saw a double bed nowadays, except in the homes of the proles.

He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys
in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of
cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust
from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting
for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were
known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad
patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.

There's
always the chance of one of those swine recognizing your voice.

He was glad that this was
happening, but he had no physical desire.

What he feared
more than anything else was that she would simply change her mind if he
did not get in touch with her quickly.

During
the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually
succeeded in making love.

Solitude
and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness
of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from
the window that played upon his cheek.

It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were
luridly floodlit.

All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of
them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder
climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods.

I wonder what a
lemon was,' she added inconsequently.

He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried
off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group',
played two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and
sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to
chess'.

He had hoped to be alone for a little while during
the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped
down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of
stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week.

His
tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word,
then of the other, over and over again.

He had imagined her a fool
like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her
belly full of ice.

In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups,
provided by Mr Charrington.

He had hoped to be alone for a little while during
the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped
down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of
stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week.

She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners
and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it.

Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing
planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the
fragile movable battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating
Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development.

Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing
planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the
fragile movable battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating
Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development.

In the years following the
Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost
unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of
collectivization.

If he could get her at a table by herself,
somewhere in the middle of the room, not too near the telescreens, and
with a sufficient buzz of conversation all round--if these conditions
endured for, say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange a few
words.

In front of him was an enemy
who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature,
in pain and perhaps with a broken bone.

She would be hanging
about among the stalls, pretending to be in search of shoelaces or
sewing-thread.

Four days had gone
past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop.

While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to
get it unfolded.

One, much
the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the Thought Police,
just as he had feared.

In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality
appropriate to a state of war.

Slowly, in
mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction
of Mr Charrington's shop, keeping one eye open for the patrols, but
irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was no danger of anyone
interfering with him.

With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or
that--a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a
pinchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby's hair--never
asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it.

Between the frontiers of
the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them,
there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville,
Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population
of the earth.

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.

To hang on from day to day
and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed
an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next
breath so long as there is air available.

But one can imagine
little knots of resistance springing up here and there--small groups of
people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving
a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we
leave off.'

'I only gave my wrist a bit of a
bang.

It was as though she had a map inside her
head.

The whole
atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of
everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the
silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed
servants hurrying to and fro--everything was intimidating.

A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine
guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street.

One
literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as
prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them.

In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups,
provided by Mr Charrington.

It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with
the girl and arrange a meeting.

However
much in earnest he might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that
belongs to a fanatic.

You'll have to remember this.

That was in another hiding-place known to Julia,
the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country
where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.

One, much
the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the Thought Police,
just as he had feared.

Except that English is its chief LINGUA FRANCA and Newspeak its
official language, it is not centralized in any way.

The theory was that men, whose sex
instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater
danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.

With one hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the other,
Julia wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the bookcase,
pointing out the best way of repairing the gateleg table, plumping herself
down in the ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and examining
the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant amusement.

Immediately beneath the telescreen, in
such a position that anyone who was watching at the other end of the
instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbled an address, tore
out the page and handed it to Winston.

He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried
off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group',
played two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and
sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to
chess'.

Winston stopped short.

He led a ghostlike existence between the
tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his
meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient
gramophone with an enormous horn.

He had hoped to be alone for a little while during
the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped
down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of
stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week.

He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that
seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane.

But the girl was still alone
when Winston secured his tray and began to make for her table.

Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of the square.

Nor did
one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as
war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour
camps.

She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor,
and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly
as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during
the Two Minutes Hate.

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle,
and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne
countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude toward...

Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or
pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column.

He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys
in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of
cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust
from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting
for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were
known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad
patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.

With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or
that--a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a
pinchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby's hair--never
asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it.

Winston knew they
were there but he saw them only intermittently.

In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the
disputed area.

Every new political theory, by whatever
name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation.

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?'

Ultimately
the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern
part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering
Strait.

Then,
as though touching her waist had reminded her of something, she felt in
the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate.

Probably
she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of the big kaleidoscopes
on which the plots of novels were 'roughed in'.

But for a moment he did not look at her body;
his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile.

He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper
casually among the other papers on the desk, put on his spectacles and
hitched the speakwrite towards him.

In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called
Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is
called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps
better rendered as Obliteration of the Self.

In the
afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling.

As compared with their
opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by
luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what
they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.

In the early twentieth century, the vision of
a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient--a
glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete--was
part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.

To be away
from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of
wrong-doing.

This failed to happen, partly
because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and
revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on
the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly
regimented society.

There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to
walk past one another without a sign, because a patrol had just come round
the corner or a helicopter was hovering overhead.

Immediately after lunch there arrived a
delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hours and
necessitated putting everything else aside.

She could describe the whole process of composing a novel,
from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the
final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad.

At
school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics
trophy two years running.

The way
she put it was:

'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy
and don't give a damn for anything.

It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests,
lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally
been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the
grave.

In principle
the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might
exist after meeting the bare needs of the population.

One, much
the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the Thought Police,
just as he had feared.

Almost immediately
they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.

Not to let one's feelings appear
in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct,
and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen
when the thing happened.

Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain.

It conflicted with the tendency
towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost
the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially
backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated,
directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.

Not to let one's feelings appear
in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct,
and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen
when the thing happened.

The June sun was still high in the sky,
and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman
pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her
middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies' diapers.

The June sun was still high in the sky,
and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman
pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her
middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies' diapers.

He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall.

For the messages that it was occasionally
necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases,
and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable.

The bluebells were so thick underfoot
that it was impossible not to tread on them.

She sat against him, putting her arm round his
waist.

'In the place where there is no darkness?'
he said hesitantly.

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.

The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had gone flying,
two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across the floor.

The family had become in effect an extension
of the Thought Police.

But no
advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has
ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer.

He did not look at her.

Just once
he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other girls at the
far end of the room.

His first feeling was relief, but as
he watched the strong slender body moving in front of him, with the scarlet
sash that was just tight enough to bring out the curve of her hips, the
sense of his own inferiority was heavy upon him.

He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big
Brother's head, two metres wide, which was being made for the occasion by
his daughter's troop of Spies.

How I hate women!' she said
parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing
machines in the Fiction Department.

Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was
mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing
close attention.

He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door
had opened.

Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the
fierce sordid battles at mealtimes.

Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a violent lunge managed
to drive his shoulder between them.

So, one evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing
boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts
of bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit workshop where the knocking of
hammers mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.

Her eyes were fixed on his, with an
appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.

In the ragged
hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just
perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in dense
masses like women's hair.

The wooden-seated carriage in which he travelled was
filled to overflowing by a single enormous family, ranging from a toothless
great-grandmother to a month-old baby, going out to spend an afternoon
with 'in-laws' in the country, and, as they freely explained to Winston,
to get hold of a little black-market butter.

So, one evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing
boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts
of bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit workshop where the knocking of
hammers mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.

As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable
at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls.

(In his own
schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the
helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later,
when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one
generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.)

'It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said, ripping off the scarlet
sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to a bough.

But there was still that memory moving round the edges of
his consciousness, something strongly felt but not reducible to definite
shape, like an object seen out of the corner of one's eye.

He had got together a big bunch and was smelling their faint sickly
scent when a sound at his back froze him, the unmistakable crackle of a
foot on twigs.

The wooden-seated carriage in which he travelled was
filled to overflowing by a single enormous family, ranging from a toothless
great-grandmother to a month-old baby, going out to spend an afternoon
with 'in-laws' in the country, and, as they freely explained to Winston,
to get hold of a little black-market butter.

He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big
Brother's head, two metres wide, which was being made for the occasion by
his daughter's troop of Spies.

Actually, few
people ever wrote letters.

When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease,
amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of persiflage.

He wondered vaguely how many others like her there
might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of
the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something
unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply
evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

One
literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as
prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them.

He had got together a big bunch and was smelling their faint sickly
scent when a sound at his back froze him, the unmistakable crackle of a
foot on twigs.

The June sun was still high in the sky,
and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman
pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her
middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies' diapers.

The Parsons children
played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a
piece of toilet paper.

But between the general aims that we are fighting for
and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything.

In the ragged
hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just
perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in dense
masses like women's hair.

She enjoyed her work, which consisted
chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor.

During
the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually
succeeded in making love.

He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper
casually among the other papers on the desk, put on his spectacles and
hitched the speakwrite towards him.

Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides
of the trucks utterly incurious.

Tonight was one of his nights at the
Community Centre.

It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions,
and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly
struggling.

These people, whose
origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the
working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of
monopoly industry and centralized government.

I found it when I got lost once on a community
hike.

The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a
summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description.

An old, close-bitten pasture, with a
footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there.

It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia,
or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must
never be crossed by anything except bombs.

'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds
of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution,
to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause
demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'

As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed.

It aroused
in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a
hoarding--a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move
up and down and pour its contents into a glass.

He had imagined her a fool
like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her
belly full of ice.

His voice, made metallic by
the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres,
deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of
civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties.

Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in
going through back files of 'The Times' and altering and embellishing news
items which were to be quoted in speeches.

They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost
flat on her face.

Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was
mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing
close attention.

The whole
atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of
everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the
silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed
servants hurrying to and fro--everything was intimidating.

It consisted in falsifying a
series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast
discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a
cloud.

The wooden-seated carriage in which he travelled was
filled to overflowing by a single enormous family, ranging from a toothless
great-grandmother to a month-old baby, going out to spend an afternoon
with 'in-laws' in the country, and, as they freely explained to Winston,
to get hold of a little black-market butter.

Actually, all the possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to
him within five minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to think,
he went over them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments
on a table.

Even after enormous
upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always
reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium,
however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know
with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories.

She had regained
some of her colour, and appeared very much better.

In the past, the ruling groups
of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and
therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another,
and the victor always plundered the vanquished.

It looked almost exactly as it had looked before--nothing had
been crossed out--but it was one name shorter.

Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was
mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing
close attention.

A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level
of their faces.

Occasionally when a truck jolted there
was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons.

Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with
a cobblestone, but that was of no importance.

There she had remained for
a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like
'Spanking Stories' or 'One Night in a Girls' School', to be bought
furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they
were buying something illegal.

Then he pulled the speakwrite towards
him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:

'Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion
contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stop
unproceed constructionwise antegetting plusfull estimates machinery
overheads stop end message.'

So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the
same thing.'

It conflicted with the tendency
towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost
the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially
backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated,
directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.

In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless,
air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the
pavements scorched one's feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours
was a horror.

With the establishment of
self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared
to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of
previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials
is no longer a matter of life and death.

It is a warfare of limited aims between
combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause
for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference.

Her lips were deeply reddened,
her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something
under the eyes to make them brighter.

A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her.

His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable
sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every
sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an
agony.

The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity.

The stuff they were eating was
a thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans.

Suddenly he became aware of Julia's face a few centimetres from his
own, deathly white, as white as chalk.

Actually, all the possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to
him within five minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to think,
he went over them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments
on a table.

His voice, made metallic by
the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres,
deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of
civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties.

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.

And don't be
too downhearted.

He had got together a big bunch and was smelling their faint sickly
scent when a sound at his back froze him, the unmistakable crackle of a
foot on twigs.

Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the
British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa.

At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the
voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose
uncontrollably from thousands of throats.

It was a scrap of paper
folded into a square.

Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one
knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it
at a different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on reading:


Chapter III
War is Peace

The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event
which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth
century.

'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty.

When Winston
followed her, he found that they were in a natural clearing, a tiny grassy
knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely.

When he did so, although he knew very well the
danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once
again, just to make sure that the words were really there.

Ever since the end
of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of
consumption goods has been latent in industrial society.

It is like the battles between certain ruminant
animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of
hurting one another.

Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard
kisses they had exchanged earlier.

But for a moment he did not look at her body;
his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile.

She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners
and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it.

They could be tracked down
by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture.

Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her
mouth stood out redder than ever.

There was a direct intimate connexion
between chastity and political orthodoxy.

Cut off from contact with the outer world,
and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar
space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down.

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.

That is unavoidable.

He walked slowly up to the north side of the square and
got a sort of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin's Church,
whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed 'You owe me three farthings.'

One
literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as
prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them.

Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to
normal speed, and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart.

His voice, made metallic by
the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres,
deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of
civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties.

Instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in
generalities, with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he
had become partly invisible.

She could describe the whole process of composing a novel,
from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the
final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad.

When he did so, although he knew very well the
danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once
again, just to make sure that the words were really there.

Just once
he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other girls at the
far end of the room.

The thing had been
plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the
portraits of Big Brother.

That was in another hiding-place known to Julia,
the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country
where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.

That was in another hiding-place known to Julia,
the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country
where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.

The lane widened, and in a minute he came to the footpath she had told him
of, a mere cattle-track which plunged between the bushes.

At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU
the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor
risks suddenly seemed stupid.

As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable
at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls.

It was a common accident
in the Fiction Department.

Winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer
edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward
into the heart of the crowd.

But no
advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has
ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer.

One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently growing on
the same root.

Not to let one's feelings appear
in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct,
and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen
when the thing happened.

They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm,
because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass
undigested through the body of a bird.

The terrible thing that the Party had done was to
persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while
at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world.

From whatever
angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the
foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you.

He wondered vaguely how many others like her there
might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of
the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something
unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply
evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

Whichever
power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or
Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies
of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.

In the vast laboratories
of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the
Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of
the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work.

He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had once held between
his fingers.

The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was
ticking away on the mantelpiece.

This failed to happen, partly
because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and
revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on
the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly
regimented society.

Already he had instinctively
started forward to help her.

As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable
at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls.

She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up.

He walked slowly up to the north side of the square and
got a sort of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin's Church,
whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed 'You owe me three farthings.'

He thought of her naked,
youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream.

The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and
well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely
encircling one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of
friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years
as to lull suspicion to sleep.

Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.

Some are
concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise
larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more
and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier
gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities
as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease
germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce
a vehicle that shall bore its way under...

Eastasia,
smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier,
comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands
and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.

She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and bought
herself a complete set of make-up materials.

Already on the walk from the station the May sunshine had made him
feel dirty and etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of
London in the pores of his skin.

Squads of
volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week,
stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and
perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers.

Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her
mouth stood out redder than ever.

He had hoped to be alone for a little while during
the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped
down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of
stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week.

For whom, for what, was that bird singing?

'I've got THE BOOK,' he said as they disentangled themselves.

'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds
of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution,
to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause
demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'

He wandered round
the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother's
statue gazed southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the
Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years
ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was
a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver
Cromwell.

Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the
British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa.

You can watch them lying
in the pools under the willow trees, waving their tails.'

He had got together a big bunch and was smelling their faint sickly
scent when a sound at his back froze him, the unmistakable crackle of a
foot on twigs.

For whom, for what, was that bird singing?

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!"

Actually, few
people ever wrote letters.

War is a way of shattering to pieces,
or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea,
materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable,
and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard
kisses they had exchanged earlier.

'It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said, ripping off the scarlet
sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to a bough.

Some are
concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise
larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more
and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier
gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities
as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease
germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce
a vehicle that shall bore its wa...

There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens
were watched continuously.

As they drifted
down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one
another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked
on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence
by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then
taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly
cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without
introduction on the following day.

Neither of them looked up; steadily they spooned the
watery stuff into their mouths, and between spoonfuls exchanged the few
necessary words in low expressionless voices.

He led a ghostlike existence between the
tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his
meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient
gramophone with an enormous horn.

In his capacity
as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party
to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often
be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or
is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such
knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of DOUBLETHINK.

A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart.

Squads of
volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week,
stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and
perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers.

THEM, it appeared, meant the Party, and above all the Inner Party, about
whom she talked with an open jeering hatred which made Winston feel uneasy,
although he knew that they were safe here if they could be safe anywhere.

Until he could be alone it was impossible
to think this new development out.

The June sun was still high in the sky,
and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman
pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her
middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies' diapers.

Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she
was singing in a powerful contralto:


It was only an 'opeless fancy.

St Clement Danes its name was.'

And even now, though his intellect told him that the message probably
meant death--still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable
hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with difficulty that he
kept his voice from trembling as he murmured his figures into the
speakwrite.

There had been no difficulties about the journey, and
the girl was so evidently experienced that he was less frightened than he
would normally have been.

The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his
face.

On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small
lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over
which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd.

'That thing is really turned off?'

'I didn't want to say anything in the lane,' she went on, 'in case there's
a mike hidden there.

It was not till a couple
of minutes later that the other, more probable explanation had occurred to
him.

In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the
disputed area.

On the evening
beforehand they met briefly in the street.

'Black market,' she said indifferently.

For the messages that it was occasionally
necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases,
and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable.

If she had worked in the Records Department it might have
been comparatively simple, but he had only a very dim idea whereabouts in
the building the Fiction Department lay, and he had no pretext for going
there.

It was not till twenty-three hours, when he
was home and in bed--in the darkness, where you were safe even from the
telescreen so long as you kept silent--that he was able to think
continuously.

'It's sure to be full of bugs, but who cares?' said Julia.

The afternoon was more bearable.

He unrolled and read it without
pausing in his speech.

Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was
mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing
close attention.

When any large operation is undertaken, it is
usually a surprise attack against an ally.

At the beginning there
had been little true sensuality in it.

But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his
lips.

He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big
Brother's head, two metres wide, which was being made for the occasion by
his daughter's troop of Spies.

In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at
war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years.

As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable
at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls.

She enjoyed her work, which consisted
chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor.

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it
was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and
therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared.

Not blackberry leaves.'

One fell on a crowded film
theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins.

Such a thing as an independent political movement was
outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible.

Every record has been
destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has
been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed,
every date has been altered.

Winston had a
hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it.

The way
she put it was:

'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy
and don't give a damn for anything.

For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets
and read it at once.

He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big
Brother's head, two metres wide, which was being made for the occasion by
his daughter's troop of Spies.

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.

The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor,
studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions,
gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of
drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist,
physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special
subject as are relevant to the taking of life.

He walked slowly up to the north side of the square and
got a sort of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin's Church,
whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed 'You owe me three farthings.'

'It's nothing.

'Martin is one of us,' said O'Brien impassively.

It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else came, but now
a terrible fear had taken possession of him.

'Well, perhaps not exactly that.

In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called
Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is
called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps
better rendered as Obliteration of the Self.

Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the
British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other
hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine
or even to the Vistula.

But the issue still struck her as
unimportant.

She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for
a moment.

It was not till twenty-three hours, when he
was home and in bed--in the darkness, where you were safe even from the
telescreen so long as you kept silent--that he was able to think
continuously.

On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed
down.

The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor,
studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions,
gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of
drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist,
physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special
subject as are relevant to the taking of life.

I've got five false teeth.'

It was a scrap of paper
folded into a square.

Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a violent lunge managed
to drive his shoulder between them.

Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable,
and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all.

His soul writhed with boredom, but for once he had had no impulse
to shirk his evening at the Centre.

Winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer
edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward
into the heart of the crowd.

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.

The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the
possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and
poverty.

A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart.

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.

Books were
just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

One day in the fairly near
future--I cannot give a date--one of the messages among your morning's
work will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a
repeat.

Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of
sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he
crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower
of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half-burying the
speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job was
always to stack them into a neat enough pile to give him room to work.

When he did so, although he knew very well the
danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once
again, just to make sure that the words were really there.

The
recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are
not now permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations
can and do happen without having political results, because there is no
way in which discontent can become articulate.

Meanwhile
no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that
the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania
the undisputed master of the entire world.

In front of him was an enemy
who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature,
in pain and perhaps with a broken bone.

Processions, meetings,
military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen
programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies
built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs
faked.

It had no caption,
and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three
or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face
and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip.

His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable
sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every
sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an
agony.

Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked
domination of one province by another.

Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy
his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the
better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three
servants, his private motor-car or helicopter--set him in a different world
from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have
a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call
'the proles'.

The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a
summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description.

He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the
work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the
wrist.

On it was written, in a large
unformed handwriting:

I LOVE YOU.

For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating
thing into the memory hole.

He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried
off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group',
played two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and
sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to
chess'.

It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else came, but now
a terrible fear had taken possession of him.

In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting,
jammed close together.

Banners,
processions, slogans, games, community hikes all that stuff.

From whatever
angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the
foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you.

While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to
get it unfolded.

The
girl finished her lunch quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to
smoke a cigarette.

It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were
luridly floodlit.

Even when weapons of war are
not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of
expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.

The whole incident could
not have taken as much as half a minute.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

The June sun was still high in the sky,
and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman
pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her
middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies' diapers.

Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes
off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent
gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.

On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small
lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over
which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd.

Chapter 2



Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled light and shade,
stepping out into pools of gold wherever the boughs parted.

A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long,
brightly-lit corridor.

For some reason
he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like
that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect.

He would ask his mother naggingly,
over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm
at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to
break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would
attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his
share.

Not to let one's feelings appear
in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct,
and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen
when the thing happened.

They sat talking for hours on the dusty,
twig-littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to time to
cast a glance through the arrowslits and make sure that no one was coming.

In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of
self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of
darkness.

But there
was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he
tried vainly to suppress it.

'You understand,' he said, 'that you will be fighting in the dark.

Almost immediately
they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.

For how could the fear, the
hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be
kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct
and using it as a driving force?

'I only gave my wrist a bit of a
bang.

In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless,
air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the
pavements scorched one's feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours
was a horror.

They add nothing to the wealth of
the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and
the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which
to wage another war.

She could describe the whole process of composing a novel,
from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the
final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad.

The whole incident could
not have taken as much as half a minute.

The first whiff of its scent
had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was
powerful and troubling.

The so-called
'abolition of private property' which took place in the middle years of
the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer
hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a
group instead of a mass of individuals.

He had hoped to be alone for a little while during
the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped
down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of
stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week.

His heart bumped in his breast with
frightening loudness.

She had regained
some of her colour, and appeared very much better.

Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her
mouth stood out redder than ever.

For how could the fear, the
hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be
kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct
and using it as a driving force?

Instead of anything directly connected with O'Brien or the
Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the
dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room
over Mr Charrington's shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel
engraving in its rosewood frame.

All this marching
up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.

She had certainly turned
very pale.

'And that picture over there'--she nodded at the engraving on the opposite
wall--'would that be a hundred years old?'

There was no
question that she had done it intentionally.

Four days had gone
past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop.

When he did so, although he knew very well the
danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once
again, just to make sure that the words were really there.

If there was any relief, it was in
his work, in which he could sometimes forget himself for ten minutes at a
stretch.

It consisted in falsifying a
series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast
discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a
cloud.

'Where can we meet?'

Her eyes were fixed on his, with an
appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.

The air in the
little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt
overpoweringly of pigeon dung.

Processions, meetings,
military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen
programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies
built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs
faked.

Her eyes were fixed on his, with an
appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.

Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all!

The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo
and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian
Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by
Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and
Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to
enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored:
but the balance of power always remains roughly even...

Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political
meaning.

He turned and fled down
the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.

Curiously enough,
this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do.

Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time.

He remembered
his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something
in a saucepan.

He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper
casually among the other papers on the desk, put on his spectacles and
hitched the speakwrite towards him.

Inefficient
nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for
efficiency was inimical to illusions.

War, however, is no
longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early
decades of the twentieth century.

There were
telescreens all round the pediment.

In a way she realized
that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would
catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed
that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could
live as you chose.

The
most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent,
are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated.

She stood looking at him for an instant,
then felt at the zipper of her overalls.

The dream had also been comprehended by--indeed, in some sense it had
consisted in--a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again
thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film,
trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter
blew them both to pieces.

It occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where
she lived.

The bluebells were so thick underfoot
that it was impossible not to tread on them.

Four days had gone
past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop.

His first feeling was relief, but as
he watched the strong slender body moving in front of him, with the scarlet
sash that was just tight enough to bring out the curve of her hips, the
sense of his own inferiority was heavy upon him.

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of
DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by
the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the
machine without raising the general standard of living.

It was as
though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got
mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves.

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.

Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on
it.

The sweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves daunted
him.

Katharine would unquestionably
have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too
stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions.

There she had remained for
a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like
'Spanking Stories' or 'One Night in a Girls' School', to be bought
furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they
were buying something illegal.

When he came into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the
wall, and was quite alone.

He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across the
soundless carpet.

Her arm was out of the sling and she had a
band of sticking-plaster round her wrist.

Occasionally when a truck jolted there
was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons.

It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with
the girl and arrange a meeting.

The ruling groups
were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to
leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be
uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.

Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political
meaning.

But anyway I remember it ends
up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop
off your head!"'

If anyone was coming you could hear them a hundred metres away.'

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

In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called
Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is
called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps
better rendered as Obliteration of the Self.

But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under
the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back.

She spoke as though her heart were fluttering.

For a week after this, life was like a restless dream.

Four days had gone
past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop.

He knew
that it was not so, because of her unmistakable agitation when she handed
him the note.

There did not seem to be any further question that he
wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding
generalities.

As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been
killing larger numbers of people than usual.

So far as he could see there were two possibilities.

Not to let one's feelings appear
in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct,
and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen
when the thing happened.

The queue edged forward till Winston was almost at the counter, then was
held up for two minutes because someone in front was complaining that he
had not received his tablet of saccharine.

We cannot act
collectively.

The ruling groups
were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to
leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be
uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.

At the start there had been a few boos
and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and
had soon stopped.

If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or
syphilis, how gladly he would have done so!

Or
they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak
with proletarian accents, get jobs in a factory and live out their lives
undetected in a back-street.

It was something small and
flat.

The June sun was still high in the sky,
and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman
pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her
middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies' diapers.

In the ragged
hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just
perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in dense
masses like women's hair.

They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost
flat on her face.

It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with
the girl and arrange a meeting.

It was the girl with dark hair.

The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was
ticking away on the mantelpiece.

He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatic
tube.

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.

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of
DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by
the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the
machine without raising the general standard of living.

In the last truck he could see an
aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists
crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound
together.

It was the girl with dark hair.

He had pulled her down on to the
ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her.

The room was darkening.

Exactly as his mother
had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so
she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper
every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water.

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.

The music went on and on, minute after minute, with
astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the
bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity.

Motives which were already present to some small extent in the
great wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and
are consciously recognized and acted upon.

But the girl was still alone
when Winston secured his tray and began to make for her table.

On it was written, in a large
unformed handwriting:

I LOVE YOU.

For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating
thing into the memory hole.

He re-adjusted his spectacles on his nose,
sighed, and drew the next batch of work towards him, with the scrap of
paper on top of it.

The smell was
already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation
from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even
now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself
mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost
again.

He had hoped to be alone for a little while during
the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped
down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of
stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week.

As they drifted
down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one
another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked
on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence
by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then
taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly
cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without
introduction on the following day.

Nor did he seem shocked or become offensively
knowing when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room for the purpose
of a love-affair.

They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost
flat on her face.

And here's a loaf of bread--proper
white bread, not our bloody stuff--and a little pot of jam.

Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small,
beetle-like man was listening intently--listening to that.

The air
seemed to kiss one's skin.

Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was
mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing
close attention.

At present nothing is possible
except to extend the area of sanity little by little.

It struck him as a curious fact that he had never
heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously.

If he could get her at a table by herself,
somewhere in the middle of the room, not too near the telescreens, and
with a sufficient buzz of conversation all round--if these conditions
endured for, say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange a few
words.

It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go
to the lavatory.

As he ran, he gathered from some shouted remarks that
a convoy of Eurasian prisoners was passing.

He wandered round
the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother's
statue gazed southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the
Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years
ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was
a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver
Cromwell.

One did not know what happened
inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs,
delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual
wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning.

Ultimately
the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

It'll be all right in a second.'

Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes
off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent
gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.

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.

It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else came, but now
a terrible fear had taken possession of him.

The
telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-blue carpet
gave one the impression of treading on velvet.

Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of
semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous
warfare.

Some are
concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise
larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more
and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier
gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities
as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease
germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce
a vehicle that shall bore its wa...

All rulers in all ages have tried
to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could
not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military
efficiency.

It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that
their hands were clasped together.

On the following day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her.

In the years following the
Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost
unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of
collectivization.

It
was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways,
and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that
smells bad hay.

Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging,
intolerable desire to be alone.

They had left the clearing and were wandering again
through the chequered shade, with their arms round each other's waists
whenever it was wide enough to walk two abreast.

All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an
article of faith.

When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary
conversation were filled up.

In so far as he had time to remember
it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the
speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie.

But there
was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he
tried vainly to suppress it.

We are
also adulterers.

So far as he could see there were two possibilities.

In principle
the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might
exist after meeting the bare needs of the population.

And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust,
and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the floor.

For distances of less than
100 kilometres it was not necessary to get your passport endorsed, but
sometimes there were patrols hanging about the railway stations, who
examined the papers of any Party member they found there and asked awkward
questions.

It was not till twenty-three hours, when he
was home and in bed--in the darkness, where you were safe even from the
telescreen so long as you kept silent--that he was able to think
continuously.

But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they
in some way touched upon her own life.

No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very
instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his hand.

He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried
off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group',
played two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and
sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to
chess'.

'I've got THE BOOK,' he said as they disentangled themselves.

She seemed to have
become completely spiritless.

I'll get the
lipstick off your face afterwards.'

He had pulled her down on to the
ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her.

He knelt down and began
picking some partly to pass the time away, but also from a vague idea that
he would like to have a bunch of flowers to offer to the girl when they
met.

He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried
off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group',
played two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and
sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to
chess'.

Obviously she had been that way
before, for she dodged the boggy bits as though by habit.

It struck him as a curious fact that he had never
heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously.

'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds
of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution,
to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause
demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'

All this marching
up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.

The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo
and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian
Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by
Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and
Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to
enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored:
but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and t...

On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the
shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks,
the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet,
the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes,
the booming of guns--after six days of this, when the great orgasm was
quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up
into such delirium that if the crowd could have got th...

There's a whole kilo here,' she said.

For a moment it felt as though his
entrails were being ground to pulp between the two muscular hips, then he
had broken through, sweating a little.

He would ask his mother naggingly,
over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm
at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to
break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would
attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his
share.

Hundreds of times--well, scores of times, anyway.'

Perhaps the girl was part of it!

On it was written, in a large
unformed handwriting:

I LOVE YOU.

For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating
thing into the memory hole.

The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the
staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime.

There were further angry
demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the
poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and
a number of shops were looted in the turmoil; then a rumour flew round
that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and
an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their
house set on fire and perished of suffocation.

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.

'It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said, ripping off the scarlet
sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to a bough.

From whatever
angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the
foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you.

He pushed it
away from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action which he
would have liked to undo but could not.

Winston and Julia clung
together, fascinated.

Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the
British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other
hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine
or even to the Vistula.

It's impossible to discover
the age of anything nowadays.'

The afternoon was more bearable.

Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or
pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column.

His heart bumped in his breast with
frightening loudness.

A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long,
brightly-lit corridor.

For hours at a
time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister,
a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian
by thinness.