George Orwell's "1984" Part 3

A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable
to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word; occasionally
therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word
or an archaic formation was retained.

It was perceived that in thus
abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by
cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.

He was in a high-ceilinged
windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.

The past was alterable.

Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.

It was more natural to exist
from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes' life even with the
certainty that there was torture at the end of it.

It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top
for carrying it by.

It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself.

No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral.

Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love,
but there was no way of making certain.

Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation 'good' when
applied to the Party and 'bad' when applied to its enemies.

The Principles of Newspeak



Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet
the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.

They slapped his face, wrung
his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to
urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water;
but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of
arguing and reasoning.

It was saccharine flavoured
with cloves, the speciality of the cafe.

It was easier to
confess everything and implicate everybody.

They wrenched off the boots with
which she had been trying to kick them, and dumped her down across
Winston's lap, almost breaking his thigh-bones.

There were moments
when he foresaw the things that would happen to him with such actuality
that his heart galloped and his breath stopped.

An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty, with
great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come down
in her struggles, was carried in, kicking and shouting, by four guards,
who had hold of her one at each corner.

There's nothing I wouldn't confess, nothing!

The secret
accumulation of knowledge--a gradual spread of enlightenment--ultimately
a proletarian rebellion--the overthrow of the Party.

He loved her
and would not betray her; but that was only a fact, known as he knew the
rules of arithmetic.

If you tell me any lies, or attempt to
prevaricate in any way, or even fall below your usual level of
intelligence, you will cry out with pain, instantly.

'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we intend to destroy you utterly,
so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference--in
that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first?

There was a
long range of crimes--espionage, sabotage, and the like--to which everyone
had to confess as a matter of course.

He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs in the pocket of his
overalls.

It set out
to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it.

They slapped his face, wrung
his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to
urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water;
but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of
arguing and reasoning.

Even the victim of the Russian purges could
carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage
waiting for the bullet.

He had capitulated, that was agreed.

Opposite Winston there sat
a man with a chinless, toothy face exactly like that of some large,
harmless rodent.

The version in use in 1984, and
embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was
a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic
formations which were due to be suppressed later.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination.

It was in the
Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and
all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few
crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind.

She paused, patted
her breast, and belched.

So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was
simply a staccato sound expressing ONE clearly understood concept.

Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible?

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

His eyes flitted
round the walls, as though he half expected to find a window somewhere.

Courage and cowardice are not involved.

The cloves and saccharine, themselves disgusting
enough in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell; and
what was worst of all was that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him
night and day, was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the smell of
those----

He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as it was possible
he never visualized them.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination.

A bench, or
shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken only by the
door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden
seat.

Had it not been
exposed long ago as a fallacy?

Besides, his memories were not
continuous.

Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish
rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes.

It struck him at once that she had changed in
some ill-defined way.

It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that
the old reformers imagined.

For a moment he lay as though stunned, with dark blood oozing from
his mouth and nose.

In some cases they could be translated into
Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually
demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain
overtones.

It was expected that Newspeak would
have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should
call it) by about the year 2050.

He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to
utter an obscenity.

It could not be used in its old sense of 'politically
free' or 'intellectually free' since political and intellectual freedom no
longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.

Already we are breaking down
the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution.

She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and seemed immediately
to take a fancy to him.

'Not even identifiable ashes.

To take a single
example: the word GOODTHINK, meaning, very roughly, 'orthodoxy', or, if
one chose to regard it as a verb, 'to think in an orthodox manner'.

A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had
passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage.

Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardly
stand, then flung like a sack of potatoes on to the stone floor of a cell,
left to recuperate for a few hours, and then taken out and beaten again.

He still did not know,
probably never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when
they arrested him.

He felt the smash of
truncheons on his elbows and iron-shod boots on his shins; he saw himself
grovelling on the floor, screaming for mercy through broken teeth.

At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like an
explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise.

His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly
sanctimonious expression.

He heard himself promising to lie, to steal,
to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to
disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face.

The words of
which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed
in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce
while indicating their derivation.

Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage
breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't
really happen.

It set out
to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it.

All this is a
digression,' he added in a different tone.

Men are infinitely
malleable.

On the other hand some of them seemed to be on
good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle
cigarettes through the spyhole in the door.

But there were other days when
they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show
of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never
finished--when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about
grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over
definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels--threats, even, to appeal to
higher authority.

An extraordinary medley
of feeling--but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive
layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was
undermost--struggled inside him.

Because of
its thinness the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large, and the
eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or
something.

Invisibility,
levitation--anything.

The creature's face seemed to be protruded,
because of its bent carriage.

That is to say, I collaborated in writing it.

At last he stood up,
waddled clumsily across the cell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls,
and, with an abashed air, held out a grimy piece of bread to the
skull-faced man.

One of them was leaping up and down, the
other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink
hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air.

You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it.

All words
grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for
instance, were contained in the single word CRIMETHINK, while all words
grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism
were contained in the single word OLDTHINK.

The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten.

As the door opened, the wave
of air that it created brought in a powerful smell of cold sweat.

He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty
bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to take much
interest in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference
in demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others.

He remembered them dimly,
because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor.

'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and
mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever
heard of.'

The resulting amalgam was always a
noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules.

Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation 'good' when
applied to the Party and 'bad' when applied to its enemies.

Certain
of our present-day adjectives, such as GOOD, STRONG, BIG, BLACK, SOFT,
were retained, but their total number was very small.

I could not help it!' he added
almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston.

They wore them down
by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches,
confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with
abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy.

Soon he was wildly excited and shouting with
laughter as the tiddly-winks climbed hopefully up the ladders and then
came slithering down the snakes again, almost to the starting-point.

He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party
members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public
funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind.

There was a
long range of crimes--espionage, sabotage, and the like--to which everyone
had to confess as a matter of course.

Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he
saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear,
cutting their communications by land and sea.

And once--Winston could not remember
whether it was in drugged sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in a moment
of wakefulness--a voice murmured in his ear: 'Don't worry, Winston; you
are in my keeping.

This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word
DUCKSPEAK, meaning 'to quack like a duck'.

A great many were
euphemisms.

There was a period of
blackness and then the cell, or room, in which he now was had gradually
materialized round him.

It was intended that
when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten,
a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of
Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is
dependent on words.

It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of green.

It was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O'Brien had seemed to
recognize the allusion.

When his nerves were in rags after hours of
questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling tears.

Do you realize that there are only
twelve rhymes to "rod" in the entire language?

Any scientific
worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted
to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the
words occurring in the other lists.

Some of the drunks were so violent that the other prisoners had to combine
to suppress them.

It was composed almost entirely of words
that we already possess words like HIT, RUN, DOG, TREE, SUGAR, HOUSE,
FIELD--but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary their
number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly
defined.

We shall abolish the orgasm.

'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience,
'although a rodent, is carnivorous.

He even had a job, a sinecure, more
highly-paid than his old job had been.

Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body was grey all
over with ancient, ingrained dirt.

It was
a photograph, and there was no question of its identity.

In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific
and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to
certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them.

There is something in the
universe--I don't know, some spirit, some principle--that you will never
overcome.'

As the young officer entered and
stepped aside, there emerged from behind him a short stumpy guard with
enormous arms and shoulders.

Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain!

In our world
there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.

They yelled insults at the guards,
fought back fiercely when their belongings were impounded, wrote obscene
words on the floor, ate smuggled food which they produced from mysterious
hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when
it tried to restore order.

He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty
bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to take much
interest in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference
in demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others.

Even now, I am well
aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is
a virtue.

For days I had racked my
brains.

'I have been able to recall one
instance--a possible instance.

She made no response whatever to
the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself.

When you delude yourself into
thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the
same thing as you.

And then
suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the
changing of a line in his face--suddenly the camouflage would be down and
bang! would go the batteries of his hatred.

Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes, and
was swallowed up.

The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a
sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head.

'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English
poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks
rhymes?'

Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain bricks in the
walls of the cell.

The
guard was laughing at his contortions.

He had ceased to notice whether he was
crying out or not.

The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look.

Take for example the well-known
passage from the Declaration of Independence:


WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL,
THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS,
THAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.

In the preceding quarter,
it appeared, the Tenth Three-Year Plan's quota for bootlaces had been
overfulfilled by 98 per cent.

It was even
conceivable that Ampleforth was the bearer of the razor blade.

His mind CONTAINED Winston's mind.

THAT TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN,
DERIVING THEIR POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.

'Don't deceive yourself.

All words
grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for
instance, were contained in the single word CRIMETHINK, while all words
grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism
were contained in the single word OLDTHINK.

Whatever he said, the swift answer
crushed him like a bludgeon.

They pretended, perhaps
they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a
limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where
human beings would be free and equal.

You would not make the act of submission which is the
price of sanity.

When his nerves were in rags after hours of
questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling tears.

The Principles of Newspeak



Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet
the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.

The confession was a formality,
though the torture was real.

A world of fear and treachery and torment, a
world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not
less but MORE merciless as it refines itself.

For only an instant it was before
his eyes, then it was out of sight again.

Fixed to the front of it was something that looked
like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards.

You believe that reality is
something objective, external, existing in its own right.

Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his
diary they had carefully replaced.

You are
mentally deranged.

And man is tiny--helpless!

There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless
as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless
effort to dodge the kicks, and simply inviting more and yet more kicks,
in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin,
in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine.

There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of
consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again
after a blank interval.

Often he would lie from one meal to the next almost
without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries
in which it was too much trouble to open his eyes.

Ideas
inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form,
and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and
condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so.

Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he
saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear,
cutting their communications by land and sea.

His fat, mottled cheeks were so pouched at the bottom
that it was difficult not to believe that he had little stores of food
tucked away there.

He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his hands crossed
on his knee.

When finally
you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will.

Even the victim of the Russian purges could
carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage
waiting for the bullet.

Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and
often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could
properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the
possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.

In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific
and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to
certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them.

There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian
literature--indispensable technical manuals, and the like--that had to
be treated in the same way.

There was no need to enumerate
them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle,
all punishable by death.

The whole process seemed to stretch out over a
long, indefinite time--weeks, possibly--and the intervals between the
sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or two.

Ampleforth, too large to sit in comfort on the narrow
bench, fidgeted from side to side, clasping his lank hands first round one
knee, then round the other.

But there were other days when
they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show
of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never
finished--when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about
grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over
definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels--threats, even, to appeal to
higher authority.

A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy
of the pedant who has found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt
and scrubby hair.

But there were other days when
they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show
of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never
finished--when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about
grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over
definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels--threats, even, to appeal to
higher authority.

He remembered how once, after the explosion
of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and
had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by
its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone
than flesh.

The colossus that bestrode the world!

The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is
all we care about.

Comparison of
adjectives was invariably made by adding -ER, -EST (GOOD, GOODER, GOODEST),
irregular forms and the MORE, MOST formation being suppressed.

At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligent, his heart
seemed to turn over.

It struck him at once that she had changed in
some ill-defined way.

Ampleforth, too large to sit in comfort on the narrow
bench, fidgeted from side to side, clasping his lank hands first round one
knee, then round the other.

No etymological principle was followed
here: in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention,
in other cases the verb.

And in
addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate
the full force of the word BELLYFEEL, which implied a blind, enthusiastic
acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word OLDTHINK, which was
inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence.

Certain
of our present-day adjectives, such as GOOD, STRONG, BIG, BLACK, SOFT,
were retained, but their total number was very small.

A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure who seemed to
glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured
face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway.

In some cases they could be translated into
Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually
demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain
overtones.

A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby
Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.

He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself.

They pretended, perhaps
they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a
limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where
human beings would be free and equal.

The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly
were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the
auxiliary verbs.

As his eyes regained their focus he
remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was
gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there was a large patch of
emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.

The secret
accumulation of knowledge--a gradual spread of enlightenment--ultimately
a proletarian rebellion--the overthrow of the Party.

'You've been starving me for weeks.

He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to
utter an obscenity.

As though for reassurance he
looked up at the imperturbable face in the portrait.

His sole concern was to find out
what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the
bullying started anew.

The eyes grew larger and more
luminous.

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

Only
once, when two Party members, both women, were pressed close together on
the bench, he overheard amid the din of voices a few hurriedly-whispered
words; and in particular a reference to something called 'room one-oh-one',
which he did not understand.

The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly
than the Inquisition had done.

When we navigate the
ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to
assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions
upon millions of kilometres away.

We are different from all the oligarchies of the
past, in that we know what we are doing.

There was much talk about the forced-labour camps to which
most of the prisoners expected to be sent.

Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying
triumph of Good over Evil?

It resembles my own mind except that you
happen to be insane.

Suppose that we
quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty.

All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of
them.

A bench, or
shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken only by the
door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden
seat.

It was thinkable that the razor blade might
arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed.

He wondered
whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it
was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept
squeezing from his eyes.

He moved himself
mentally from place to place, and tried to determine by the feeling of his
body whether he was perched high in the air or buried deep underground.

He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was
the inquisitor, he was the friend.

Not in the individual
mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the
mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

His eyes
settled on the smashed face of the chinless man.

He
remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop his hair,
and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse,
tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over
him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make
him sleep.

The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and
consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms.

An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty, with
great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come down
in her struggles, was carried in, kicking and shouting, by four guards,
who had hold of her one at each corner.

He had been appointed to a
sub-committee of a sub-committee which had sprouted from one of the
innumerable committees dealing with minor difficulties that arose in the
compilation of the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.

Suddenly the foul musty
odour of the brutes struck his nostrils.

We
were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling.

A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure who seemed to
glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured
face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway.

He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to
utter an obscenity.

Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling
away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame.

O'Brien's manner grew stern again.

He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a
priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish.

Newspeak
words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary,
the B vocabulary (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary.

Besides, was it possible, when you
were actually suffering it, to wish for any reason that your own pain
should increase?

Things will happen to you from which you
could not recover, if you lived a thousand years.

You will be annihilated in the past as well
as in the future.

Whenever his physical sensations were a little under
control the terror returned.

It was more natural to exist
from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes' life even with the
certainty that there was torture at the end of it.

The version in use in 1984, and
embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was
a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic
formations which were due to be suppressed later.

For
perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston's vision.

Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase
of pain.

The skull-faced man had quickly thrust his hands
behind his back, as though demonstrating to all the world that he refused
the gift.

His troubled eyes were gazing at the wall about a metre above
the level of Winston's head.

He must interpose another human being, the BODY of another human
being, between himself and the rats.

The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional,
dirty-looking crocuses.

He began
to grow actually proud of his body, and to cherish an intermittent belief
that his face also was growing back to normal.

We
were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling.

But in
addition there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared
to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideological colour not
from their meaning, but from their structure.

It was a tricky
ending, involving a couple of knights.

To a surprising extent the ordinary
criminals ignored the Party prisoners.

Fragments of triumphant phrases pushed themselves through the din: 'Vast
strategic manoeuvre--perfect co-ordination--utter rout--half a million
prisoners--complete demoralization--control of the whole of Africa--bring
the war within measurable distance of its end--victory--greatest victory
in human history--victory, victory, victory!'

Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards, his face vaguely
perturbed, but uncomprehending.

The wave
of pain receded almost as quickly as it had come.

The tone of his voice
implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous
horror that such a word could be applied to himself.

His troubled eyes were gazing at the wall about a metre above
the level of Winston's head.

You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston.

He could
evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he
showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever.

It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself.

Some dreadful thing which had lain embedded in the future had
somehow been skipped over and had not happened.

It covered fornication,
adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal
intercourse practised for its own sake.

They wore them down
by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches,
confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with
abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy.

Already we are breaking down
the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution.

Ideas
inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form,
and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and
condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so.

An example was PROLEFEED, meaning the rubbishy
entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses.

'It was my little daughter,' said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride.

For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes
necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to
make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the
correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets.

Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish
rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes.

I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly.

That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect
doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of
others.

Feebly, without
arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of
what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.

Sanity was statistical.

The
dull pain in his belly never went away, but sometimes it grew better and
sometimes worse, and his thoughts expanded or contracted accordingly.

There was no need to enumerate
them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle,
all punishable by death.

The rhyme was "rod".

A bowed, grey-coloured,
skeleton-like thing was coming towards him.

There was a
long range of crimes--espionage, sabotage, and the like--to which everyone
had to confess as a matter of course.

A ray of sunlight slanting through a
window fell on dusty table-tops.

All of these followed their ancient usage, except that
WHOM had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the SHALL, SHOULD tenses had
been dropped, all their uses being covered by WILL and WOULD.

Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation.

When
we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science.

You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived
in, but not its underlying motives.

Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they
deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity.

The tone of his voice
implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous
horror that such a word could be applied to himself.

You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston.

'It's insidious.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said.

They might keep him for years in
solitary confinement, they might send him to a labour-camp, they might
release him for a while, as they sometimes did.

He could hear just enough of what was
issuing from the telescreen to realize that it had all happened, as he had
foreseen; a vast seaborne armada had secretly assembled a sudden blow in
the enemy's rear, the white arrow tearing across the tail of the black.

Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage
breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't
really happen.

Newspeak was designed not to extend
but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly
assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

A feeling of
weariness had overwhelmed him.

Did not the statement, 'You do
not exist', contain a logical absurdity?

It will be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical
peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to
the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.

The A vocabulary consisted of the words needed for the
business of everyday life--for such things as eating, drinking, working,
putting on one's clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles,
gardening, cooking, and the like.

It set out
to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it.

None of the now-existing adverbs was retained,
except for a very few already ending in -WISE: the -WISE termination was
invariable.

This accounted not
only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the
almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily
pronounceable.

Here and there under the dirt there
were the red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an
inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it.

Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there was neither interest nor
surprise, but only misery.

To a surprising extent the ordinary
criminals ignored the Party prisoners.

In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication,
the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might
remember their original meanings.

The first time he tried to
smoke it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out for
a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal.

There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was
homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol distilled
from potatoes.

If it had been possible he would have cowered deeper into
the bed.

He drank another mouthful of gin, picked up
the white knight and made a tentative move.

'But the whole universe is outside us.

He paused opposite
Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: 'You don't think they'll shoot
me, do you, old chap?

No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral.

It needed also a sort of
athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate
use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical
errors.

We are not interested in the good
of others; we are interested solely in power.

When you delude yourself into
thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the
same thing as you.

At last he stood up,
waddled clumsily across the cell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls,
and, with an abashed air, held out a grimy piece of bread to the
skull-faced man.

The tone of his voice
implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous
horror that such a word could be applied to himself.

The more the Party is powerful, the
less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the
despotism.

Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not
a memory in a living brain.

It was not easy to preserve
inscrutability when you did not know what your face looked like.

The guards, too, treated the
common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle
them roughly.

There were days when they assembled
and then promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to one another that
there was not really anything to be done.

'"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past,"' repeated Winston obediently.

He could
evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he
showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever.

He
remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop his hair,
and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse,
tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over
him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make
him sleep.

The man looked frantically round at the other prisoners, as though with
some idea that he could put another victim in his own place.

By such methods it was found possible to bring about an enormous
diminution of vocabulary.

It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly.

The stars can be near
or distant, according as we need them.

'Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence.

Is
there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past
is still happening?'

They were
engaged in producing something called an Interim Report, but what it was
that they were reporting on he had never definitely found out.

It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a
species of blasphemy.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression
for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc,
but to make all other modes of thought impossible.

An extraordinary medley
of feeling--but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive
layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was
undermost--struggled inside him.

The
others are outside--irrelevant.'

The guards, too, treated the
common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle
them roughly.

He paused opposite
Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: 'You don't think they'll shoot
me, do you, old chap?

He did not know whether the thing was really happening,
or whether the effect was electrically produced; but his body was being
wrenched out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order
to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish
the dictatorship.

Every day, at
every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and
yet they will always survive.

The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers.

His tiny sister, too young to
understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against a bolster,
laughing because the others were laughing.

Then,
noticing that she was sitting on something uneven, she slid off Winston's
knees on to the bench.

If you tell me any lies, or attempt to
prevaricate in any way, or even fall below your usual level of
intelligence, you will cry out with pain, instantly.

The past never had been
altered.

Later he was
to realize that all that then happened was merely a preliminary, a routine
interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected.

Always, without
exception, it is so arranged.

'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and
mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever
heard of.'

His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his
face had suddenly become both stern and animated.

No book is
produced individually, as you know.'

It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon
eleven years ago and promptly destroyed.

Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once
believed--Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford--in the end we broke them down.

Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the two
halves of a dental plate fell out of his mouth.

Some dreadful thing which had lain embedded in the future had
somehow been skipped over and had not happened.

'Of course I'm guilty!' cried Parsons with a servile glance at the
telescreen.

It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed
a palpable untruth--i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or
strength.

And it was to be
foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics
of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced--its words growing
fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of
putting them to improper uses always diminishing.

'You don't even control
the climate or the law of gravity.

And they imagined that they had learned
from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not
make martyrs.

The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional,
dirty-looking crocuses.

Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to
the patrols the very next day.

There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was
homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol distilled
from potatoes.

We are not content with
negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission.

The chinless man
jumped in his tracks.

'It is switched
off.

It
was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should
have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the
drugs should be pumped into his arm.

Newspeak was designed not to extend
but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly
assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

The bonds that had held his
body down were loosened.

You will do what is required of
you.'

At the thought the words burst out of him:

'What is in Room 101?'

He watched the heavy
yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his
vision.

'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we intend to destroy you utterly,
so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference--in
that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first?

'I have been able to recall one
instance--a possible instance.

We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our
side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.

The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a
sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head.

A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure who seemed to
glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured
face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway.

Ultimately it was hoped to
make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher
brain centres at all.

Courage and cowardice are not involved.

In the first place, because the confessions that they
had made were obviously extorted and untrue.

No one cared what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no
telescreen admonished him.

'And have you committed it?'

An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty, with
great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come down
in her struggles, was carried in, kicking and shouting, by four guards,
who had hold of her one at each corner.

The secret
accumulation of knowledge--a gradual spread of enlightenment--ultimately
a proletarian rebellion--the overthrow of the Party.

But there had been a moment--he did
not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps--of luminous certainty, when
each new suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and
become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as
easily as five, if that were what was needed.

Through the midday
hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the
telescreen.

Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother.

The version in use in 1984, and
embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was
a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic
formations which were due to be suppressed later.

He was
not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love, he
was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down which he had
seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs.

A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure who seemed to
glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured
face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway.

The past never had been
altered.

Always we shall have the heretic here
at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible--and in the end
utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own
accord.

Do you suppose it is
beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy?

She put a vast arm round his shoulder and drew him
towards her, breathing beer and vomit into his face.

Although it was three
or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided
lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature
in each.

We are not content with
negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission.

Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling
away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame.

Through the midday
hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the
telescreen.

But there were other days when
they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show
of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never
finished--when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about
grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over
definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels--threats, even, to appeal to
higher authority.

Winston
did not look at him again, but the tormented, skull-like face was as
vivid in his mind as though it had been straight in front of his eyes.

Concealed lamps
flooded it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound
which he supposed had something to do with the air supply.

'Who denounced you?' said Winston.

A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had
passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage.

He had been appointed to a
sub-committee of a sub-committee which had sprouted from one of the
innumerable committees dealing with minor difficulties that arose in the
compilation of the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.

It is intolerable to us that an erroneous
thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless
it may be.

You will do what is required of
you.'

A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure who seemed to
glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured
face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway.

She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.

Not brainy, of
course, but keen.

If you have ever
cherished any dreams of violent insurrection, you must abandon them.

One, a
woman, was consigned to 'Room 101', and, Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel
and turn a different colour when she heard the words.

There was a dull aching in his belly.

It needed also a sort of
athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate
use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical
errors.

When we navigate the
ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to
assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions
upon millions of kilometres away.

So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have
political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary.

His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston.

Will you please remember, throughout our conversation,
that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you at any moment and to
whatever degree I choose?

You also believe
that the nature of reality is self-evident.

Almost invariably
these words--GOODTHINK, MINIPAX, PROLEFEED, SEXCRIME, JOYCAMP, INGSOC,
BELLYFEEL, THINKPOL, and countless others--were words of two or three
syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable
and the last.

The movement of the armies was a diagram: a
black arrow tearing vertically southward, and a white arrow horizontally
eastward, across the tail of the first.

The shock of the sight had driven all
caution out of him.

O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb
hidden and the four fingers extended.

Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of
pity for his ruined body overcame him.

Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he
saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear,
cutting their communications by land and sea.

He quailed.

You have a vivid mental picture of the vertebrae snapping apart
and the spinal fluid dripping out of them.

What can you do, thought Winston,
against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your
arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

When we navigate the
ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to
assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions
upon millions of kilometres away.

She did not actually try to shake him off, but
walked at just such a speed as to prevent his keeping abreast of her.

The secret
accumulation of knowledge--a gradual spread of enlightenment--ultimately
a proletarian rebellion--the overthrow of the Party.

You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived
in, but not its underlying motives.

Sometimes they
burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.'

And then--perhaps
it was not happening, perhaps it was only a memory taking on the semblance
of sound--a voice was singing:


'Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me----'


The tears welled up in his eyes.

She said
something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.

His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston.

His mind shrivelled as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments with
which O'Brien would demolish him.

In
the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming
his heresy, exulting in it.

Newspeak was designed not to extend
but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly
assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

The man in
the white coat bent down and looked closely into Winston's eyes, felt his
pulse, laid an ear against his chest, tapped here and there, then he
nodded to O'Brien.

Often he would lie from one meal to the next almost
without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries
in which it was too much trouble to open his eyes.

'Do you remember,' he went on, 'writing in your diary, "Freedom is the
freedom to say that two plus two make four"?'

At a guess he
would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from
some malignant disease.

The German Nazis and the
Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never
had the courage to recognize their own motives.

Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of
pity for his ruined body overcame him.

History had already been rewritten,
but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there,
imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of
Oldspeak it was possible to read them.

How
many years had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness?

The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a
sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head.

They'll know my record, won't they?

In the old days he had
hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity.

A shrill trumpet-call had pierced the air.