George Orwell's "1984" Part 1

And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered.

And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems

Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon--not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words--which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes.

A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology o

As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of 'The Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its st

I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!'

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes.

In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name, though he daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the Two Minutes Hate.

He knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed.

He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front--it made no difference.

As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way.

Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past.

At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.

He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor.

And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies.

A colourless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face, was standing outside.

With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved.

Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly mattered.

A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police.

It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant.

On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class.

Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off.

Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar.

It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched.

Very occasionally some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever.

And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies.

His voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of proles.

As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern.

It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it.

In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers.

There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother.

Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.

The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve.

Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.

Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.

When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'.

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate.

The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable.

He had even started humming to an improvised tune

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the----

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water.

He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach.

They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of Big Brother.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat.

You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

After confessing to these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important.

But even then he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate.

Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty.

Truisms are true, hold on to that!

Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom.

At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age.

It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched.

It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.

There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there.

Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies.

Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?

At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age.

And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.

To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.

He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much.

A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him.

She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it.

The face of Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that of O'Brien.

From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

There would be mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe.

It's fascinating.'

But I dare say you'd find it a little bit cumbersome.'

There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets.

As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices.

He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's physique.

Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them ('What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades?

An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.

The telescreen had changed over to strident military music.

There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally.

Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire.

Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.

His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable.

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion.

It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.

And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies.

It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step.

There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so.

The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression.

It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.

The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction.

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan.

For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix.]--was startlingly different from any other object in sight.

Chapter 5

In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward.

How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal--tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree--existed and even predominated.

Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fashioned pen, WHAT he had been writing--and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter.

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story.

But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him.

She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.

It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes.

Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years?

All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.

It was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory.

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering--a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting--three hundred million people all with the same face.

He was a few paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation.

But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair.

To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves.

There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken.

They ran:

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify

times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue

times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside.

Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands.

He was holding the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the ...

And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies.

And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses?

But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.

The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage.

And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar.

Only on a small table in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends--lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like--which looked as though they might include something interesting.

You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.

The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil.

He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love.

It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous.

It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably.

They used to kind of embed it in the glass.

There were occasions when Big Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed.

But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down.

It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched.

They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get.

But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.

On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.

He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State.

He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years.

All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.

They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit.

There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which--one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how--was the sweat of some person not present at the moment.

Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-ag...

All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

It was perhaps not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Centre.

Just once Winston caught a phrase--'complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism'--jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid.

It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck.

A trumpet call, clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party.

It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.

With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.

For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly.

Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it.

All three had written long, abject articles in 'The Times', analysing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.

Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon--not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words--which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes.

It was like a single equation with two unknowns.

But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control.

In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair.

Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind.

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.

And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.

He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats.

All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.

They were all impregnable, as the Party intended that they should be.

From the table at Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of the room.

Her voice seemed to stick into his brain like jagged splinters of glass.

There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so.

In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence.

Parasites--that was another of them.

When he spoke it was with a tolerant philosophical air, as though the beer had mellowed him.

Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.

And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels--with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient--nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin.

Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

All three had written long, abject articles in 'The Times', analysing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.

Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible.

She must have followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived.

Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.

Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere.

Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

Last night to the flicks.

Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms.

There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which--one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how--was the sweat of some person not present at the moment.

It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.

Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it.

He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.

The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the fifties.

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

From the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.

All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.

The great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years.

He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed--and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indee...

He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front--it made no difference.

It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.

The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in a different way.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the ...

And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses?

He wrote:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror.

The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically.

Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so.

The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.

They ran:

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify

times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue

times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside.

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last.

He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.

It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.

At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of 'The Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.

Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him.

Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six.

Perhaps after all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running.

It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.

All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.

Or again, 'The Times' of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan.

The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again.

He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action.

Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose.

He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party.

The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.

He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.

The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party.

Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating her brother in every movement.

Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station.

Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC.

This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked.

The great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years.

One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them.

Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.

Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.

It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.

And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.

He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party.

Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth.

This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.

Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere.

But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.

This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.

He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.

When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship.

It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that by a voluntary act.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the ...

And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which 'The Times' did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak--'child hero' was the phrase generally used--had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.

At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally.

'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, 'I thought I heard you come in.

In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight.

From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's physique.

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise.

Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.

Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.

And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week.

He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed--and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indee...

All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.

It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion.

Or again, 'The Times' of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan.

A certain Comrade Withers, a prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.

You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.

He picked up his pen again and wrote:

She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt.

In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.

All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.

Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds.

It was always at night--the arrests invariably happened at night.

The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible.

The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds.

The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which gave off an unclean but friendly smell.

Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable.

A certain Comrade Withers, a prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.

He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State.

Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil.

Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered.

On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother.

Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fashioned pen, WHAT he had been writing--and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter.

Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.

For example, it appeared from 'The Times' of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa.

It was only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance.

At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally.

Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances.

Even from the coin the eyes pursued you.

Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station.

And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother.

When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness.

And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER?

But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen.

There was no knowing how much of this legend was true and how much invented.

'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it.

Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?

Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie.

A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape.