TEXT: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
  GEORGE ORWELL
  PART I
  I
  It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his 
  chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass 
  doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering 
  along with him.
  The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, 
  too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more 
  than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and 
  ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the 
  best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight 
  hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, 
  and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, 
  resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the 
  enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the 
  eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
  Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with 
  the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which 
  formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank 
  somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was 
  called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. 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. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin 
  roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
  Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. 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. The blackmoustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. 
  There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the 
  caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another 
  poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the 
  single word INGSOC. 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. It was the police patrol, 
  snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police 
  mattered.
  Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron 
  and  the  overfulfilment  of  the  Ninth  Three-Year  Plan.  The  telescreen  received and  transmitted 
  simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be 
  picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque 
  commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether 
  you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police 
  plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched 
  everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You 
  had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you 
  made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
  Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a 
  back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and 
  white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, 
  chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to 
  squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite 
  like this. 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? 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 it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood 
  except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
  The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak[1] -- was startlingly different from any other 
  object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, 
  terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. 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. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of 
  similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from 
  the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of 
  the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of 
  Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of 
  Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And 
  the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: 
  Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
  The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. 
  Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. 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. Even the streets leading 
  up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed 
  truncheons.
  Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism 
  which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny 
  kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and 
  he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had 
  got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid 
  with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. 
  Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of 
  medicine.
  Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric 
  acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with 
  a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began 
  to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES 
  and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was 
  more successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the 
  left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, 
  quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.
  For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of 
  being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the 
  longer wall, opposite the window. 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. 
  By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the 
  telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his 
  present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had 
  suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
  But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a 
  peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had 
  not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was 
  much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy 
  quarter  of  the  town  (just  what  quarter  he  did  not  now  remember)  and  had  been  stricken 
  immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into 
  ordinary shops (“dealing on the free market”, it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, 
  because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to 
  get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had 
  slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting 
  it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing 
  
  written in it, it was a compromising possession.
  The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. 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. Winston fitted a nib 
  into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. 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. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. 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 dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a 
  second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small 
  clumsy letters he wrote:
  April 4th, 1984.
  He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he 
  did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was 
  fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but 
  it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
  For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, 
  for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then 
  fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of 
  what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of 
  its nature impossible. 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.
  For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to 
  strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of 
  expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. 
  For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that 
  anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was 
  to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, 
  literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his 
  varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always 
  became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness 
  of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a 
  slight booziness caused by the gin.
  Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting 
  down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital 
  letters and finally even its full stops:
  April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of  
  refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. 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-aged woman might have been a jewess 
  sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with 
  fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the  
  woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself,  
  all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets 
  off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went  
  all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the 
  air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause 
  from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a 
  fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in 
  front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to 
  her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never--
  Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what 
  had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. 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, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided 
  
  to come home and begin the diary today.
  It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to 
  happen.
  It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they 
  were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite 
  the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one 
  of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came 
  unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did 
  not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he 
  had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner -- she had some mechanical job on 
  one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick 
  hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior 
  Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to 
  bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing 
  her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and 
  community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He 
  disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and 
  above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of 
  slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the 
  impression of being more dangerous than most. 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 idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought 
  Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which 
  had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
  The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of 
  some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary 
  hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner 
  Party member approaching.  O’Brien was a large,  burly man with a thick  neck  and a coarse, 
  humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He 
  had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming -- in some 
  indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such 
  terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had 
  seen O’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not 
  solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s urbane manner and his prize-
  fighter’s physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief -- or perhaps not even a 
  belief, merely a hope -- that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face 
  suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his 
  face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you 
  could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never 
  made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment 
  O’Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to 
  stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same 
  row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next 
  cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
  The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running 
  without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth 
  on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.
  As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the 
  screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave 
  a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. 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. The programmes 
  of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the 
  principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent 
  crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out 
  of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps 
  somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it 
  was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
  Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a 
  painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a 
  small goatee beard -- a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile 
  silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled 
  
  the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual 
  venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party -- an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a 
  child should have 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 
  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, 
  indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. 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. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots formed the 
  background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.
  Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were 
  breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-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. He was an object of hatred 
  more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these 
  Powers it was generally at peace with the other. 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. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day 
  never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the 
  Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of 
  conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to 
  be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which 
  Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a 
  title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through 
  vague rumours.  Neither the Brotherhood nor  the book was a subject that any ordinary Party 
  member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
  In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their 
  places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice 
  that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth 
  was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was 
  sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were 
  standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 
  “Swine! Swine! Swine!” and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at 
  the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid 
  moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against 
  the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to 
  act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any 
  pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to 
  torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people 
  like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And 
  yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one 
  object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. 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. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the 
  people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments 
  his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an 
  invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite 
  of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like 
  some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of 
  civilization.
  It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. 
  Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in 
  a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-
  haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to 
  death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like 
  
  Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than 
  before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. 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.
  The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep’s bleat, and 
  for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. 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. 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. 
  Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. 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. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead 
  the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
  WAR IS PEACE
  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
  But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though 
  the impact that it had made on everyone’s eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little 
  sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a 
  tremulous murmur that sounded like “My Saviour!” she extended her arms towards the screen. 
  Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.
  At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of “B-
  B!....B-B!....” -- over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first “B” and the 
  second-a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one 
  seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as 
  thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming 
  emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was 
  an act of  self-hypnosis,  a deliberate  drowning of  consciousness by means  of rhythmic  noise. 
  Winston’s entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the 
  general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of “B-B!....B-B!” always filled him with horror. Of 
  course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to 
  control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a 
  space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have 
  betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened -- if, indeed, it 
  did happen.
  Momentarily he caught O’Brien’s eye. O’Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles 
  and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a 
  fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew -- yes, 
  he  knew! -- that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had 
  passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into 
  the other through their eyes. “I am with you,” O’Brien seemed to be saying to him. “I know 
  precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don’t 
  worry, I am on your side!” And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O’Brien’s face was as 
  inscrutable as everybody else’s.
  That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such incidents never 
  had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides 
  himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were 
  true after all -- perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless 
  arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. 
  Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that 
  might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory 
  walls -- once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had looked as 
  though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined 
  everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O’Brien again. The idea of following 
  up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous 
  even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an 
  equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the 
  locked loneliness in which one had to live.
  
  Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was rising from his 
  stomach.
  His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had 
  also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward 
  handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat 
  capitals--
  DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
  DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
  DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
  DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
  DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
  over and over again, filling half a page.
  He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those 
  particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment 
  he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
  He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN 
  WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went 
  on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would 
  get him just the same. He had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never set 
  pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. 
  Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a 
  while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
  It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of 
  sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces 
  round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply 
  disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of 
  everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then 
  forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vapourized was the usual word.
  For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy 
  scrawl:
  theyll shoot me i don’t care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont  
  care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care  
  down with big brother--
  He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next 
  moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door.
  Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away 
  after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. 
  His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He 
  got up and moved heavily towards the door.
  II
  As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he had left the diary open on the 
  table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible 
  across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his 
  panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.
  He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a warm wave of relief flowed through 
  him. A colourless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face, was standing outside.
  “Oh, comrade,” she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, “I thought I heard you come in. 
  Do you think you could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It’s got blocked up and--”
  It was Mrs. Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor. (“Mrs.” was a word somewhat 
  discountenanced by the Party -- you were supposed to call everyone “comrade” -- but with some 
  women one used it instinctively.) She was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had 
  the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her down the 
  passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansions were old flats, 
  built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings 
  and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating 
  
  system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of 
  economy.  Repairs,  except  what  you  could  do  for  yourself,  had  to  be  sanctioned  by  remote 
  committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
  “Of course it’s only because Tom isn’t home,” said Mrs. Parsons vaguely.
  The Parsons’ flat was bigger than Winston’s, and dingy in a different way. Everything had a 
  battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal. 
  Games impedimenta -- hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned 
  inside out -- lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared 
  exercise-books. On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a full-
  sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole 
  building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which -- one knew this at the first sniff, 
  though it was hard to say how -- was the sweat of some person not present at the moment. In 
  another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the 
  military music which was still issuing from the telescreen.
  “It’s the children,” said Mrs. Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance at the door. “They 
  haven’t been out today. And of course--”
  She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly 
  to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage. Winston knelt down 
  and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, 
  which was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs. Parsons looked on helplessly.
  “Of course if Tom was home he’d put it right in a moment,” she said. “He loves anything like 
  that. He’s ever so good with his hands, Tom is.”
  Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active 
  man  of  paralysing  stupidity,  a  mass  of  imbecile  enthusiasms  --  one  of  those  completely 
  unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of 
  the Party depended. 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. 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.  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. 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.
  “Have you got a spanner?” said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the angle-joint.
  “A spanner,” said Mrs. Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate. “I don’t know, I’m sure. 
  Perhaps the children--”
  There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the children charged into 
  the living-room. Mrs. Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the water and disgustedly 
  removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he 
  could in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.
  “Up with your hands!” yelled a savage voice.
  A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was 
  menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made 
  the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey 
  shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above 
  his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy’s demeanour, that it was not altogether 
  a game.
  “You’re a traitor!” yelled the boy. “You’re a thought-criminal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot 
  you, I’ll vaporize you, I’ll send you to the salt mines!”
  Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting “Traitor!” and “Thought-criminal!” the 
  little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the 
  gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating 
  ferocity in the boy’s eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being 
  very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston 
  thought.
  Mrs. Parsons’ eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again. In the 
  better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of 
  her face.
  “They do get so noisy,” she said. “They’re disappointed because they couldn’t go to see the 
  hanging, that’s what it is. I’m too busy to take them. and Tom won’t be back from work in time.”
  “Why can’t we go and see the hanging?” roared the boy in his huge voice.
  
  “Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!” chanted the little girl, still capering 
  round.
  Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening, 
  Winston remembered. This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children 
  always clamoured to be taken to see it. He took his leave of Mrs. Parsons and made for the door. 
  But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an 
  agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun round 
  just in time to see Mrs. Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a 
  catapult.
  “Goldstein!” bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what most struck Winston was 
  the look of helpless fright on the woman’s greyish face.
  Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the table again, still 
  rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was 
  reading out, with a sort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress 
  which had just been anchored between lceland and the Faroe lslands.
  With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another 
  year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. 
  Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such 
  organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet 
  this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the 
  contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the 
  banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother 
  -- it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the 
  enemies of the  State,  against  foreigners,  traitors,  saboteurs,  thought-criminals.  It was almost 
  normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. 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.
  The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked up his pen half-heartedly, wondering 
  whether he could find something more to write in the diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O’Brien 
  again.
  Years ago -- how long was it? Seven years it must be -- he had dreamed that he was walking 
  through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: ‘We shall 
  meet in the place where there is no darkness.’ It was said very quietly, almost casually -- a 
  statement, not a command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the 
  time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him. It was only later and by 
  degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He could not now remember whether it was 
  before or after having the dream that he had seen O’Brien for the first time, nor could he remember 
  when he had first identified the voice as O’Brien’s. But at any rate the identification existed. It was 
  O’Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.
  Winston had never been able to feel sure -- even after this morning’s flash of the eyes it was 
  still impossible to be sure whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter 
  greatly.  There  was  a  link  of  understanding  between  them,  more  important  than  affection  or 
  partisanship. “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,” he had said. Winston did not 
  know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.
  The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call, clear and beautiful, floated into the 
  stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly:
  “Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar 
  front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action 
  we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the 
  newsflash--”
  Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the 
  annihilation  of  a  Eurasian  army,  with  stupendous  figures  of  killed  and  prisoners,  came  the 
  announcement  that,  as  from  next  week,  the  chocolate  ration  would  be  reduced  from  thirty 
  grammes to twenty.
  Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a deflated feeling. The telescreen -- 
  perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate -- crashed into 
  “Oceania, ’tis for thee”. You were supposed to stand to attention. However, in his present position 
  he was invisible.
  “Oceania, ’tis for thee” gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to the window, 
  keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far away a rocket 
  bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling 
  on London at present.
  
  Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully 
  appeared  and  vanished.  Ingsoc.  The  sacred  principles  of  Ingsoc.  Newspeak,  doublethink,  the 
  mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in 
  a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future 
  was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? 
  And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer, 
  the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
  WAR IS PEACE
  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
  He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the 
  same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from 
  the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on 
  posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette packet -- everywhere. Always the eyes watching you 
  and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the 
  bath or in bed -- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your 
  skull.
  The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth, with the light no 
  longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart quailed before the 
  enormous pyramidal shape. It was too strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs 
  would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for 
  the past -- for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but 
  annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police 
  would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. 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?
  The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by 
  fourteen-thirty.
  Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely 
  ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure 
  way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that 
  you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:
  To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are 
  different from one another and do not live alone -- to a time when truth exists and 
  what is done cannot be undone:
  From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big 
  Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings!
  He was already dead, he reflected. 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. The consequences 
  of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:
  Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
  Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as 
  possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might 
  betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-
  haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction 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. He went to the bathroom and 
  carefully scrubbed the  ink  away with the  gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like 
  sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
  He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at 
  least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends 
  was too obvious. 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.
  III
  
  Winston was dreaming of his mother.
  He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. 
  She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. His 
  father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston 
  remembered especially the very thin soles of his father’s shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of 
  them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the fifties.
  At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his 
  young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby, always 
  silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some 
  subterranean place -- the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave -- but it was a place 
  which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking 
  ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still 
  see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the green waters which in 
  another moment must hide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and air while they were 
  being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and 
  they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in their 
  faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, 
  and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things.
  He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the 
  lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those dreams which, 
  while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in 
  which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. 
  The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, 
  had been tragic  and sorrowful  in a way that was no longer possible.  Tragedy,  he perceived, 
  belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when 
  the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s 
  memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to 
  love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a 
  conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen 
  today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex 
  sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him 
  through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.
  Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting 
  rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his 
  dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking 
  thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track 
  wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the 
  field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in 
  dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, 
  slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.
  The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single 
  movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and 
  smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in 
  that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its 
  grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as 
  though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a 
  single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. 
  Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips.
  The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note 
  for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. Winston wrenched 
  his body out of bed -- naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons 
  annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600 -- and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were 
  lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he was 
  doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It 
  emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and 
  taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose 
  ulcer had started itching.
  “Thirty to forty group!” yapped a piercing female voice. “Thirty to forty group! Take your 
  places, please. Thirties to forties!”
  Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish 
  woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.
  “Arms bending and stretching!” she rapped out. “Take your time by me.  One, two, three, 
  
  four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three four! One 
  two, three, four!...”
  The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston’s mind the impression made 
  by  his  dream,  and  the  rhythmic  movements  of  the  exercise  restored  it  somewhat.  As  he 
  mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which 
  was considered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into 
  the  dim  period  of  his  early  childhood.  It  was  extraordinarily  difficult.  Beyond  the  late  fifties 
  everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of 
  your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not 
  happened,  you  remembered  the  detail  of  incidents  without  being  able  to  recapture  their 
  atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had 
  been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. 
  Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or 
  Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.
  Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it 
  was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of 
  his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was 
  the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but 
  he did remember his father’s hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some 
  place deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which 
  finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His mother, in 
  her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister -- or 
  perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his 
  sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had 
  realized to be a Tube station.
  There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people, packed tightly 
  together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother and father 
  found themselves a place on the floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting 
  side by side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back 
  from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He reeked of gin. 
  It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears 
  welling from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some 
  grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible 
  thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. It 
  also seemed to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old man loved -- a little 
  granddaughter, perhaps -- had been killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:
  “We didn’t ought to ’ave trusted ’em. I said so, Ma, didn’t I? That’s what comes of trusting 
  ’em. I said so all along. We didn’t ought to ’ave trusted the buggers.”
  But which buggers they didn’t ought to have trusted Winston could not now remember.
  Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not 
  always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street 
  fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the 
  whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly 
  impossible,  since  no  written  record,  and  no  spoken  word,  ever  made  mention  of  any  other 
  alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was 
  at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever 
  admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as 
  Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in 
  alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to 
  possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners 
  had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war 
  with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any 
  past or future agreement with him was impossible.
  The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders 
  painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise 
  that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) -- the frightening thing was that it might all be 
  true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened 
  -- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
  The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, 
  knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where 
  did  that  knowledge  exist?  Only  in  his  own  consciousness,  which  in  any  case  must  soon  be 
  annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same 
  tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party 
  
  slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though 
  of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to 
  everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your 
  own memory. “Reality control”, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’
  “Stand easy!” barked the instructress, a little more genially.
  Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away 
  into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete 
  truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which 
  cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against 
  logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and 
  that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then 
  to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget 
  it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate 
  subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of 
  the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved 
  the use of doublethink.
  The instructress had called them to attention again. “And now let’s see which of us can 
  touch our toes!” she said enthusiastically. “Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! 
  One-two!...”
  Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his 
  buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant quality went out of 
  his  meditations.  The  past,  he  reflected,  had  not  merely  been  altered,  it  had  been  actually 
  destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record 
  outside your own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big 
  Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but it was impossible to be 
  certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the 
  Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time 
  until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties,  when the 
  capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming 
  motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There was no knowing how much of this legend was 
  true and how much invented. Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself had 
  come into existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was 
  possible that in its Oldspeak form -- “English Socialism”, that is to say -- it had been current earlier. 
  Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was 
  not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented 
  aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. 
  There was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable 
  documentary proof of the falsification of an historical fact. And on that occasion--
  “Smith!” screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. “6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend 
  lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. 
  Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.”
  A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston’s body. His face remained completely 
  inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you 
  away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and -- one could not 
  say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and tucked the first joint of 
  her fingers under her toes.
  “There, comrades! That’s how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I’m thirty-nine 
  and I’ve had four children. Now look.” She bent over again. “You see my knees aren’t bent. You can 
  all do it if you want to,” she added as she straightened herself up. “Anyone under forty-five is 
  perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don’t all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, 
  but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the 
  Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with. Now try again. That’s better, comrade, 
  that’s  much better,” she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in 
  touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
  IV
  With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could 
  prevent him from uttering when his day’s work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, 
  blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped 
  together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the 
  
  right-hand side of his desk.
  In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small 
  pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, 
  within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for 
  the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the 
  building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were 
  nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even 
  when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the 
  nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air 
  to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
  Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message 
  of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon -- not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of 
  Newspeak words -- which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:
  times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
  times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue
  times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
  times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub 
  antefiling
  With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate 
  and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though 
  the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.
  Winston dialled “back numbers” on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of 
  the Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he 
  had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought 
  necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from the 
  Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had 
  predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly 
  be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its 
  offensive  in  South  India  and left  North  Africa  alone.  It was therefore  necessary  to rewrite  a 
  paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually 
  happened. Or again, the Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of 
  the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also 
  the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual 
  output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s 
  job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third 
  message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short 
  a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a “categorical pledge” were 
  the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as 
  Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the 
  end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning 
  that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
  As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten 
  corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, 
  with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious,  he crumpled up the original 
  message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be 
  devoured by the flames.
  What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know 
  in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be 
  necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number 
  would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its 
  stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, 
  periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind 
  of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. 
  Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every 
  prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor 
  was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, 
  ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed 
  exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, 
  to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far 
  larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to 
  track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been 
  superseded and were due for destruction. A number of the Times which might, because of changes 
  
  in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen 
  times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. 
  Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any 
  admission  that  any  alteration  had  been  made.  Even  the  written  instructions  which  Winston 
  received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or 
  implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, 
  misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.
  But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even 
  forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material 
  that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of 
  connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original 
  version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up 
  out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots 
  for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, 
  however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for 
  the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer 
  the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at 
  all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was 
  that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the 
  population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. 
  Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become 
  uncertain.
  Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other side a small, 
  precise-looking,  dark-chinned  man  named  Tillotson  was  working  steadily  away,  with  a  folded 
  newspaper on his knee and his mouth very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He had the 
  air of trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen. He looked up, 
  and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Winston’s direction.
  Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he was employed on. People in 
  the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long, windowless hall, with its 
  double  row  of  cubicles  and  its  endless  rustle  of  papers  and  hum  of  voices  murmuring  into 
  speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name, though 
  he daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the Two Minutes Hate. He 
  knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at 
  tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were 
  therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own 
  husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, 
  dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with 
  rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions -- definitive texts, they were called 
  -- of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to 
  be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-
  section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, 
  below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were the 
  huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped 
  studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its 
  producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the 
  armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which 
  were due for recall. There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, 
  and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite 
  anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the 
  lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one 
  falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.
  And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of 
  Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with 
  newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels -- with every conceivable kind 
  of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a 
  biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had 
  not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a 
  lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments 
  dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced 
  rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-
  cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by 
  mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a 
  whole sub-section -- Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak -- engaged in producing the lowest kind of 
  
  pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those 
  who worked on it, was permitted to look at.
  Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while Winston was working, but they 
  were simple matters, and he had disposed of them before the Two Minutes Hate interrupted him. 
  When the Hate was over he returned to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, 
  pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and settled down to his main job of the 
  morning.
  Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but 
  included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in 
  the depths of a mathematical problem -- delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to 
  guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party 
  wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing. On occasion he had even been entrusted 
  with the rectification of the  Times leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He 
  unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:
  times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub 
  antefiling
  In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:
  The reporting of Big Brother’s Order for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is 
  extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and 
  submit your draft to higher authority before filing.
  Winston read through the offending article. Big Brother’s Order for the Day, it seemed, had 
  been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an organization known as FFCC, which supplied 
  cigarettes and other comforts to the sailors in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a 
  prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special mention and awarded a 
  decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.
  Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no reasons given. One could 
  assume that Withers and his associates were now in disgrace, but there had been no report of the 
  matter in the Press or on the telescreen. That was to be expected, since it was unusual for political 
  offenders to be put on trial or even publicly denounced. The great purges involving thousands of 
  people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their 
  crimes and were afterwards executed, were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in 
  a couple of years. More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply 
  disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what had 
  happened to them. In some cases they might not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally 
  known to Winston, not counting his parents, had disappeared at one time or another.
  Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip. In the cubicle across the way Comrade 
  Tillotson was still crouching secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his head for a moment: again 
  the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged on the same 
  job as himself. It was perfectly possible. So tricky a piece of work would never be entrusted to a 
  single person: on the other hand, to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an 
  act of fabrication was taking place. Very likely as many as a dozen people were now working away 
  on rival versions of what Big Brother had actually said. And presently some master brain in the 
  Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex 
  processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the 
  permanent records and become truth.
  Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it was for corruption or 
  incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordinate. Perhaps 
  Withers or someone close to him had been suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps -- what 
  was likeliest of all -- the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were a 
  necessary  part  of  the  mechanics  of  government.  The  only  real  clue  lay  in  the  words  “refs 
  unpersons”, which indicated that Withers was already dead. You could not invariably assume this to 
  be the case when people were arrested. Sometimes they were released and allowed to remain at 
  liberty for as much as a year or two years before being executed. Very occasionally some person 
  whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly reappearance at some public trial 
  where he would implicate hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever. 
  Withers, however, was already an  unperson. He did not exist: he had never existed. Winston 
  decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse the tendency of Big Brother’s speech. It was 
  better to make it deal with something totally unconnected with its original subject.
  He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but 
  that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-
  
  production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. What was needed 
  was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready made as it were, the image 
  of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. There were 
  occasions when Big Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-
  and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed. Today 
  he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade 
  Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into 
  existence.
  Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating 
  in Big Brother’s familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of 
  asking questions and then promptly answering them (“What lessons do we learn from this fact, 
  comrades? The lesson -- which is also one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc -- that,” etc., 
  etc.), easy to imitate.
  At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a sub-machine gun, 
  and a model helicopter. At six -- a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules -- he had joined the 
  Spies, at nine he had been a troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought 
  Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies. At 
  seventeen he had been a district organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nine teen he had 
  designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first 
  trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twenty-three he had perished in action. 
  Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had 
  weighted his body with his machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches 
  and all -- an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible to contemplate without feelings of envy. 
  Big Brother added a few remarks on the purity and single-mindedness of Comrade Ogilvy’s life. He 
  was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, 
  and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible 
  with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty. He had no subjects of conversation except the 
  principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-
  down of spies, saboteurs, thoughtcriminals, and traitors generally.
  Winston debated with himself whether to award Comrade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous 
  Merit: in the end he decided against it because of the unnecessary cross-referencing that it would 
  entail.
  Once again he glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle. Something seemed to tell him 
  with certainty that Tillotson was busy on the same job as himself. There was no way of knowing 
  whose job would finally be adopted, but he felt a profound conviction that it would be his own. 
  Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck him as curious that you could 
  create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now 
  existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as 
  authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
  V
  In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The 
  room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of stew 
  came pouring forth, with a sour 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.
  “Just the man I was looking for,” said a voice at Winston’s back.
  He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps 
  “friend” was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but 
  there  were  some  comrades  whose  society  was  pleasanter  than  that  of  others.  Syme  was  a 
  philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now 
  engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature, 
  smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, 
  which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.
  “I wanted to ask you whether you’d got any razor blades,” he said.
  “Not one!” said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. “I’ve tried all over the place. They don’t 
  exist any longer.”
  Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones which he was 
  hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past. At any given moment there was 
  some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, 
  
  sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You 
  could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the “free” market.
  “I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks,” he added untruthfully.
  The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and faced Syme again. Each 
  of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.
  “Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?” said Syme.
  “I was working,” said Winston indifferently. “I shall see it on the flicks, I suppose.”
  “A very inadequate substitute,” said Syme.
  His mocking eyes roved over Winston’s face. “I know you,” the eyes seemed to say, “I see 
  through you. I know very well why you didn’t go to see those prisoners hanged.” In an intellectual 
  way, Syme was venomously orthodox. 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. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from 
  such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was 
  authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large 
  dark eyes.
  “It was a good hanging,” said Syme reminiscently. “I think it spoils it when they tie their feet 
  together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and 
  blue -- a quite bright blue. That’s the detail that appeals to me.”
  “Nex’, please!” yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.
  Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. 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.
  “There’s a table over there, under that telescreen,” said Syme. “Let’s pick up a gin on the 
  way.”
  The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They 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. Winston 
  took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff 
  down. When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He 
  began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of 
  spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat. Neither of them spoke again till 
  they had emptied their pannikins. 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.
  “How is the Dictionary getting on?” said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.
  “Slowly,” said Syme. “I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.”
  He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin 
  aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across 
  the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.
  “The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,” he said. “We’re getting the language into its 
  final shape -- the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished 
  with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is 
  inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of 
  them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain 
  a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.”
  He  bit  hungrily  into  his  bread  and  swallowed  a  couple  of  mouthfuls,  then  continued 
  speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had 
  lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.
  “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs 
  and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the 
  synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is 
  simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for 
  instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do 
  just as well -- better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a 
  stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 
  ‘excellent’  and  ‘splendid’  and  all  the  rest  of  them?  ‘Plusgood’  covers  the  meaning,  or 
  ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in 
  the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and 
  badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of 
  that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,” he added as an afterthought.
  A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. 
  Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
  
  “You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,” he said almost sadly. “Even when 
  you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in the 
  Times occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to 
  stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the 
  beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world 
  whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?”
  Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself 
  to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
  “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the 
  end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to 
  express it. 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. Already, in the 
  Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you 
  and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little 
  smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely 
  a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. 
  The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is 
  Newspeak,” he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. “Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, 
  that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could 
  understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
  “Except--” began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
  It had been on the tip of his tongue to say “Except the proles,” but he checked himself, not 
  feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined 
  what he was about to say.
  “The proles are not human beings,” he said carelessly. “By 2050 -- earlier, probably -- all real 
  knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been 
  destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron -- they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not 
  merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of 
  what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. 
  How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been 
  abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we 
  understand  it  now.  Orthodoxy  means  not  thinking  --  not  needing  to  think.  Orthodoxy  is 
  unconsciousness.”
  One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. 
  He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. 
  One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.
  Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a little sideways in his chair to drink 
  his  mug  of coffee.  At the  table  on his left the  man with the  strident voice  was still  talking 
  remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her 
  back to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he 
  said. From time to time Winston caught some such remark as “I think you’re so right, I do so agree 
  with you”, uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped 
  for an instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man by sight, though he knew 
  no more about him than that he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He was a man 
  of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, 
  and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to 
  Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of 
  sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once 
  Winston caught a phrase -- “complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism” -- jerked out very 
  rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a 
  noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was 
  saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might 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. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it 
  was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up 
  and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of 
  dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming 
  out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in 
  unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
  Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was tracing patterns 
  in the puddle of stew. The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of 
  the surrounding din.
  
  “There is a word in Newspeak,” said Syme, “I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak, to 
  quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. 
  Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.”
  Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought it with a kind of 
  sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully 
  capable of denouncing him as a thought-criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There was 
  something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a 
  sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He 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. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that 
  would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Café, 
  haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting 
  the Chestnut Tree Café, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the 
  Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it was said, 
  had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme’s fate was not difficult to foresee. 
  And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston’s, 
  secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought police. So would anybody else, for 
  that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
  Syme looked up. “Here comes Parsons,” he said.
  Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, “that bloody fool”. Parsons, Winston’s 
  fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room -- a tubby, middle-
  sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at 
  neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a 
  little boy grown large, so much so that although he was wearing the regulation overalls, it was 
  almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red 
  neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves 
  rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when a community 
  hike or any other physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a 
  cheery “Hullo, hullo!” and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of 
  moisture  stood out all  over his pink  face.  His powers of sweating were extraordinary.  At the 
  Community Centre you could always tell when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of 
  the bat handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there was a long column of words, 
  and was studying it with an ink-pencil between his fingers.
  “Look at him working away in the lunch hour,” said Parsons, nudging Winston. “Keenness, 
  eh? What’s that you’ve got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect. Smith, old 
  boy, I’ll tell you why I’m chasing you. It’s that sub you forgot to give me.”
  “Which sub is that?” said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About a quarter of one’s 
  salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult 
  to keep track of them.
  “For Hate Week. You know -- the house-by-house fund. I’m treasurer for our block. We’re 
  making an all-out effort -- going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won’t be my fault if old 
  Victory Mansions doesn’t have the biggest outfit of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you 
  promised me.”
  Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a 
  small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.
  “By the way, old boy,” he said. “I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with his 
  catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told him I’d take the catapult 
  away if he does it again.”
  “I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,” said Winston.
  “Ah, well -- what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn’t it? Mischievous little beggars 
  they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of 
  course. D’you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out 
  Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the 
  whole afternoon following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the 
  woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.”
  “What  did  they  do  that  for?”  said  Winston,  somewhat  taken  aback.  Parsons  went  on 
  triumphantly:
  “My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent -- might have been dropped by 
  parachute, for instance. But here’s the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the 
  first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes -- said she’d never seen anyone 
  wearing shoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of 
  seven, eh?”
  
  “What happened to the man?” said Winston.
  “Ah, that I couldn’t say, of course. But I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if--” Parsons made 
  the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
  “Good,” said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.
  “Of course we can’t afford to take chances,” agreed Winston dutifully.
  “What I mean to say, there is a war on,” said Parsons.
  As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above their 
  heads.  However,  it  was  not  the  proclamation  of  a  military  victory  this  time,  but  merely  an 
  announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.
  “Comrades!” cried an eager youthful voice. “Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for 
  you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of 
  consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the 
  past year. 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. Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs--”
  The phrase “our new, happy life” recurred several times. It had been a favourite of late with 
  the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of 
  gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that 
  they were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was 
  already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it was seldom 
  possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully 
  horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. For the 
  moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out 
  of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for 
  raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had 
  been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that 
  they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it 
  easily,  with  the  stupidity  of an  animal.  The  eyeless creature  at the  other  table  swallowed it 
  fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who 
  should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too -- in some more 
  complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a 
  memory?
  The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year 
  there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, 
  more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, 
  and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly 
  upwards. 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. He 
  meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always 
  tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from 
  the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that 
  you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, 
  grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew 
  and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that 
  you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of 
  anything greatly different. 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. And though, of course, it grew worse as one’s body aged, 
  was it not a sign that this was  not the natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the 
  discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts 
  that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with 
  its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of 
  ancestral memory that things had once been different?
  He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been 
  ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting 
  at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes 
  darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look 
  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. 
  Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-
  
  favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, 
  growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces 
  with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.
  The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call and gave way 
  to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took his pipe 
  out of his mouth.
  “The Ministry of Plenty’s certainly done a good job this year,” he said with a knowing shake 
  of his head. “By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose you haven’t got any razor blades you can let me 
  have?”
  “Not one,” said Winston. “I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks myself.”
  “Ah, well -- just thought I’d ask you, old boy.”
  “Sorry,” said Winston.
  The  quacking  voice  from  the  next  table,  temporarily  silenced  during  the  Ministry’s 
  announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly found 
  himself thinking of Mrs. Parsons, with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face. Within 
  two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs. Parsons would be 
  vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O’Brien would be vaporized. 
  Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice 
  would never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine 
  corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl from 
  the Fiction Department -- she would never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that he knew 
  instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for 
  survival, it was not easy to say.
  At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk. The girl at the next 
  table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair. She was looking 
  at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away 
  again.
  The sweat started out on Winston’s backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It 
  was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching 
  him? Why did she keep following him about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had 
  already been at the table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday, at any 
  rate,  during the Two Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no 
  apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and make sure 
  whether he was shouting loudly enough.
  His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member of the Thought 
  Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. He did not 
  know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was 
  possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your 
  thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest 
  thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to 
  yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. 
  In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was 
  announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: 
  facecrime, it was called.
  The girl had turned her back on him again. 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. His cigarette 
  had gone out, and he laid it carefully on the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after 
  work, if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the next table was a spy of the 
  Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, 
  but a cigarette end must not be wasted. Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away 
  in his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.
  “Did I ever tell you, old boy,” he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, “about the time 
  when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman’s skirt because they saw her 
  wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of 
  matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard! That’s a first-
  rate training they give them in the Spies nowadays -- better than in my day, even. What d’you 
  think’s the latest thing they’ve served them out with? Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! 
  My little girl brought one home the other night -- tried it out on our sitting-room door, and reckoned 
  she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the hole. Of course it’s only a toy, mind you. Still, 
  gives ’em the right idea, eh?”
  At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. It was the signal to return to work. 
  All three men sprang to their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco 
  fell out of Winston’s cigarette.
  
  VI
  Winston was writing in his diary:
  It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near 
  one of the big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a 
  street lamp that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very thick. It 
  was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the 
  bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the  
  street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I--
  For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against 
  them,  trying  to  squeeze  out  the  vision  that  kept  recurring.  He  had  an almost  overwhelming 
  temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the 
  wall, to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window -- to do any violent or noisy or 
  painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him.
  Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension 
  inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of a man whom he 
  had passed in the street a few weeks back; a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged 
  thirty-five to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief-case. They were a few metres apart when the left 
  side of the man’s face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened again just as they 
  were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, 
  but obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for. And what 
  was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all 
  was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see.
  He drew his breath and went on writing:
  I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement 
  kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very 
  low. She--
  His teeth were set on edge. He would have liked to spit. Simultaneously with the woman in 
  the basement kitchen he thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married -- had been married, 
  at any rate: probably he still was married, so far as he knew his wife was not dead. He seemed 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. Only the proles used scent. In his mind the smell 
  of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.
  When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years or thereabouts. 
  Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, of course, but it was one of those rules that you could 
  occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be 
  caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour camp: not more, if you had 
  committed no other offence. And it was easy enough, provided that you could avoid being caught in 
  the act. The poorer quarters swarmed with women who were ready to sell themselves. Some could 
  even be purchased for a bottle of gin, which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly the Party 
  was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether 
  suppressed. 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.  The  unforgivable  crime  was 
  promiscuity between Party members. But -- though this was one of the crimes that the accused in 
  the great purges invariably confessed to -- it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually 
  happening.
  The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties 
  which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from 
  the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. 
  All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the 
  purpose, and -- though the principle was never clearly stated -- permission was always refused if 
  the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only 
  recognized  purpose  of  marriage  was  to  beget  children  for  the  service  of  the  Party.  Sexual 
  intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This 
  again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member 
  
  from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which 
  advocated  complete  celibacy  for  both  sexes.  All  children  were  to  be  begotten  by  artificial 
  insemination  (artsem,  it was called in Newspeak) and brought  up in  public  institutions.  This, 
  Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general 
  ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to 
  distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. 
  And as far as the women were concerned, the Party’s efforts were largely successful.
  He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten -- nearly eleven years since they had 
  parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For days at a time he was capable of 
  forgetting that he had ever been married. They had only been together for about fifteen months. 
  The Party did not permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases where there were no 
  children.
  Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements. 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. Very early in her married life he had decided -- though perhaps it was 
  only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people -- that she had without exception 
  the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. 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. “The human sound-track” he nicknamed her in his 
  own mind. Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing -- sex.
  As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like 
  embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping 
  him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her 
  strength. The rigidlty of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with 
  shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, 
  and, after a while, horrible. But even then he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed 
  that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused this. They 
  must, she said, produce a child if they could. So the performance continued to happen, once a week 
  quite regulariy, whenever it was not impossible. She even used to remind him of it in the morning, 
  as something which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten. She had two 
  names for it. One was “making a baby”, and the other was “our duty to the Party” (yes, she had 
  actually used that phrase). Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the 
  appointed day came round. But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up 
  trying, and soon afterwards they parted.
  Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and wrote:
  She  threw  herself  down  on  the  bed,  and  at  once,  without  any  kind  of 
  preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt. I--
  He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs and cheap scent 
  in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was 
  mixed up with the thought of Katharine’s white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the 
  Party. Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of 
  these filthy scuffles at intervals of years? But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. 
  The women of the Party were all alike. Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By 
  careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at 
  school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial 
  music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them. His reason told him that there must be 
  exceptions, but his heart did not believe it. They were all impregnable, as the Party intended that 
  they should be. And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of 
  virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was 
  rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, 
  would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.
  But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He wrote:
  I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light--
  After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp had seemed very bright. For the first 
  time he could see the woman properly. He had taken a step towards her and then halted, full of lust 
  and terror. He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly 
  possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out: for that matter they might be waiting 
  outside the door at this moment. If he went away without even doing what he had come here to 
  do--!
  
  It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed. What he had suddenly seen in the 
  lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked 
  as though it might crack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the 
  truly dreadful  detail  was that her mouth had fallen a little  open,  revealing nothing except a 
  cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all.
  He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:
  When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at 
  least. But I went ahead and did it just the same.
  He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had written it down at last, but it made 
  no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice 
  was as strong as ever.
  VII
  If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
  If  there  was  hope,  it  must lie  in  the  proles,  because  only  there  in  those  swarming 
  disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party 
  ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any 
  enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary 
  Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever 
  assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion 
  of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow 
  become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise 
  up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to 
  pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet--!
  He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous 
  shout of hundreds of voices women’s voices -- had burst from a side-street a little way ahead. It was 
  a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud “Oh-o-o-o-oh!” that went humming on like 
  the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It’s started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are 
  breaking loose at last! 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. But at this moment the general despair broke down into 
  a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. 
  They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now 
  the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, 
  were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, 
  accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. 
  There was a fresh outburst of yells. 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. For a 
  moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. 
  And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few 
  hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
  He wrote:
  Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have 
  rebelled they cannot become conscious.
  That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks. 
  The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they 
  had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had 
  been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), 
  children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles 
  of  doublethink,  the  Party  taught  that  the  proles  were  natural  inferiors  who  must  be  kept  in 
  subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known 
  about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, 
  their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the 
  plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of 
  ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they 
  
  passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they 
  were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. 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. To keep them in control was not difficult. 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 of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles 
  should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which 
  could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or 
  shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent 
  led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific 
  grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles did not 
  even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There 
  was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, 
  prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the 
  proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow 
  their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity 
  went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been 
  permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. 
  As the Party slogan put it: “Proles and animals are free.”
  Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. It had begun itching 
  again. The thing you invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the 
  Revolution had really been like. He took out of the drawer a copy of a children’s history textbook 
  which he had borrowed from Mrs. Parsons, and began copying a passage into the diary:
  In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was not the 
  beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly 
  anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had 
  no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you 
  had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips if 
  they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water. But 
  in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses 
  that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them.  
  These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, 
  like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in a 
  long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a 
  stovepipe, which was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no 
  one else was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and 
  everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the 
  factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into 
  prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary 
  person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap 
  and address him as “Sir”. The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and--
  But he knew the rest of the catalogue. 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. There was also something 
  called the jus primae noctis, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It 
  was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his 
  factories.
  How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being 
  was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was 
  the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were 
  intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly 
  characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its 
  dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies 
  that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. 
  Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging 
  through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine 
  tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal 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. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people 
  shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of 
  cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million 
  dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs. Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy 
  hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.
  He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the telescreens bruised your 
  ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better 
  recreations -- that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, 
  more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be 
  proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were 
  literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party 
  claimed  that  the  infant  mortality  rate  was  now  only  160  per  thousand,  whereas  before  the 
  Revolution it had been 300 -- and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It 
  might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted 
  without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law as 
  the jus primae noctis, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.
  Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became 
  truth. Just once in his life he had possessed -- after the event: that was what counted -- concrete, 
  unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as 
  thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been -- at any rate, it was at about the time when he and 
  Katharine had parted. But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.
  The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in which the 
  original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, 
  except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter-
  revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had 
  simply disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at which 
  they made confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, 
  Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested. 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. 
  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. 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. All three had written long, abject articles in the  Times, analysing the 
  reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.
  Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut 
  Tree Café. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of 
  the corner of his eye. They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the 
  last great figures left over from the heroic days of the Party. The glamour of the underground 
  struggle and the civil war still faintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already at that time 
  facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had 
  known that of Big Brother.  But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables,  doomed with 
  absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of 
  the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the 
  grave.
  There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise even to be seen in 
  the neighbourhood of such people. They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin flavoured 
  with cloves which was the speciality of the café. Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance 
  had  most  impressed  Winston.  Rutherford  had  once  been  a  famous  caricaturist,  whose  brutal 
  cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now, at long 
  intervals, his cartoons were appearing in the  Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier 
  manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always they were a rehashing of the ancient 
  themes -- slum tenements, starving children, street battles, capitalists in top hats -- even on the 
  barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to their top hats an endless, hopeless effort to get 
  back into the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his face pouched and 
  seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one time he must have been immensely strong; now his great 
  body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up 
  before one’s eyes, like a mountain crumbling.
  It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember how he had come to be in 
  the café at such a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny music  was trickling from the 
  telescreens. The three men sat in their corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, 
  
  the waiter brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the 
  pieces set out but no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something happened 
  to the telescreens. The tune that they were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed 
  too. There came into it -- but it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, 
  jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was 
  singing:
  Under the spreading chestnut tree
  I sold you and you sold me:
  There lie they, and here lie we
  Under the spreading chestnut tree.
  The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford’s ruinous face, 
  he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward 
  shudder, and yet not knowing at what he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken 
  noses.
  A  little  later  all  three  were  re-arrested.  It  appeared  that  they  had  engaged  in  fresh 
  conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At their second trial they confessed to all their 
  old crimes over again, with a whole string of new ones. They were executed, and their fate was 
  recorded in the Party histories, a warning to posterity. About five years after this, in 1973, Winston 
  was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk 
  when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and 
  then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn 
  out of the Times of about ten years earlier -- the top half of the page, so that it included the date -- 
  and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York. Prominent in the 
  middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, in any 
  case their names were in the caption at the bottom.
  The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that date they had 
  been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere 
  in Siberia, and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had 
  betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston’s memory because it chanced to 
  be midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in countless other places as well. There 
  was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.
  Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston had not imagined that 
  the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were 
  accused of. But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil 
  bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow 
  the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance 
  made known.
  He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph was, and what it 
  meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been 
  upside-down from the point of view of the telescreen.
  He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as to get as far away 
  from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your 
  breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your heart, 
  and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He let what he judged to be ten minutes 
  go by, tormented all the while by the fear that some accident -- a sudden draught blowing across 
  his desk, for instance -- would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the 
  photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers. Within another minute, 
  perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes.
  That was ten -- eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept that photograph. It 
  was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even 
  now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party’s 
  hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer 
  had once existed?
  But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes, the photograph 
  might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no 
  longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead 
  men had betrayed their country. Since then there had been other changes -- two, three, he could 
  not remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the 
  original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but 
  changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never 
  clearly  understood  why the  huge  imposture  was  undertaken.  The  immediate  advantages  of 
  
  falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again 
  and wrote:
  I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
  He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. 
  Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to 
  believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be 
  alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not 
  greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.
  He picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which 
  formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force 
  were pressing down upon you -- something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your 
  brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your 
  senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to 
  believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their 
  position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external 
  reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what 
  was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. 
  For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or 
  that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if 
  the mind itself is controllable what then?
  But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The face of O’Brien, not 
  called up by any obvious association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with more certainty than 
  before, that O’Brien was on his side. He was writing the diary for O’Brien -- to O’Brien: it was like an 
  interminable letter which no one would ever read, but which was addressed to a particular person 
  and took its colour from that fact.
  The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most 
  essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the 
  ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which 
  he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were 
  wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are 
  true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, 
  objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. 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. If that is granted, 
  all else follows.
  VIII
  From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee -- real coffee, not 
  Victory Coffee -- came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two 
  seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to 
  cut off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
  He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. 
  This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: 
  a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was 
  carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in 
  bed. 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. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, 
  it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he came out of the 
  Ministry the balminess of the April air had tempted him. 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. On impulse he 
  had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then 
  east, then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which 
  direction he was going.
  “If there is hope,” he had written in the diary, “it lies in the proles.” The words kept coming 
  back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the 
  
  vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He 
  was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave 
  straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were 
  puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. 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. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in 
  the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed 
  him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded across 
  thelr  aprons  were  talking  outside  a  doorway.  Winston  caught  scraps  of  conversation  as  he 
  approached.
  “‘Yes,’ I says to ’er, ‘that’s all very well,’ I says. ‘But if you’d of been in my place you’d of 
  done the same as what I done. It’s easy to criticize,’ I says, ‘but you ain’t got the same problems as 
  what I got.’”
  “Ah,” said the other, “that’s jest it. That’s jest where it is.”
  The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile silence as he went 
  past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the 
  passing of some unfamiliar animal. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a 
  street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business 
  there. The patrols might stop you if you happened to run into them. ‘May I see your papers, 
  comrade? What are you doing here? What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home?’ -- 
  and so on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual route: but 
  it was enough to draw attention to you if the Thought Police heard about it.
  Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warning from all sides. 
  People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little 
  ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and 
  leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like black suit, 
  who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.
  “Steamer!” he yelled. “Look out, guv’nor! Bang over’ead! Lay down quick!”
  “Steamer” was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs. 
  Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave you 
  a warning of this kind. They seemed to possess some kind of instinct which told them several 
  seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled faster 
  than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar that seemed to make 
  the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found 
  that he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window.
  He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres up the street. A 
  black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was 
  already forming around the ruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of 
  him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was 
  a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely 
  whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.
  He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street 
  to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and 
  the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly 
  twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented (“pubs”, they called them) were 
  choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came 
  forth a smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting house-front three 
  men were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper 
  which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even before he was near enough to make out 
  the expression on their faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was 
  obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them 
  when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation. For a moment 
  they seemed almost on the point of blows.
  “Can’t you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven ain’t won 
  for over fourteen months!”
  “Yes, it ’as, then!”
  “No, it ’as not! Back ’ome I got the ’ole lot of ’em for over two years wrote down on a piece 
  of paper. I takes ’em down reg’lar as the clock. An’ I tell you, no number ending in seven--”
  “Yes, a seven ’as won! I could pretty near tell you the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it 
  ended in. It were in February -- second week in February.”
  
  “February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white. An’ I tell you, no number--”
  “Oh, pack it in!” said the third man.
  They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone thirty metres. 
  They were  still  arguing,  with vivid,  passionate  faces.  The Lottery,  with its  weekly pay-out  of 
  enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was 
  probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the 
  only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual 
  stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed 
  capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men 
  who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to 
  do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware 
  (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums 
  were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In the absence of 
  any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to 
  arrange.
  But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in 
  words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the 
  pavement that it became an act of faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a 
  feeling that he had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was a main thoroughfare not 
  far away. From somewhere ahead there came a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn 
  and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers 
  were selling tired-looking vegetables. At this moment Winston remembered where he was. The alley 
  led out into the main street, and down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the junk-shop 
  where he had bought the blank book which was now his diary. And in a small stationer’s shop not 
  far away he had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.
  He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side of the alley there was 
  a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were merely coated with 
  dust. A very old man, bent but active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a 
  prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching, it occurred to him that 
  the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had already been middle-aged when the Revolution 
  happened. He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world 
  of capitalism. In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been formed 
  before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the 
  fifties and sixties, and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual 
  surrender. If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the 
  early part of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenly the passage from the history book that 
  he had copied into his diary came back into Winston’s mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of him. 
  He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him. He 
  would say to him: “Tell me about your life when you were a boy. What was it like in those days? 
  Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?”
  Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he descended the steps and 
  crossed the narrow street. It was madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule against 
  talking to proles and frequenting their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. 
  If the patrols appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it was not likely that they would 
  believe him. He pushed open the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in the face. 
  As he entered the din of voices dropped to about half its volume. Behind his back he could feel 
  everyone eyeing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at the other end of the room 
  interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed was 
  standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed 
  young man with enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round with glasses in their hands, 
  were watching the scene.
  “I  arst  you  civil  enough,  didn’t  I?”  said  the  old  man,  straightening  his  shoulders 
  pugnaciously. “You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ’ole bleeding boozer?”
  “And what in hell’s name is a pint?” said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his 
  fingers on the counter.
  “Ark at ’im! Calls ’isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ’alf of a 
  quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon. ’Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.”
  “Never heard of ’em,” said the barman shortly. “Litre and half litre -- that’s all we serve. 
  There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.”
  “I likes a pint,” persisted the old man. “You could ’a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We 
  didn’t ’ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.”
  “When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,” said the barman, with a 
  glance at the other customers.
  
  There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused by Winston’s entry seemed to 
  disappear. The old man’s whitestubbled face had flushed pink. He turned away, muttering to 
  himself, and bumped into Winston. Winston caught him gently by the arm.
  “May I offer you a drink?” he said.
  “You’re a gent,” said the other, straightening his shoulders again. He appeared not to have 
  noticed Winston’s blue overalls. “Pint!” he added aggressively to the barman. “Pint of wallop.”
  The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thick glasses which he had rinsed 
  in a bucket under the counter. Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs. The proles were 
  supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of 
  darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about lottery tickets. 
  Winston’s presence was forgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under the window where he 
  and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but at any 
  rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.
  “’E could ’a drawed me off a pint,” grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass. 
  “A ’alf litre ain’t enough. It don’t satisfy. And a ’ole litre’s too much. It starts my bladder running. Let 
  alone the price.”
  “You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,” said Winston tentatively.
  The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the 
  door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room that he expected the changes to have 
  occurred.
  “The beer was better,” he said finally. “And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer -- 
  wallop we used to call it -- was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.”
  “Which war was that?” said Winston.
  “It’s all wars,” said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened 
  again. “’Ere’s wishing you the very best of ’ealth!”
  In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam’s apple made a surprisingly rapid up-and-down 
  movement, and the beer vanished. Winston went to the bar and came back with two more half-
  litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full litre.
  “You are very much older than I am,” said Winston. “You must have been a grown man 
  before I was born. You can remember what it was like in the old days, before the Revolution. People 
  of my age don’t really know anything about those times. We can only read about them in books, 
  and what it says in the books may not be true. I should like your opinion on that. The history books 
  say that life before the Revolution was completely different from what it is now. There was the most 
  terrible oppression, injustice, poverty worse than anything we can imagine. Here in London, the 
  great mass of the people never had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them hadn’t even 
  boots on their feet. They worked twelve hours a day, they left school at nine, they slept ten in a 
  room. And at the same time there were a very few people, only a few thousands -- the capitalists, 
  they were called -- who were rich and powerful. They owned everything that there was to own. They 
  lived in great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor-cars and four-horse 
  carriages, they drank champagne, they wore top hats--”
  The old man brightened suddenly.
  “Top ’ats!” he said. “Funny you should mention ’em. The same thing come into my ’ead only 
  yesterday, I dono why. I was jest thinking, I ain’t seen a top ’at in years. Gorn right out, they ’ave. 
  The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law’s funeral. And that was -- well, I couldn’t give you 
  the date, but it must’a been fifty years ago. Of course it was only ’ired for the occasion, you 
  understand.”
  “It isn’t very important about the top hats,” said Winston patiently. “The point is, these 
  capitalists -- they and a few lawyers and priests and so forth who lived on them -- were the lords of 
  the earth. Everything existed for their benefit. You -- the ordinary people, the workers -- were their 
  slaves. They could do what they liked with you. They could ship you off to Canada like cattle. They 
  could sleep with your daughters if they chose. They could order you to be flogged with something 
  called a cat-o’-nine tails. You had to take your cap off when you passed them. Every capitalist went 
  about with a gang of lackeys who--”
  The old man brightened again.
  “Lackeys!” he said. “Now there’s a word I ain’t ’eard since ever so long. Lackeys! That 
  reg’lar takes me back, that does. I recollect oh, donkey’s years ago -- I used to sometimes go to 
  ’Yde Park of a Sunday afternoon to ’ear the blokes making speeches. Salvation Army, Roman 
  Catholics, Jews, Indians -- all sorts there was. And there was one bloke -- well, I couldn’t give you ’is 
  name, but a real powerful speaker ’e was. ’E didn’t ’alf give it ’em! ‘Lackeys!’ ’e says, ‘lackeys of 
  the bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class!’ Parasites -- that was another of them. And ’yenas -- ’e 
  definitely called ’em ’yenas. Of course ’e was referring to the Labour Party, you understand.”
  Winston had the feeling that they were talking at cross-purposes.
  “What I really wanted to know was this,” he said. “Do you feel that you have more freedom 
  
  now than you had in those days? Are you treated more like a human being? In the old days, the rich 
  people, the people at the top--”
  “The ’Ouse of Lords,” put in the old man reminiscently.
  “The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is, were these people able to treat you as 
  an inferior, simply because they were rich and you were poor? Is it a fact, for instance, that you had 
  to call them ‘Sir’ and take off your cap when you passed them?”
  The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off about a quarter of his beer before 
  answering.
  “Yes,” he said. “They liked you to touch your cap to ’em. It showed respect, like. I didn’t 
  agree with it, myself, but I done it often enough. Had to, as you might say.”
  “And was it usual -- I’m only quoting what I’ve read in history books -- was it usual for these 
  people and their servants to push you off the pavement into the gutter?”
  “One of ’em pushed me once,” said the old man. “I recollect it as if it was yesterday. It was 
  Boat Race night -- terribly rowdy they used to get on Boat Race night -- and I bumps into a young 
  bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue. Quite a gent, ’e was -- dress shirt, top ’at, black overcoat. ’E was kind 
  of zig-zagging across the pavement, and I bumps into ’im accidental-like. ’E says, ‘Why can’t you 
  look where you’re going?’ ’e says. I say, ‘Ju think you’ve bought the bleeding pavement?’ ’E says, 
  ‘I’ll twist your bloody ’ead off if you get fresh with me.’ I says, ‘You’re drunk. I’ll give you in charge 
  in ’alf a minute,’ I says. An’ if you’ll believe me, ’e puts ’is ’and on my chest and gives me a shove 
  as pretty near sent me under the wheels of a bus. Well, I was young in them days, and I was going 
  to ’ave fetched ’im one, only--”
  A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man’s memory was nothing but a 
  rubbish-heap of details. One could question him all day without getting any real information. The 
  party histories might still be true, after a fashion: they might even be completely true. He made a 
  last attempt.
  “Perhaps I have not made myself clear,” he said. “What I’m trying to say is this. You have 
  been alive a very long time; you lived half your life before the Revolution. In 1925, for instance, you 
  were already grown up. Would you say from what you can remember, that life in 1925 was better 
  than it is now, or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to live then or now?”
  The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He finished up his beer, more slowly 
  than before. When he spoke it was with a tolerant philosophical air, as though the beer had 
  mellowed him.
  “I know what you expect me to say,” he said. “You expect me to say as I’d sooner be young 
  again. Most people’d say they’d sooner be young, if you arst’ ’em. You got your ’ealth and strength 
  when you’re young. When you get to my time of life you ain’t never well. I suffer something wicked 
  from my feet, and my bladder’s jest terrible. Six and seven times a night it ’as me out of bed. On 
  the other ’and, there’s great advantages in being a old man. You ain’t got the same worries. No 
  truck with women, and that’s a great thing. I ain’t ’ad a woman for near on thirty year, if you’d 
  credit it. Nor wanted to, what’s more.”
  Winston sat back against the window-sill. It was no use going on. He was about to buy some 
  more beer when the old man suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal at the 
  side of the room. The extra half-litre was already working on him. Winston sat for a minute or two 
  gazing at his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out into the street again. 
  Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, “Was life better before 
  the Revolution than it is now?” would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it 
  was unanswerable  even now,  since  the  few scattered survivors  from the  ancient  world  were 
  incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel 
  with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the 
  swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the 
  range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And 
  when memory failed and written records were falsified -- when that happened, the claim of the 
  Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not 
  exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
  At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted and looked up. He was in a 
  narrow street, with a few dark little shops, interspersed among dwelling-houses. Immediately above 
  his head there hung three discoloured metal balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He 
  seemed to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside the junk-shop where he had bought 
  the diary.
  A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficiently rash act to buy the book in the 
  beginning, and he had sworn never to come near the place again. And yet the instant that he 
  allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had brought him back here of their own accord. It was 
  precisely against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped to guard himself by opening the 
  diary. At the same time he noticed that although it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still 
  
  open.  With the feeling that he  would be less conspicuous inside  than hanging about on the 
  pavement, he stepped through the doorway. If questioned, he could plausibly say that he was trying 
  to buy razor blades.
  The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which gave off an unclean but friendly 
  smell. He was a man of perhaps sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes 
  distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy and still 
  black. His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact that he was wearing an aged jacket 
  of black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary 
  man, or perhaps a musician. His voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent less debased than 
  that of the majority of proles.
  “I recognized you on the pavement,”  he said immediately. “You’re the gentleman that 
  bought the young lady’s keepsake album. That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was. Cream-laid, it 
  used to be called. There’s been no paper like that made for -- oh, I dare say fifty years.” He peered 
  at Winston over the top of his spectacles. “Is there anything special I can do for you? Or did you just 
  want to look round?”
  “I was passing,” said Winston vaguely. “I just looked in. I don’t want anything in particular.”
  “It’s just as well,” said the other, “because I don’t suppose I could have satisfied you.” He 
  made an apologetic gesture with his softpalmed hand. “You see how it is; an empty shop, you might 
  say. Between you and me, the antique trade’s just about finished. No demand any longer, and no 
  stock either. Furniture, china, glass it’s all been broken up by degrees. And of course the metal 
  stuff’s mostly been melted down. I haven’t seen a brass candlestick in years.”
  The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, but there was almost nothing in it 
  of the slightest value. The floorspace was very restricted, because all round the walls were stacked 
  innumerable dusty picture-frames. In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out 
  chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even pretend to be in going 
  order, and other miscellaneous rubbish. Only on a small table in the corner was there a litter of 
  odds and ends -- lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like -- which looked as though they 
  might include something interesting. As Winston wandered towards the table his eye was caught by 
  a round, smooth thing that gleamed softly in the lamplight, and he picked it up.
  It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making almost a 
  hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the 
  glass. 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.
  “What is it?” said Winston, fascinated.
  “That’s coral, that is,” said the old man. “It must have come from the Indian Ocean. They 
  used to kind of embed it in the glass. That wasn’t made less than a hundred years ago. More, by the 
  look of it.”
  “It’s a beautiful thing,” said Winston.
  “It is a beautiful thing,” said the other appreciatively. “But there’s not many that’d say so 
  nowadays.” He coughed. “Now, if it so happened that you wanted to buy it, that’d cost you four 
  dollars. I can remember when a thing like that would have fetched eight pounds, and eight pounds 
  was -- well, I can’t work it out, but it was a lot of money. But who cares about genuine antiques 
  nowadays even the few that’s left?”
  Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid the coveted thing into his pocket. 
  What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of 
  belonging to an age quite different from the present one. The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any 
  glass that he had ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, 
  though he could guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in 
  his  pocket,  but  fortunately  it  did  not  make  much  of  a  bulge.  It  was  a  queer  thing,  even  a 
  compromising thing, for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter 
  anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. The old man had grown noticeably more cheerful 
  after receiving the four dollars. Winston realized that he would have accepted three or even two.
  “There’s another room upstairs that you might care to take a look at,” he said. “There’s not 
  much in it. Just a few pieces. We’ll do with a light if we’re going upstairs.”
  He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowly up the steep and worn stairs 
  and along a tiny passage, into a room which did not give on the street but looked out on a cobbled 
  yard and a forest of chimney-pots. Winston noticed that the furniture was still arranged as though 
  the room were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpet on the floor, a picture or two on the 
  walls, and a deep, slatternly arm-chair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a 
  twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupying nearly a 
  quarter of the room, was an enormous bed with the mattress still on it.
  “We lived here till my wife died,” said the old man half apologetically. “I’m selling the 
  furniture off by little and little. Now that’s a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it would be if you 
  
  could get the bugs out of it. But I dare say you’d find it a little bit cumbersome.”
  He was holdlng the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in the warm dim 
  light the place looked curiously inviting. The thought flitted through Winston’s mind that it would 
  probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. 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. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it 
  felt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and 
  a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, 
  no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.
  “There’s no telescreen!” he could not help murmuring.
  “Ah,” said the old man, “I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed 
  to feel the need of it, somehow. Now that’s a nice gateleg table in the corner there. Though of 
  course you’d have to put new hinges on it if you wanted to use the flaps.”
  There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had already gravitated towards 
  it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with 
  the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there 
  existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960. The old man, still carrying 
  the lamp, was standing in front of a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on the other side of the 
  fireplace, opposite the bed.
  “Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all--” he began delicately.
  Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steel engraving of an oval building 
  with rectangular windows,  and a small  tower in front. There was a railing running round the 
  building, and at the rear end there was what appeared to be a statue. Winston gazed at it for some 
  moments. It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember the statue.
  “The frame’s fixed to the wall,” said the old man, “but I could unscrew it for you, I dare say.”
  “I know that building,” said Winston finally. “It’s a ruin now. It’s in the middle of the street 
  outside the Palace of Justice.”
  “That’s right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in -- oh, many years ago. It was a 
  church at one time, St. Clement’s Danes, its name was.” He smiled apologetically, as though 
  conscious of saying something slightly ridiculous, and added: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of 
  St. Clement’s!”
  “What’s that?” said Winston.
  “Oh -- ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.’ That was a rhyme we had when I 
  was a little boy. How it goes on I don’t remember, but I do know it ended up, ‘Here comes a candle 
  to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.’ It was a kind of a dance. They 
  held out their arms for you to pass under, and when they came to ‘Here comes a chopper to chop 
  off your head’ they brought their arms down and caught you. It was just names of churches. All the 
  London churches were in it -- all the principal ones, that is.”
  Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It was always difficult to 
  determine the age of a London building. Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in 
  appearance, was automatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, while anything 
  that was obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim period called the Middle Ages. The 
  centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any value. One could not learn 
  history from architecture  any more  than one  could  learn it  from books.  Statues,  inscriptions, 
  memorial stones, the names of streets -- anything that might throw light upon the past had been 
  systematically altered.
  “I never knew it had been a church,” he said.
  “There’s a lot of them left, really,” said the old man, “though they’ve been put to other uses. 
  Now, how did that rhyme go? Ah! I’ve got it!
  ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s,
  You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s--’
  there, now, that’s as far as I can get. A farthing, that was a small copper coin, looked something like 
  a cent.”
  “Where was St. Martin’s?” said Winston.
  “St. Martin’s? That’s still standing. It’s in Victory Square, alongside the picture gallery. A 
  building with a kind of a triangular porch and pillars in front, and a big flight of steps.”
  Winston knew the place well. It was a museum used for propaganda displays of various 
  kinds -- scale models of rocket bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux illustrating enemy 
  atrocities, and the like.
  “St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields it used to be called,” supplemented the old man, “though I don’t 
  recollect any fields anywhere in those parts.”
  
  Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an even more incongruous possession 
  than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry home, unless it were taken out of its frame. But 
  he lingered for some minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not 
  Weeks -- as one might have gathered from the inscription over the shop-front -- but Charrington. Mr. 
  Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years. 
  Throughout that time he had been intending to alter the name over the window, but had never 
  quite got to the point of doing it. All the while that they were talking the half-remembered rhyme 
  kept running through Winston’s head. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clement’s, You owe 
  me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you 
  had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or 
  other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them 
  pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.
  He got away from Mr. Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as not to let the old 
  man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out of the door. He had already made up his 
  mind that after a suitable interval -- a month, say -- he would take the risk of visiting the shop 
  again. It was perhaps not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Centre. The serious piece 
  of folly had been to come back here in the first place, after buying the diary and without knowing 
  whether the proprietor of the shop could be trusted. However--!
  Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy further scraps of beautiful 
  rubbish. He would buy the engraving of St. Clement’s Danes, take it out of its frame, and carry it 
  home concealed under the jacket of his overalls. He would drag the rest of that poem out of Mr. 
  Charrington’s memory. Even the lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed momentarily 
  through his mind again. For perhaps five seconds exaltation made him careless, and he stepped out 
  on to the pavement without so much as a preliminary glance through the window. He had even 
  started humming to an improvised tune--
  Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s,
  You owe me three farthings, say the--
  Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water. A figure in blue overalls 
  was coming down the pavement, not ten metres away. It was the girl from the Fiction Department, 
  the girl with dark hair. The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her. She 
  looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.
  For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move. Then he turned to the right and 
  walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction. At any 
  rate, one question was settled. There was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him. 
  She must have followed him here, because it was not credible that 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. It was too great a coincidence. Whether she was 
  really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly 
  mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she had seen him go into the pub as 
  well.
  It was an effort to walk. The lump of glass in his pocket banged against his thigh at each 
  step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it away. The worst thing was the pain in his 
  belly. For a couple of minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did not reach a lavatory 
  soon. But there would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this. Then the spasm passed, leaving 
  a dull ache behind.
  The street was a blind alley. Winston halted, stood for several seconds wondering vaguely 
  what to do, then turned round and began to retrace his steps. As he turned it occurred to him that 
  the girl had only passed him three minutes ago and that by running he could probably catch up with 
  her. He could keep on her track till they were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with 
  a cobblestone.  The piece  of glass in his pocket would be  heavy enough for the job.  But he 
  abandoned the idea immediately, because even the thought of making any physical effort was 
  unbearable. He could not run, he could not strike a blow. Besides, she was young and lusty and 
  would defend herself. He thought also of hurrying to the Community Centre and staying there till 
  the place closed, so as to establish a partial alibi for the evening. But that too was impossible. A 
  deadly lassitude had taken hold of him. All he wanted was to get home quickly and then sit down 
  and be quiet.
  It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the flat. The lights would be switched off 
  at the main at twenty-three thirty. He went into the kitchen and swallowed nearly a teacupful of 
  Victory Gin. Then he went to the table in the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out of the drawer. 
  But he did not open it at once. From the telescreen a brassy female voice was squalling a patriotic 
  song. He sat staring at the marbled cover of the book, trying without success to shut the voice out 
  
  of his consciousness.
  It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself 
  before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were actually 
  suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick 
  and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the 
  biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into 
  inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-
  haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of his danger 
  he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an 
  external enemy, but always against one’s own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in 
  his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly 
  heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues 
  that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, 
  and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment 
  struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
  He  opened  the  diary.  It  was  important  to  write  something  down.  The  woman  on  the 
  telescreen had started a new song. Her voice seemed to stick into his brain like jagged splinters of 
  glass. He tried to think of O’Brien, for whom, or to whom, the diary was written, but instead he 
  began thinking of the things that would happen to him after the Thought Police took him away. It 
  would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed was what you expected. But before death 
  (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that 
  had to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken 
  bones, the smashed teeth, and bloody clots of hair.
  Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Why was it not possible 
  to cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed 
  to confess. When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you 
  would be dead. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future 
  time?
  He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of O’Brien. “We 
  shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,” O’Brien had said to him. He knew what it 
  meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which 
  one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. But with the voice 
  from the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not follow the train of thought further. He put a 
  cigarette in his mouth. Half the tobacco promptly fell out on to his tongue, a bitter dust which was 
  difficult to spit out again. The face of Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that of O’Brien. Just 
  as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of his pocket and looked at it. The face gazed 
  up  at  him,  heavy,  calm,  protecting:  but  what  kind  of  smile  was  hidden  beneath  the  dark 
  moustache? Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:
  WAR IS PEACE
  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
  PART II
  I
  It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory.
  A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor. 
  It was the girl with dark hair. Four days had gone past since the evening when he had run into her 
  outside the junk-shop. As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable 
  at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls. Probably she had crushed her hand 
  while swinging round one of the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were “roughed in”. It 
  was a common accident in the Fiction Department.
  They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost flat on her face. 
  A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her. She must have fallen right on the injured arm. Winston 
  stopped short. The girl had risen to her knees. Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against 
  which her mouth stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing 
  
  expression that looked more like fear than pain.
  A curious emotion stirred in Winston’s heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to 
  kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. 
  Already he had instinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall 
  on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.
  “You’re hurt?” he said.
  “It’s nothing. My arm. It’ll be all right in a second.”
  She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had certainly turned very pale.
  “You haven’t broken anything?”
  “No, I’m all right. It hurt for a moment, that’s all.”
  She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up. She had regained some of her 
  colour, and appeared very much better.
  “It’s nothing,” she repeated shortly. “I only gave my wrist a bit of a bang. Thanks, comrade!”
  And with that she walked on in the direction in which she had been going, as briskly as 
  though it had really been nothing. The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a 
  minute. Not to let one’s feelings appear in one’s face was a habit that had acquired the status of an 
  instinct, and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen when the thing 
  happened. Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two 
  or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand. There 
  was no question that she had done it intentionally. It was something small and flat. As he passed 
  through the lavatory door he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was 
  a scrap of paper folded into a square.
  While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to get it unfolded. 
  Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted to 
  take it into one of the water-closets and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well 
  knew. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched 
  continuously.
  He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper casually among the 
  other papers on the desk, put on his spectacles and hitched the speakwrite towards him. “five 
  minutes,” he told himself, “five minutes at the very least!” His heart bumped in his breast with 
  frightening loudness. Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was mere routine, the 
  rectification of a long list of figures, not needing close attention.
  Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political meaning. So far as 
  he could see there were two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was an agent 
  of the Thought Police, just as he had feared. He did not know why the Thought Police should choose 
  to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons. The thing that was 
  written on the paper might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some 
  description. But there was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried 
  vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police at all, but 
  from some kind of underground organization. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the 
  girl was part of it! No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very instant 
  of feeling the scrap of paper in his hand. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other, 
  more probable explanation had occurred to him. And even now, though his intellect told him that 
  the message probably meant death -- still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable 
  hope persisted, and his heart banged,  and it was with difficulty that he kept his voice from 
  trembling as he murmured his figures into the speakwrite.
  He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatic tube. Eight minutes 
  had gone by. He re-adjusted his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work 
  towards him, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large 
  unformed handwriting:
  I love you.
  For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating thing into the 
  memory hole. When he did so, although he knew very well the danger of showing too much 
  interest, he could not resist reading it once again, just to make sure that the words were really 
  there.
  For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work. What was even worse than having to 
  focus  his mind  on  a  series  of  niggling  jobs  was the  need to  conceal  his  agitation  from  the 
  telescreen. He felt as though a fire were burning in his belly. Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise-filled 
  canteen was torment. He had hoped to be alone for a little while during the lunch hour, but as bad 
  luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost 
  defeating the tinny smell of stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate 
  
  Week. He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big Brother’s head, two 
  metres wide, which was being made for the occasion by his daughter’s troop of Spies. The irritating 
  thing was that in the racket of voices Winston could hardly hear what Parsons was saying, and was 
  constantly having to ask for some fatuous remark to be repeated. Just once he caught a glimpse of 
  the girl, at a table with two other girls at the far end of the room. She appeared not to have seen 
  him, and he did not look in that direction again.
  The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch there arrived a delicate, difficult 
  piece of work which would take several hours and necessitated putting everything else aside. It 
  consisted in falsifying a series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast 
  discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a cloud. This was the kind 
  of thing that Winston was good at, and for more than two hours he succeeded in shutting the girl 
  out of his mind altogether. Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable 
  desire to be alone. Until he could be alone it was impossible to think this new development out. 
  Tonight was one of his nights at the Community Centre. He wolfed another tasteless meal in the 
  canteen, hurried off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a “discussion group”, played 
  two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and sat for half an hour through a 
  lecture entitled “Ingsoc in relation to chess”. His soul writhed with boredom, but for once he had 
  had no impulse to shirk his evening at the Centre. At the sight of the words I love you the desire to 
  stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid. It was not till 
  twenty-three hours, when he was home and in bed -- in the darkness, where you were safe even 
  from the telescreen so long as you kept silent -- that he was able to think continuously.
  It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with the girl and 
  arrange a meeting. He did not consider any longer the possibility that she might be laying some 
  kind of trap for him. He knew that it was not so, because of her unmistakable agitation when she 
  handed him the note. Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, as well she might be. Nor 
  did  the  idea  of  refusing  her  advances  even  cross  his  mind.  Only  five  nights  ago  he  had 
  contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance. He thought 
  of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined her a fool like all the 
  rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at 
  the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him! What he 
  feared more than anything else was that she would simply change her mind if he did not get in 
  touch with her quickly. But the physical difficulty of meeting was enormous. It was like trying to 
  make a move at chess when you were already mated. Whichever way you turned, the telescreen 
  faced you. Actually, all the possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to him within five 
  minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to think, he went over them one by one, as though 
  laying out a row of instruments on a table.
  Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this morning could not be repeated. If 
  she had worked in the Records Department it might have been comparatively simple, but he had 
  only a very dim idea whereabouts in the building the Fiction Departrnent lay, and he had no pretext 
  for going there. If he had known where she lived, and at what time she left work, he could have 
  contrived to meet her somewhere on her way home; but to try to follow her home was not safe, 
  because it would mean loitering about outside the Ministry, which was bound to be noticed. As for 
  sending a letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By a routine that was not even secret, 
  all letters were opened in transit. Actually, few people ever wrote letters. For the messages that it 
  was occasionally necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases, and you 
  struck out the ones that were inapplicable. In any case he did not know the girl’s name, let alone 
  her address. Finally he decided that the safest place was the canteen. If he could get her at a table 
  by herself, somewhere in the middle of the room, not too near the telescreens, and with a sufficient 
  buzz of conversation all round -- if these conditions endured for, say, thirty seconds, it might be 
  possible to exchange a few words.
  For a week after this, life was like a restless dream. On the next day she did not appear in 
  the canteen until he was leaving it, the whistle having already blown. Presumably she had been 
  changed on to a later shift. They passed each other without a glance. On the day after that she was 
  in the canteen at the usual time, but with three other girls and immediately under a telescreen. 
  Then for three dreadful days she did not appear at all. His whole mind and body seemed to be 
  afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every 
  sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could 
  not altogether escape from her image. He did not touch the diary during those days. If there was 
  any relief, it was in his work, in which he could sometimes forget himself for ten minutes at a 
  stretch. He had absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her. There was no enquiry he could 
  make. She might have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she might have been 
  transferred to the other end of Oceania: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed 
  her mind and decided to avoid him.
  
  The next day she reappeared. Her arm was out of the sling and she had a band of sticking-
  plaster round her wrist. The relief of seeing her was so great that he could not resist staring directly 
  at her for several seconds. On the following day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her. When 
  he came into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the wall, and was quite alone. It 
  was early, and the place was not very full. The queue edged forward till Winston was almost at the 
  counter, then was held up for two minutes because someone in front was complaining that he had 
  not received his tablet of saccharine. But the girl was still alone when Winston secured his tray and 
  began to make for her table. He walked casually towards her, his eyes searching for a place at some 
  table beyond her. She was perhaps three metres away from him. Another two seconds would do it. 
  Then a voice behind him called, “Smith!” He pretended not to hear. “Smith!” repeated the voice, 
  more loudly. It was no use. He turned round. A blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, 
  whom he barely knew, was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table. It was not safe to 
  refuse. After having been recognized, he could not go and sit at a table with an unattended girl. It 
  was too noticeable. He sat down with a friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston 
  had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it. The girl’s table filled 
  up a few minutes later.
  But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps she would take the hint. Next 
  day he took care to arrive early. Surely enough, she was at a table in about the same place, and 
  again alone. The person immediately ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-
  like man with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winston turned away from the counter with 
  his tray, he saw that the little man was making straight for the girl’s table. His hopes sank again. 
  There was a vacant place at a table further away, but something in the little man’s appearance 
  suggested that he would be sufficiently attentive to his own comfort to choose the emptiest table. 
  With ice at his heart Winston followed. It was no use unless he could get the girl alone. At this 
  moment there was a tremendous crash. The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had gone 
  flying, two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across the floor. He started to his feet with a 
  malignant glance at Winston, whom he evidently suspected of having tripped him up. But it was all 
  right. Five seconds later, with a thundering heart, Winston was sitting at the girl’s table.
  He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and promptly began eating. It was all-important 
  to speak at once, before anyone else came, but now a terrible fear had taken possession of him. A 
  week had gone by since she had first approached him. She would have changed her mind, she must 
  have changed her mind! It was impossible that this affair should end successfully; such things did 
  not happen in real life. He might have flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had 
  not seen Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply round the room with a tray, looking for 
  a place to sit down. In his vague way Ampleforth was attached to Winston, and would certainly sit 
  down at his table if he caught sight of him. There was perhaps a minute in which to act. Both 
  Winston and the girl were eating steadily. The stuff they were eating was a thin stew, actually a 
  soup, of haricot beans. In a low murmur Winston began speaking. Neither of them looked up; 
  steadily they spooned the watery stuff into their mouths, and between spoonfuls exchanged the few 
  necessary words in low expressionless voices.
  “What time do you leave work?”
  “Eighteen-thirty.”
  “Where can we meet?”
  “Victory Square, near the monument.”
  “It’s full of telescreens.”
  “It doesn’t matter if there’s a crowd.”
  “Any signal?”
  “No. Don’t come up to me until you see me among a lot of people. And don’t look at me. Just 
  keep somewhere near me.”
  “What time?”
  “Nineteen hours.”
  “All right.”
  Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another table. They did not speak again, 
  and, so far as it was possible for two people sitting on opposite sides of the same table, they did not 
  look at one another. The girl finished her lunch quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to 
  smoke a cigarette.
  Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time. He wandered round the base of 
  the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother’s statue gazed southward towards the 
  skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a 
  few years ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was a statue of a man on 
  horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell. At five minutes past the hour the girl 
  had still not appeared. Again the terrible fear seized upon Winston. She was not coming, she had 
  changed her mind! He walked slowly up to the north side of the square and got a sort of pale-
  
  coloured pleasure from identifying St. Martin’s Church, whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed 
  “You owe me three farthings.” Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading 
  or pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column. It was not safe to go near her until 
  some more people had accumulated. There were telescreens all round the pediment. But at this 
  moment there was a din of shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left. 
  Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square. The girl nipped nimbly round the lions 
  at the base of the monument and joined in the rush. Winston followed. As he ran, he gathered from 
  some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian prisoners was passing.
  Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of the square. Winston, at 
  normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, 
  shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward into the heart of the crowd. Soon he was within arm’s 
  length of the girl, but the way was blocked by an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous 
  woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of flesh. Winston wriggled 
  himself sideways, and with a violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them. For a 
  moment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp between the two muscular hips, 
  then he had broken through, sweating a little. He was next to the girl. They were shoulder to 
  shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them.
  A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine guns standing 
  upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in shabby 
  greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out 
  over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-
  clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons. Truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces 
  passed. Winston knew they were there but he saw them only intermittently. The girl’s shoulder, and 
  her arm right down to the elbow, were pressed against his. Her cheek was almost near enough for 
  him to feel its warmth. She had immediately taken charge of the situation, just as she had done in 
  the canteen. She began speaking in the same expressionless voice as before, with lips barely 
  moving, a mere murmur easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks.
  “Can you hear me?”
  “Yes.”
  “Can you get Sunday afternoon off?”
  “Yes.”
  “Then listen carefully. You’ll have to remember this. Go to Paddington Station--”
  With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she outlined the route that he was to 
  follow. A half-hour railway journey; turn left outside the station; two kilometres along the road: a 
  gate with the top bar missing; a path across a field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes; a 
  dead tree with moss on it. It was as though she had a map inside her head. “Can you remember all 
  that?” she murmured finally.
  “Yes.”
  “You turn left, then right, then left again. And the gate’s got no top bar.”
  “Yes. What time?”
  “About fifteen. You may have to wait. I’ll get there by another way. Are you sure you 
  remember everything?”
  “Yes.”
  “Then get away from me as quick as you can.”
  She need not have told him that. But for the moment they could not extricate themselves 
  from the crowd. The trucks were still filing post, the people still insatiably gaping. At the start there 
  had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and 
  had soon stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or 
  from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of 
  prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did 
  one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the others 
  simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round Mogol faces had given way to 
  faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby cheekbones eyes 
  looked into Winston’s, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was 
  drawing to an end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, 
  standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound 
  together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the 
  crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.
  It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were 
  clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long fingers, the 
  shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. 
  Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the same instant it occurred to him that 
  he did not know what colour the girl’s eyes were. They were probably brown, but people with dark 
  
  hair sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. 
  With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of 
  them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston 
  out of nests of hair.
  II
  Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled light and shade, stepping out into 
  pools of gold wherever the boughs parted. Under the trees to the left of him the ground was misty 
  with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss one’s skin. It was the second of May. From somewhere deeper 
  in the heart of the wood came the droning of ring doves.
  He was a bit early. There had been no difficulties about the journey, and the girl was so 
  evidently experienced that he was less frightened than he would normally have been. Presumably 
  she could be trusted to find a safe place. In general you could not assume that you were much safer 
  in the country than in London. There were no telescreens, of course, but there was always the 
  danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, 
  it was not easy to make a journey by yourself without attracting attention. For distances of less than 
  100 kilometres it was not necessary to get your passport endorsed, but sometimes there were 
  patrols hanging about the railway stations, who examined the papers of any Party member they 
  found there and asked awkward questions. However, no patrols had appeared, and on the walk from 
  the station he had made sure by cautious backward glances that he was not being followed. The 
  train was full of proles, in holiday mood because of the summery weather. The wooden-seated 
  carriage in which he travelled was filled to overflowing by a single enormous family, ranging from a 
  toothless great-grandmother to a month-old baby, going out to spend an afternoon with “in-laws” in 
  the country, and, as they freely explained to Winston, to get hold of a little blackmarket butter.
  The lane widened, and in a minute he came to the footpath she had told him of, a mere 
  cattle-track which plunged between the bushes. He had no watch, but it could not be fifteen yet. 
  The bluebells were so thick underfoot that it was impossible not to tread on them. He knelt down 
  and began picking some partly to pass the time away, but also from a vague idea that he would like 
  to have a bunch of flowers to offer to the girl when they met. He had got together a big bunch and 
  was smelling their faint sickly scent when a sound at his back froze him, the unmistakable crackle 
  of a foot on twigs. He went on picking bluebells. It was the best thing to do. It might be the girl, or 
  he might have been followed after all. To look round was to show guilt. He picked another and 
  another. A hand fell lightly on his shoulder.
  He looked up. It was the girl. She shook her head, evidently as a warning that he must keep 
  silent, then parted the bushes and quickly led the way along the narrow track into the wood. 
  Obviously she had been that way before, for she dodged the boggy bits as though by habit. Winston 
  followed, still clasping his bunch of flowers. His first feeling was relief, but as he watched the strong 
  slender body moving in front of him, with the scarlet sash that was just tight enough to bring out 
  the curve of her hips, the sense of his own inferiority was heavy upon him. Even now it seemed 
  quite likely that when she turned round and looked at him she would draw back after all. The 
  sweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves daunted him. Already on the walk from the 
  station the May sunshine had made him feel dirty and etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the 
  sooty dust of London in the pores of his skin. It occurred to him that till now she had probably never 
  seen him in broad daylight in the open. They came to the fallen tree that she had spoken of. The girl 
  hopped over and forced apart the bushes, in which there did not seem to be an opening. When 
  Winston followed her, he found that they were in a natural clearing, a tiny grassy knoll surrounded 
  by tall saplings that shut it in completely. The girl stopped and turned.
  “Here we are,” she said.
  He was facing her at several paces’ distance. As yet he did not dare move nearer to her.
  “I didn’t want to say anything in the lane,” she went on, “in case there’s a mike hidden 
  there. I don’t suppose there is, but there could be. There’s always the chance of one of those swine 
  recognizing your voice. We’re all right here.”
  He still had not the courage to approach her. “We’re all right here?” he repeated stupidly.
  “Yes. Look at the trees.” They were small ashes, which at some time had been cut down and 
  had sprouted up again into a forest of poles, none of them thicker than one’s wrist. “There’s nothing 
  big enough to hide a mike in. Besides, I’ve been here before.”
  They were only making conversation. He had managed to move closer to her now. She stood 
  before him very upright, with a smile on her face that looked faintly ironical, as though she were 
  wondering why he was so slow to act. The bluebells had cascaded on to the ground. They seemed 
  to have fallen of their own accord. He took her hand.
  
  “Would you believe,” he said, “that till this moment I didn’t know what colour your eyes 
  were?” They were brown, he noted, a rather light shade of brown, with dark lashes. “Now that 
  you’ve seen what I’m really like, can you still bear to look at me?”
  “Yes, easily.”
  “I’m thirty-nine years old. I’ve got a wife that I can’t get rid of. I’ve got varicose veins. I’ve 
  got five false teeth.”
  “I couldn’t care less,” said the girl.
  The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was in his his arms. At the beginning 
  he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. The youthful body was strained against his own, the 
  mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes! actually she had turned her face up and he was 
  kissing the wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was calling him darling, 
  precious one, loved one. He had pulled her down on to the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he 
  could do what he liked with her. But the truth was that he had no physical sensation, except that of 
  mere contact. All he felt was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening, but he had 
  no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened him, he was too much 
  used to living without women -- he did not know the reason. The girl picked herself up and pulled a 
  bluebell out of her hair. She sat against him, putting her arm round his waist.
  “Never mind, dear. There’s no hurry. We’ve got the whole afternoon. Isn’t this a splendid 
  hide-out? I found it when I got lost once on a community hike. If anyone was coming you could hear 
  them a hundred metres away.”
  “What is your name?” said Winston.
  “Julia. I know yours. It’s Winston -- Winston Smith.”
  “How did you find that out?”
  “I expect I’m better at finding things out than you are, dear. Tell me, what did you think of 
  me before that day I gave you the note?”
  He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love-offering to start 
  off by telling the worst.
  “I hated the sight of you,” he said. “I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. 
  Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you really want 
  to know, I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police.”
  The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a tribute to the excellence of her 
  disguise.
  “Not the Thought Police! You didn’t honestly think that?”
  “Well, perhaps not exactly that. But from your general appearance -- merely because you’re 
  young and fresh and healthy, you understand -- I thought that probably--”
  “You thought I was a good Party member. Pure in word and deed. Banners, processions, 
  slogans, games, community hikes all that stuff. And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance 
  I’d denounce you as a thought-criminal and get you killed off?”
  “Yes, something of that kind. A great many young girls are like that, you know.”
  “It’s this bloody thing that does it,” she said, ripping off the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-
  Sex League and flinging it on to a bough. Then, as though touching her waist had reminded her of 
  something, she felt in the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate. She broke 
  it in half and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even before he had taken it he knew by the smell 
  that it was very unusual chocolate. It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper. 
  Chocolate normally was dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like 
  the smoke of a rubbish fire. But at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like the piece she 
  had given him. The first whiff of its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, 
  but which was powerful and troubling.
  “Where did you get this stuff?” he said.
  “Black market,” she said indifferently. “Actually I am that sort of girl, to look at. I’m good at 
  games. I was a troop-leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior 
  Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I’ve spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry 
  one end of a banner in the processions. I always Iook cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always 
  yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe.”
  The first fragment of chocolate had melted on Winston’s tongue. The taste was delightful. 
  But there was still that memory moving round the edges of his consciousness, something strongly 
  felt but not reducible to definite shape, like an object seen out of the corner of one’s eye. He 
  pushed it away from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action which he would have 
  liked to undo but could not.
  “You are very young,” he said. “You are ten or fifteen years younger than I am. What could 
  you see to attract you in a man like me?”
  “It was something in your face. I thought I’d take a chance. I’m good at spotting people who 
  don’t belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them.”
  
  Them, it appeared, meant the Party, and above all the Inner Party, about whom she talked 
  with an open jeering hatred which made Winston feel uneasy, although he knew that they were safe 
  here if they could be safe anywhere. A thing that astonished him about her was the coarseness of 
  her language. Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston himself very seldom did 
  swear, aloud, at any rate. Julia, however, seemed unable to mention the Party, and especially the 
  Inner Party, without using the kind of words that you saw chalked up in dripping alley-ways. He did 
  not dislike it. It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways, and 
  somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay. They had 
  left the clearing and were wandering again through the chequered shade, with their arms round 
  each other’s waists whenever it was wide enough to walk two abreast. He noticed how much softer 
  her waist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone. They did not speak above a whisper. Outside 
  the clearing, Julia said, it was better to go quietly. Presently they had reached the edge of the little 
  wood. She stopped him.
  “Don’t go out into the open. There might be someone watching. We’re all right if we keep 
  behind the boughs.”
  They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes. The sunlight, filtering through innumerable 
  leaves, was still hot on their faces. Winston looked out into the field beyond, and underwent a 
  curious, slow shock of recognition. He knew it by sight. An old, closebitten pasture, with a footpath 
  wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side the 
  boughs of the elm trees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in 
  dense masses like women’s hair. Surely somewhere nearby, but out of sight, there must be a 
  stream with green pools where dace were swimming?
  “Isn’t there a stream somewhere near here?” he whispered.
  “That’s right, there is a stream. It’s at the edge of the next field, actually. There are fish in it, 
  great big ones. You can watch them lying in the pools under the willow trees, waving their tails.”
  “It’s the Golden Country -- almost,” he murmured.
  “The Golden Country?”
  “It’s nothing, really. A landscape I’ve seen sometimes in a dream.”
  “Look!” whispered Julia.
  A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level of their faces. 
  Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted 
  them carefully into place  again,  ducked its head for a moment,  as though making a sort of 
  obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the 
  volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and 
  on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though 
  the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread 
  out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston 
  watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no 
  rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into 
  nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near. He 
  and Julia had spoken only in low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would 
  pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small, beetle-like man was 
  listening intently -- listening to that. But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of 
  his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up 
  with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt. The girl’s 
  waist in the bend of his arm was soft and warm. He pulled her round so that they were breast to 
  breast; her body seemed to melt into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as water. 
  Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. 
  When they moved their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply. The bird took fright and fled 
  with a clatter of wings.
  Winston put his lips against her ear. “Now,” he whispered.
  “Not here,” she whispered back. “Come back to the hideout. It’s safer.”
  Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back to the clearing. 
  When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him. They were both 
  breathing fast. but the smile had reappeared round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at 
  him for an instant, then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was almost as in his dream. 
  Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them 
  aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be 
  annihilated. Her body gleamed white in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his 
  eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile. He knelt down before her and 
  took her hands in his.
  “Have you done this before?”
  “Of course. Hundreds of times -- well, scores of times anyway.”
  
  “With Party members?”
  “Yes, always with Party members.”
  “With members of the Inner Party?”
  “Not with those swine, no. But there’s plenty that would if they got half a chance. They’re 
  not so holy as they make out.”
  His heart leapt.  Scores of times she  had done  it:  he wished it had been hundreds -- 
  thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew, 
  perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a 
  sham concealing iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, 
  how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! He pulled her down 
  so that they were kneeling face to face.
  “Listen. The more men you’ve had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?”
  “Yes, perfectly.”
  “I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to 
  be corrupt to the bones.”
  “Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I’m corrupt to the bones.”
  “You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me: I mean the thing in itself?”
  “I adore it.”
  That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person but the 
  animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to 
  pieces. He pressed her down upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was no 
  difficulty. Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed, and in a sort of 
  pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The sun seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. 
  He reached out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her. Almost immediately they 
  fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.
  Winston woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed 
  on the palm of her hand. Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful. There was a line or 
  two round the eyes, if you looked closely. The short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and soft. It 
  occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where she lived.
  The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling. 
  But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had 
  not quite come back. He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. In the old 
  days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end 
  of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because 
  everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a 
  victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
  III
  “We can come here once again,” said Julia. “It’s generally safe to use any hide-out twice. 
  But not for another month or two, of course.”
  As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed. She became alert and business-like, 
  put her clothes on, knotted the scarlet sash about her waist, and began arranging the details of the 
  journey home. It seemed natural to leave this to her. She obviously had a practical cunning which 
  Winston lacked, and she seemed also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside round 
  London,  stored away from innumerable  community hikes.  The route  she  gave him was quite 
  different from the one by which he had come, and brought him out at a different railway station. 
  “Never go home the same way as you went out,” she said, as though enunciating an important 
  general principle. She would leave first, and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her.
  She had named a place where they could meet after work, four evenings hence. It was a 
  street in one of the poorer quarters, where there was an open market which was generally crowded 
  and noisy. She would be hanging about among the stalls, pretending to be in search of shoelaces or 
  sewing-thread.  If  she  judged  that  the  coast  was  clear  she  would  blow  her  nose  when  he 
  approached; otherwise he was to walk past her without recognition. But with luck, in the middle of 
  the crowd, it would be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting.
  “And now I must go,” she said as soon as he had mastered his instructions. “I’m due back at 
  nineteen-thirty. I’ve got to put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or 
  something. Isn’t it bloody? Give me a brush-down, would you? Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are 
  you sure? Then good-bye, my love, good-bye!”
  She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a moment later pushed her 
  way through the saplings and disappeared into the wood with very little noise. Even now he had not 
  
  found out her surname or her address. However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that 
  they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.
  As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in the wood. During the month of May 
  there was only one further occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love. That was in 
  another hidlng-place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of 
  country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good hiding-place when once 
  you got there, but the getting there was very dangerous. For the rest they could meet only in the 
  streets, in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. In the 
  street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down the crowded pavements, 
  not  quite  abreast  and  never  looking  at  one  another,  they  carried  on  a  curious,  intermittent 
  conversation which flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence 
  by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes 
  later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then 
  continued almost without introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this 
  kind of conversation, which she called “talking by instalments”. She was also surprisingly adept at 
  speaking without moving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings they managed to 
  exchange a kiss. They were passing in silence down a side-street (Julia would never speak when 
  they were away from the main streets) when there was a deafening roar, the earth heaved, and the 
  air darkened, and Winston found himself lying on his side, bruised and terrified. A rocket bomb must 
  have dropped quite near at hand. Suddenly he became aware of Julia’s face a few centimetres from 
  his own, deathly white, as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! He clasped her 
  against him and found that he was kissing a live warm face. But there was some powdery stuff that 
  got in the way of his lips. Both of their faces were thickly coated with plaster.
  There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to walk past one 
  another without a sign, because a patrol had just come round the corner or a helicopter was 
  hovering overhead. Even if it had been less dangerous, it would still have been difficult to find time 
  to meet. Winston’s working week was sixty hours, Julia’s was even longer, and their free days 
  varied according to the pressure of work and did not often coincide. Julia, in any case, seldom had 
  an evening completely free. She spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and 
  demonstrations, distributing literature for the junior Anti-Sex League, preparing banners for Hate 
  Week, making collections for the savings campaign, and such-like activities. It paid, she said, it was 
  camouflage. If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She even induced Winston to 
  mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munition work which 
  was done voluntarily by zealous Party members. So, one evening every week, Winston spent four 
  hours of paralysing boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts of 
  bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit workshop where the knocking of hammers mingled drearily with 
  the music of the telescreens.
  When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary conversation were filled 
  up. It was a blazing afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the bells was hot and 
  stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-
  littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the 
  arrowslits and make sure that no one was coming.
  Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls (“Always in the 
  stink of women! How I hate women!” she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, 
  on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted 
  chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was “not clever”, but was 
  fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of 
  composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final 
  touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She “didn’t 
  much care for reading,” she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or 
  bootlaces.
  She had no memories of anything before the early ’sixties and the only person she had ever 
  known  who  talked  frequently  of  the  days  before  the  Revolution  was  a  grandfather  who  had 
  disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won 
  the gymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch 
  secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an 
  excellent character. She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in 
  Pornosec, the  sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for 
  distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she 
  remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with 
  titles like  Spanking Stories or  One Night in a Girls’ School, to be bought furtively by proletarian 
  youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.
  “What are these books like?” said Winston curiously.
  
  “Oh, ghastly rubbish. They’re boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them 
  round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I’m not 
  literary, dear -- not even enough for that.”
  He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except the heads of the 
  departments, were girls. The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than 
  those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.
  “They don’t even like having married women there,” she added. Girls are always supposed 
  to be so pure. Here’s one who isn’t, anyway.
  She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member of sixty who 
  later committed suicide to avoid arrest. “And a good job too,” said Julia, “otherwise they’d have had 
  my name out of him when he confessed.” Since then there had been various others. Life as she saw 
  it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; “they”, meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having 
  it; you broke the rules as best you could. She seemed to think it just as natural that “they” should 
  want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the 
  Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it 
  touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used 
  Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never heard of the 
  Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, 
  which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and 
  stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the 
  younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, 
  accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but 
  simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.
  They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too remote to be worth 
  thinking about. No imaginable committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if Katharine, 
  Winston’s wife, could somehow have been got rid of. It was hopeless even as a daydream.
  “What was she like, your wife?” said Julia.
  “She was -- do you know the Newspeak word  goodthinkful? Meaning naturally orthodox, 
  incapable of thinking a bad thought?”
  “No, I didn’t know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.”
  He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously enough she appeared to know 
  the essential parts of it already. She described to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the 
  stiffening of Katharine’s body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be 
  pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him. 
  With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things: Katharine, in any case, had long ceased 
  to be a painful memory and became merely a distasteful one.
  “I could have stood it if it hadn’t been for one thing,” he said. He told her about the frigid 
  little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week. “She 
  hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it. She used to call it -- but you’ll never guess.”
  “Our duty to the Party,” said Julia promptly.
  “How did you know that?”
  “I’ve been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens. And in the Youth 
  Movement. They rub it into you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can 
  never tell; people are such hypocrites.”
  She began to enlarge upon the  subject.  With Julia,  everything came  back to her own 
  sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike 
  Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that 
  the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore 
  had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced 
  hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. 
  The way she put it was:
  “When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give 
  a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy 
  all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. 
  If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year 
  Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”
  That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and 
  political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party 
  needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct 
  and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had 
  turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family 
  could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, 
  in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned 
  
  against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become 
  in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be 
  surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
  Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would unquestionably have denounced 
  him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his 
  opinions. But what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, 
  which had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began telling Julia of something that had 
  happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years 
  ago.
  It was three or four months after they were married. They had lost their way on a community 
  hike somewhere in Kent. They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but they 
  took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk 
  quarry. It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the bottom. There was nobody 
  of whom they could ask the way. As soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very 
  uneasy. To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-
  doing. She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start searching in the other 
  direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the 
  cliff beneath them. One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently growing on the 
  same root. He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and 
  look at it.
  “Look, Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump down near the bottom. Do you see 
  they’re two different colours?”
  She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for a moment. She even 
  leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was pointing. He was standing a little behind her, and 
  he put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how 
  completely alone they were. There was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even 
  a bird awake. In a place like this the danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very 
  small, and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up sounds. It was the hottest sleepiest 
  hour of the afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face. And the thought 
  struck him...
  “Why didn’t you give her a good shove?” said Julia. “I would have.”
  “Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I’d been the same person then as I am now. Or 
  perhaps I would -- I’m not certain.”
  “Are you sorry you didn’t?”
  “Yes. On the whole I’m sorry I didn’t.”
  They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer against him. Her head 
  rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. She was very 
  young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an 
  inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.
  “Actually it would have made no difference,” he said.
  “Then why are you sorry you didn’t do it?”
  “Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we’re playing, we can’t 
  win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.”
  He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always contradicted him when he said 
  anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always 
  defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought 
  Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was 
  somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed 
  was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as 
  happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the 
  moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.
  “We are the dead,” he said.
  “We’re not dead yet,” said Julia prosaically.
  “Not physically. Six months, a year -- five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are 
  young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we 
  can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the 
  same thing.”
  “Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being 
  alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive! 
  Don’t you like this?”
  She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him. He could feel her breasts, 
  ripe yet firm, through her overalls. Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigour into 
  his.
  
  “Yes, I like that,” he said.
  “Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, we’ve got to fix up about the next time 
  we meet. We may as well go back to the place in the wood. We’ve given it a good long rest. But you 
  must get there by a different way this time. I’ve got it all planned out. You take the train -- but look, 
  I’ll draw it out for you.”
  And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust, and with a twig from a 
  pigeon’s nest began drawing a map on the floor.
  IV
  Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr. Charrington’s shop. Beside the 
  window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The old-
  fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on 
  the gateleg table, the glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of 
  the half-darkness.
  In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups, provided by Mr. 
  Charrington. Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water to boil. He had brought an envelope full 
  of Victory Coffee and some saccharine tablets. The clock’s hands said seventeen-twenty: it was 
  nineteen-twenty really. She was coming at nineteen-thirty.
  Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly. Of all the crimes that a 
  Party member could commit, this one was the least possible to conceal. Actually the idea had first 
  floated into his head in the form of a vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored by the surface of the 
  gateleg table. As he had foreseen, Mr. Charrington had made no difficulty about letting the room. 
  He was obviously glad of the few dollars that it would bring him. Nor did he seem shocked or 
  become offensively knowing when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room for the purpose 
  of a love-affair. Instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in generalities, with so 
  delicate an air as to give the impression that he had become partly invisible. Privacy, he said, was a 
  very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally. And when 
  they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep his 
  knowledge to himself. He even, seeming almost to fade out of existence as he did so, added that 
  there were two entries to the house, one of them through the back yard, which gave on an alley.
  Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of 
  the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a 
  monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped 
  about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a 
  series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies’ diapers. Whenever her mouth 
  was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:
  “It was only an ’opeless fancy.
  It passed like an Ipril dye,
  But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred!
  They ’ave stolen my ’eart awye!”
  The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs 
  published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these 
  songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a 
  versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant 
  sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the 
  cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet 
  the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
  Folly, folly, folly! he thought again. It was inconceivable that they could frequent this place 
  for more than a few weeks without being caught. But the temptation of having a hiding-place that 
  was truly their own, indoors and near at hand, had been too much for both of them. For some time 
  after their visit to the church belfry it had been impossible to arrange meetings. Working hours had 
  been drastically increased in anticipation of Hate Week. It was more than a month distant, but the 
  enormous, complex preparations that it entailed were throwing extra work on to everybody. Finally 
  both of them managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day. They had agreed to go back to 
  the clearing in the wood. On the evening beforehand they met briefly in the street. As usual, 
  Winston hardly looked at Julia as they drifted towards one another in the crowd, but from the short 
  glance he gave her it seemed to him that she was paler than usual.
  “It’s all off,” she murmured as soon as she judged it safe to speak. “Tomorrow, I mean.”
  
  “What?”
  “Tomorrow afternoon. I can’t come.”
  “Why not?”
  “Oh, the usual reason. It’s started early this time.”
  For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that he had known her the nature of 
  his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it. Their first 
  love-making had been simply an act of the will. But after the second time it was different. The smell 
  of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the 
  air all round him. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt 
  that he had a right to. When she said that she could not come, he had the feeling that she was 
  cheating  him.  But  just  at  this  moment  the  crowd  pressed  them  together  and  their  hands 
  accidentally met. She gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire 
  but affection. It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must 
  be a normal, recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, 
  suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple of ten years’ standing. He 
  wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly 
  and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He wished 
  above all  that they had some place  where they could be alone together without feeling the 
  obligation to make love every time they met. It was not actually at that moment, but at some time 
  on the following day, that the idea of renting Mr. Charrington’s room had occurred to him. When he 
  suggested it to Julia she had agreed with unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that it was 
  lunacy. It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves. As he sat waiting 
  on the edge of the bed he thought again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It was curious how 
  that predestined horror moved in and out of one’s consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, 
  preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps 
  postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten 
  the interval before it happened.
  At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia burst into the room. She was 
  carrying a tool-bag of coarse brown canvas, such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and fro 
  at the Ministry. He started forward to take her in his arms, but she disengaged herself rather 
  hurriedly, partly because she was still holding the tool-bag.
  “Half a second,” she said. “Just let me show you what I’ve brought. Did you bring some of 
  that filthy Victory Coffee? I thought you would. You can chuck it away again, because we shan’t be 
  needing it. Look here.”
  She  fell  on  her  knees,  threw  open  the  bag,  and  tumbled  out  some  spanners  and  a 
  screwdriver that filled the top part of it. Underneath were a number of neat paper packets. The first 
  packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling. It was filled with 
  some kind of heavy, sand-like stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.
  “It isn’t sugar?” he said.
  “Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here’s a loaf of bread -- proper white bread, not our 
  bloody stuff -- and a little pot of jam. And here’s a tin of milk -- but look! This is the one I’m really 
  proud of. I had to wrap a bit of sacking round it, because--”
  But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up. The smell was already filling the 
  room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but which one did 
  occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing 
  itself mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.
  “It’s coffee,” he murmured, “real coffee.”
  “It’s Inner Party coffee. There’s a whole kilo here,” she said.
  “How did you manage to get hold of all these things?”
  “It’s all Inner Party stuff. There’s nothing those swine don’t have, nothing. But of course 
  waiters and servants and people pinch things, and -- look, I got a little packet of tea as well.”
  Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a corner of the packet.
  “It’s real tea. Not blackberry leaves.”
  “There’s been a lot of tea about lately. They’ve captured India, or something,” she said 
  vaguely. “But listen, dear. I want you to turn your back on me for three minutes. Go and sit on the 
  other side of the bed. Don’t go too near the window. And don’t turn round till I tell you.”
  Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down in the yard the red-armed 
  woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub and the line. She took two more pegs out 
  of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:
  “They sye that time ’eals all things,
  They sye you can always forget;
  But the smiles an’ the tears acrorss the years
  
  They twist my ’eart-strings yet!”
  She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward with the 
  sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that 
  she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of 
  clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing 
  rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone 
  and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like 
  talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that 
  they had anything to sing about.
  “You can turn round now,” said Julia.
  He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her. What he had actually 
  expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked. The transformation that had happened was 
  much more surprising than that. She had painted her face.
  She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and bought herself a 
  complete set of make-up materials. Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose 
  powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not 
  very skilfully done, but Winston’s standards in such matters were not high. He had never before 
  seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her 
  appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of colour in the right places she had become not 
  only very much prettier, but, above all, far more feminine. Her short hair and boyish overalls merely 
  added to the effect. As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He 
  remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen, and a woman’s cavernous mouth. It was the 
  very same scent that she had used; but at the moment it did not seem to matter.
  “Scent too!” he said.
  “Yes, dear, scent too. And do you know what I’m going to do next? I’m going to get hold of a 
  real woman’s frock from somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers. I’ll wear silk 
  stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I’m going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.”
  They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed. It was the first time 
  that he had stripped himself naked in her presence. Until now he had been too much ashamed of 
  his pale and meagre body, with the varicose veins standing out on his calves and the discoloured 
  patch over his ankle. There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and 
  smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them. “It’s sure to be full of 
  bugs, but who cares?” said Julia. One never saw a double bed nowadays, except in the homes of the 
  proles. Winston had occasionally slept in one in his boyhood: Julia had never been in one before, so 
  far as she could remember.
  Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When Winston woke up the hands of the clock had 
  crept round to nearly nine. He did not stir, because Julia was sleeping with her head in the crook of 
  his arm. Most of her make-up had transferred itself to his own face or the bolster, but a light stain of 
  rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone. A yellow ray from the sinking sun fell across 
  the foot of the bed and lighted up the fireplace, where the water in the pan was boiling fast. Down 
  in the yard the woman had stopped singing, but the faint shouts of children floated in from the 
  street. He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in 
  bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love 
  when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying 
  there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when 
  that seemed ordinary? Julia woke up, rubbed her eyes, and raised herself on her elbow to look at 
  the oilstove.
  “Half that water’s boiled away,” she said. “I’ll get up and make some coffee in another 
  moment. We’ve got an hour. What time do they cut the lights off at your flats?”
  “Twenty-three thirty.”
  “It’s twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in earlier than that, because -- Hi! Get 
  out, you filthy brute!”
  She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor, and sent it 
  hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary 
  at Goldstein, that morning during the Two Minutes Hate.
  “What was it?” he said in surprise.
  “A rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting. There’s a hole down there. I 
  gave him a good fright, anyway.”
  “Rats!” murmured Winston. “In this room!”
  “They’re all over the place,” said Julia indifferently as she lay down again. “We’ve even got 
  them in the kitchen at the hostel. Some parts of London are swarming with them. Did you know 
  they attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these streets a woman daren’t leave a baby alone for 
  
  two minutes. It’s the great huge brown ones that do it. And the nasty thing is that the brutes 
  always--”
  “Don’t go on!” said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut.
  “Dearest! You’ve gone quite pale. What’s the matter? Do they make you feel sick?”
  “Of all horrors in the world -- a rat!”
  She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him, as though to reassure him 
  with the warmth of her body. He did not reopen his eyes immediately. For several moments he had 
  had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his 
  life. It was always very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the 
  other side of it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. In the dream 
  his deepest feeling was always one of self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind 
  the wall of darkness. With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could even 
  have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke up without discovering what it was: but 
  somehow it was connected with what Julia had been saying when he cut her short.
  “I’m sorry,” he said, “it’s nothing. I don’t like rats, that’s all.”
  “Don’t worry, dear, we’re not going to have the filthy brutes in here. I’ll stuff the hole with a 
  bit of sacking before we go. And next time we come here I’ll bring some plaster and bung it up 
  properly.”
  Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten. Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he 
  sat up against the bedhead. Julia got out of bed, pulled on her overalls, and made the coffee. The 
  smell that rose from the saucepan was so powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest 
  anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive. What was even better than the taste of 
  the coffee was the silky texture given to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after 
  years of saccharine. With one hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the other, Julia 
  wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the bookcase, pointing out the best way of 
  repairing  the  gateleg  table,  plumping  herself  down  in  the  ragged  arm-chair  to  see  if  it  was 
  comfortable, and examining the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant amusement. She 
  brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of 
  her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the glass.
  “What is it, do you think?” said Julia.
  “I don’t think it’s anything -- I mean, I don’t think it was ever put to any use. That’s what I 
  like about it. It’s a little chunk of history that they’ve forgotten to alter. It’s a message from a 
  hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.”
  “And that picture over there” -- she nodded at the engraving on the opposite wall -- “would 
  that be a hundred years old?”
  “More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can’t tell. It’s impossible to discover the age of anything 
  nowadays.”
  She went over to look at it. “Here’s where that brute stuck his nose out,” she said, kicking 
  the wainscoting immediately below the picture. “What is this place? I’ve seen it before somewhere.”
  “It’s a church, or at least it used to be. St. Clement’s Danes its name was.” The fragment of 
  rhyme  that  Mr.  Charrington  had  taught  him  came  back  into  his  head,  and  he  added  half-
  nostalgically: ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s!’”
  To his astonishment she capped the line:
  “You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s,
  “When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey--
  “I can’t remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I remember it ends up, ‘Here comes 
  a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!’”
  It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another line after “the bells of 
  Old Bailey”. Perhaps it could be dug out of Mr. Charrington’s memory, if he were suitably prompted.
  “Who taught you that?“ he said.
  “My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was vaporized when I 
  was eight -- at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,” she added inconsequently. 
  “I’ve seen oranges. They’re a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.”
  “I can remember lemons,” said Winston. “They were quite common in the fifties. They were 
  so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them.”
  “I bet that picture’s got bugs behind it,” said Julia. “I’ll take it down and give it a good clean 
  some day. I suppose it’s almost time we were leaving. I must start washing this paint off. What a 
  bore! I’ll get the lipstick off your face afterwards.”
  Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room was darkening. He turned over 
  towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was 
  not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it 
  
  was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the 
  sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get 
  inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and 
  the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was 
  in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
  V
  Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless 
  people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day 
  Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the 
  notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. 
  It looked almost exactly as it had looked before -- nothing had been crossed out -- but it was one 
  name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
  The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless, air-conditioned 
  rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the pavements scorched one’s feet and the 
  stench of the Tubes at the rush hours was a horror. The preparations for Hate Week were in full 
  swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings, military 
  parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; 
  stands  had  to  be  erected,  effigies  built,  slogans  coined,  songs  written,  rumours  circulated, 
  photographs faked. Julia’s unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the production of 
  novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets. Winston, in addition to his regular work, 
  spent long periods every day in going through back files of the Times and altering and embellishing 
  news items which were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles 
  roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. The rocket bombs crashed oftener than 
  ever, and sometimes in the far distance there were enormous explosions which no one could 
  explain and about which there were wild rumours.
  The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song, it was called) 
  had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens. It had a savage, 
  barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. 
  Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The proles had 
  taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed with the still-popular “It was only a 
  hopeless fancy”. The Parsons children played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a 
  comb and a piece of toilet paper. Winston’s evenings were fuller than ever. Squads of volunteers, 
  organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, 
  erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of 
  streamers. Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred metres of 
  bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark. The heat and the manual work had 
  even given him a pretext for reverting to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was 
  everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along with 
  comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible 
  supply of acrid-smelling sweat.
  A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption, and represented 
  simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with 
  expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From 
  whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, 
  seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every 
  wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about the war, 
  were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with 
  the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual. One fell 
  on a crowded film theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The whole 
  population of the neighbourhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and 
  was in effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used 
  as a playground and several  dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry 
  demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasian 
  soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and a number of shops were looted in the turmoil; 
  then a rumour flew round that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, 
  and an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their house set on fire and 
  perished of suffocation.
  In the room over Mr. Charrington’s shop, when they could get there, Julia and Winston lay 
  side by side on a stripped bed under the open window, naked for the sake of coolness. The rat had 
  
  never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty 
  or clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle everything with 
  pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes, and make love with sweating bodies, then 
  fall asleep and wake to find that the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counter-attack.
  Four, five, six -- seven times they met during the month of June. Winston had dropped his 
  habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had grown fatter, his 
  varicose ulcer had subsided, leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of 
  coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased to be intolerable, he had 
  no longer any impulse to make faces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now 
  that they had a secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could 
  only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over 
  the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. 
  The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr. Charrington, 
  thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He usually stopped to talk with Mr. Charrington for a 
  few minutes on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on 
  the other hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark 
  shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and which contained, among 
  other things, an unbelievably ancient gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the 
  opportunity to talk. Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and thick 
  spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had always vaguely the air of being a 
  collector rather than a tradesman. With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of 
  rubbish or that -- a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck locket 
  containing a strand of some long-dead baby’s hair -- never asking that Winston should buy it, 
  merely that he should admire it. To talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out 
  musical-box.  He  had  dragged  out  from  the  corners  of  his  memory  some  more  fragments  of 
  forgotten rhymes. There was one about four and twenty blackbirds, and another about a cow with a 
  crumpled horn, and another about the death of poor Cock Robin. “It just occurred to me you might 
  be interested,” he would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new fragment. 
  But he could never recall more than a few lines of any one rhyme.
  Both of them knew -- in a way, it was never out of their minds that what was now happening 
  could not last long. There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the 
  bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned 
  soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. But 
  there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as 
  they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was 
  difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary. It was as when Winston had gazed into 
  the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside that glassy 
  world, and that once inside it time could be arrested. Often they gave themselves up to daydreams 
  of escape. Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry on their intrigue, just like this, for 
  the remainder of their natural lives. Or Katharine would die, and by subtle manoeuvrings Winston 
  and Julia would succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide together. Or they would 
  disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak with proletarian accents, get jobs in a 
  factory and live out their lives undetected in a back-street. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. 
  In reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no 
  intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present 
  that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next 
  breath so long as there is air available.
  Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the Party, but with no 
  notion of how to take the first step. Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a reality, there still 
  remained the difficulty of finding one’s way into it. He told her of the strange intimacy that existed, 
  or seemed to exist, between himself and O’Brien, and of the impulse he sometimes felt, simply to 
  walk into O’Brien’s presence, announce that he was the enemy of the Party, and demand his help. 
  Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judging 
  people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should believe O’Brien to be 
  trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes. Moreover she took it for granted that 
  everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the Party and would break the rules if he thought it 
  safe to do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition existed or could 
  exist. The tales about Goldstein and his underground army, she said, were simply a lot of rubbish 
  which the Party had invented for its own purposes and which you had to pretend to believe in. 
  Times beyond number, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations, she had shouted at the top 
  of her voice for the execution of people whose names she had never heard and in whose supposed 
  crimes she had not the faintest belief. When public trials were happening she had taken her place in 
  the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded the courts from morning to night, chanting 
  
  at intervals “Death to the traitors!” During the Two Minutes Hate she always excelled all others in 
  shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what 
  doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since the Revolution and was too young 
  to remember the ideological battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an independent 
  political movement was outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible. It would 
  always  exist,  and  it  would  always  be  the  same.  You  could  only  rebel  against  it  by  secret 
  disobedience  or,  at  most,  by  isolated  acts  of  violence  such  as  killing  somebody  or  blowing 
  something up.
  In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party 
  propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she 
  startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs 
  which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, “just to keep 
  people frightened”. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort 
  of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid 
  bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way 
  touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because 
  the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for 
  instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, 
  Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party claimed to have 
  invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one 
  generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he told her that aeroplanes 
  had been in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as 
  totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It was rather more 
  of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that 
  Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that 
  she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of 
  the enemy had changed. “I thought we’d always been at war with Eurasia,” she said vaguely. It 
  frightened him a little. The invention of aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the 
  switchover in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was grown up. He argued 
  with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory 
  back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But 
  the issue still struck her as unimportant. “Who cares?” she said impatiently. “It’s always one bloody 
  war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.”
  Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent forgeries that he 
  committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening 
  beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, 
  and Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had once held between his fingers. It did 
  not make much impression on her. At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.
  “Were they friends of yours?” she said.
  “No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members. Besides, they were far older men 
  than I was. They belonged to the old days, before the Revolution. I barely knew them by sight.”
  “Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all the time, aren’t they?”
  He tried to make her understand. “This was an exceptional case. It wasn’t just a question of 
  somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually 
  abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like 
  that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the 
  years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been 
  rewritten,  every  picture  has  been  repainted,  every  statue  and  street  and  building  has  been 
  renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by 
  minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always 
  right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, 
  even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only 
  evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being 
  shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete 
  evidence after the event -- years after it.”
  “And what good was that?”
  “It was no good,  because I threw it away a few minutes later.  But if the same thing 
  happened today, I should keep it.”
  “Well, I wouldn’t!” said Julia. “I’m quite ready to take risks, but only for something worth 
  while, not for bits of old newspaper. What could you have done with it even if you had kept it?”
  “Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have planted a few doubts here and 
  there, supposing that I’d dared to show it to anybody. I don’t imagine that we can alter anything in 
  our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there -- small 
  
  groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few 
  records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off.”
  “I’m not interested in the next generation, dear. I’m interested in us.”
  “You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,” he told her.
  She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight.
  In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began 
  to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective 
  reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid 
  any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried 
  by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he persisted in 
  talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those 
  people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her, he realized how easy it 
  was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy 
  meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of 
  understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they 
  never  fully  grasped  the  enormity  of  what  was demanded  of  them,  and  were  not  sufficiently 
  interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained 
  sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it 
  left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
  VI
  It had happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life, it seemed to him, he 
  had been waiting for this to happen.
  He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and he was almost at the spot where 
  Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he became aware that someone larger than himself 
  was walking just behind him. The person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a 
  prelude to speaking. Winston stopped abruptly and turned. It was O’Brien.
  At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only impulse was to run away. His 
  heart  bounded  violently.  He  would  have  been  incapable  of  speaking.  O’Brien,  however,  had 
  continued forward in the same movement, laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston’s arm, 
  so that the two of them were walking side by side. He began speaking with the peculiar grave 
  courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members.
  “I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,” he said. “I was reading one of your 
  Newspeak articles in the Times the other day. You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?”
  Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. “Hardly scholarly,” he said. “I’m only an 
  amateur. It’s not my subject. I have never had anything to do with the actual construction of the 
  language.”
  “But you write it very elegantly,” said O’Brien. “That is not only my own opinion. I was 
  talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an expert. His name has slipped my memory for 
  the moment.”
  Again Winston’s heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable that this was anything other 
  than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any 
  identifiable reference to him would have been mortally dangerous. O’Brien’s remark must obviously 
  have been intended as a signal, a codeword. By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had turned 
  the two of them into accomplices. They had continued to stroll slowly down the corridor, but now 
  O’Brien halted. With the curious, disarming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the 
  gesture he resettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went on:
  “What I had really intended to say was that in your article I noticed you had used two words 
  which have become obsolete. But they have only become so very recently. Have you seen the tenth 
  edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?”
  “No,” said Winston. “I didn’t think it had been issued yet. We are still using the ninth in the 
  Records Department.”
  “The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I believe. But a few advance copies 
  have been circulated. I have one myself. It might interest you to look at it, perhaps?”
  “Very much so,” said Winston, immediately seeing where this tended.
  “Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The reduction in the number of verbs -- 
  that is the point that will appeal to you, I think. Let me see, shall I send a messenger to you with the 
  dictionary? But I am afraid I invariably forget anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick it up at 
  my flat at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you my address.”
  They were standing in front of a telescreen. Somewhat absentmindedly O’Brien felt two of 
  
  his pockets and then produced a small leather-covered notebook and a gold ink-pencil. Immediately 
  beneath the telescreen, in such a position that anyone who was watching at the other end of the 
  instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbled an address, tore out the page and handed 
  it to Winston.
  “I am usually at home in the evenings,” he said. “If not, my servant will give you the 
  dictionary.”
  He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper, which this time there was no need 
  to conceal. Nevertheless he carefully memorized what was written on it, and some hours later 
  dropped it into the memory hole along with a mass of other papers.
  They had been talking to one another for a couple of minutes at the most. There was only 
  one meaning that the episode could possibly have. It had been contrived as a way of letting 
  Winston know O’Brien’s address. This was necessary, because except by direct enquiry it was never 
  possible to discover where anyone lived. There were no directories of any kind. “If you ever want to 
  see me, this is where I can be found,” was what O’Brien had been saying to him. Perhaps there 
  would even be a message concealed somewhere in the dictionary. But at any rate, one thing was 
  certain. The conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.
  He knew that sooner or later he would obey O’Brien’s summons. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps 
  after a long delay -- he was not certain. What was happening was only the working-out of a process 
  that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had 
  been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to 
  actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. 
  The end was contained in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a 
  foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. Even while he was speaking to O’Brien, when the 
  meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body. He 
  had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he 
  had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.
  VII
  Winston  had  woken  up  with  his  eyes  full  of  tears.  Julia  rolled  sleepily  against  him, 
  murmuring something that might have been “What’s the matter?”
  “I dreamt--” he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words. There 
  was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his mind in the 
  few seconds after waking.
  He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream. It was a vast, 
  luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a 
  summer evening after rain. It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the 
  glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in 
  which one could see into interminable distances. The dream had also been comprehended by -- 
  indeed, in some sense it had consisted in -- a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made 
  again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the 
  small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blew them both to pieces.
  “Do you know,” he said, “that until this moment I believed I had murdered my mother?”
  “Why did you murder her?” said Julia, almost asleep.
  “I didn’t murder her. Not physically.”
  In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within a few moments 
  of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that he 
  must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the 
  date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened.
  His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he could not remember. He 
  remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical panics about air-
  raids  and  the  sheltering  in  Tube  stations,  the  piles  of  rubble  everywhere,  the  unintelligible 
  proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the 
  enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance -- above 
  all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other 
  boys in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato 
  peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the 
  cinders; and also in waiting for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were 
  known  to  carry  cattle  feed,  and  which,  when they  jolted  over the  bad  patches  in  the  road, 
  sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.
  When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any violent grief, but a 
  
  sudden change came over her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was evident 
  even  to  Winston  that  she  was  waiting  for  something  that  she  knew  must  happen.  She  did 
  everything that was needed -- cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the 
  mantelpiece -- always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an artist’s lay-
  figure moving of its own accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. 
  For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, 
  ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian by thinness. Very occasionally she 
  would take Winston in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying anything. 
  He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with 
  the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.
  He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that seemed half 
  filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a gas ring in the fender, and a shelf where food 
  was kept, and on the landing outside there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several 
  rooms.  He  remembered  his  mother’s  statuesque  body  bending  over  the  gas  ring  to  stir  at 
  something in a saucepan. Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid 
  battles at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why there was not 
  more food, he would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which 
  was beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would 
  attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his share. His mother was quite 
  ready to give him more than his share. She took it for granted that he, “the boy”, should have the 
  biggest portion; but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every meal she 
  would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little sister was sick and also needed 
  food, but it was no use. He would cry out with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to 
  wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister’s plate. He 
  knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to 
  do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his mother did not 
  stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.
  One day a chocolate-ration was issued. There had been no such issue for weeks or months 
  past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab 
  (they still talked about ounces in those days) between the three of them. It was obvious that it 
  ought to be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were listening to somebody else, 
  Winston heard himself demanding in a loud booming voice that he should be given the whole piece. 
  His mother told him not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that went round and 
  round,  with shouts,  whines,  tears,  remonstrances,  bargainings.  His tiny sister,  clinging to her 
  mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at him with 
  large, mournful eyes. In the end his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave it to 
  Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, 
  perhaps not knowing what it was. Winston stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden 
  swift spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate out of his sister’s hand and was fleeing for the 
  door.
  “Winston, Winston!” his mother called after him. “Come back! Give your sister back her 
  chocolate!”
  He stopped, but did not come back. His mother’s anxious eyes were fixed on his face. Even 
  now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was that was on the point of 
  happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His 
  mother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in the 
  gesture told him that his sister was dying. He turned and fled down the stairs. with the chocolate 
  growing sticky in his hand.
  He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt somewhat 
  ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several hours, until hunger drove him home. 
  When he came back his mother had disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time. 
  Nothing was gone from the room except his mother and his sister. They had not taken any clothes, 
  not even his mother’s overcoat. To this day he did not know with any certainty that his mother was 
  dead. It was perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a forced-labour camp. As for his 
  sister, she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies for homeless 
  children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which had grown up as a result of the civil war, or 
  she might have been sent to the labour camp along with his mother, or simply left somewhere or 
  other to die.
  The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping protecting gesture of the arm 
  in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained. His mind went back to another dream of two 
  months ago. Exactly as his mother had sat on the dingy whitequilted bed, with the child clinging to 
  her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper every minute, but 
  still looking up at him through the darkening water.
  
  He told Julia the story of his mother’s disappearance. Without opening her eyes she rolled 
  over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.
  “I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,” she said indistinctly. “All children are 
  swine.”
  “Yes. But the real point of the story--”
  From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again. He would have liked 
  to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that 
  she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of 
  nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her 
  feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that 
  an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, 
  and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was 
  gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not 
  produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her 
  to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no 
  more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to 
  persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time 
  robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what 
  you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever 
  happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted 
  clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not 
  have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed 
  by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a 
  completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value 
  in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were notloyal 
  to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did 
  not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life 
  and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. 
  They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. 
  And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen 
  a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a 
  cabbage-stalk.
  “The proles are human beings,” he said aloud. “We are not human.”
  “Why not?” said Julia, who had woken up again.
  He thought for a little while. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he said, “that the best thing for 
  us to do would be simply to walk out of here before it’s too late, and never see each other again?”
  “Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I’m not going to do it, all the same.”
  “We’ve been lucky,” he said “but it can’t last much longer. You’re young. You look normal 
  and innocent. If you keep clear of people like me, you might stay alive for another fifty years.”
  “No. I’ve thought it all out. What you do, I’m going to do. And don’t be too downhearted. I’m 
  rather good at staying alive.”
  “We may be together for another six months -- a year -- there’s no knowing. At the end 
  we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get hold of 
  us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they’ll 
  shoot you, and if I refuse to confess, they’ll shoot you just the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or 
  stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even 
  know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without power of any kind. The one 
  thing that matters is that we shouldn’t betray one another, although even that can’t make the 
  slightest difference.”
  “If you mean confessing,” she said, “we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always 
  confesses. You can’t help it. They torture you.”
  “I don’t mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter: 
  only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you -- that would be the real betrayal.”
  She thought it over. “They can’t do that,” she said finally. “It’s the one thing they can’t do. 
  They can make you say anything -- anything -- but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get 
  inside you.”
  “No,” he said a little more hopefully, “no; that’s quite true. They can’t get inside you. If you 
  can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve 
  beaten them.”
  He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and 
  day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never 
  mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less 
  true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of 
  
  Love, but it was possible  to guess: tortures,  drugs,  delicate instruments that registered your 
  nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning. 
  Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be 
  squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what 
  difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not 
  alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that 
  you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to 
  yourself, remained impregnable.
  VIII
  They had done it, they had done it at last!
  The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. The telescreen was dimmed 
  to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on 
  velvet. At the far end of the room O’Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a 
  mass of papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the servant showed Julia 
  and Winston in.
  Winston’s heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be able to speak. 
  They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act to come 
  here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; though it was true that they had come by different 
  routes and only met on O’Brien’s doorstep. But merely to walk into such a place needed an effort of 
  the nerve. It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner 
  Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of 
  the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good 
  food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed 
  servants hurrying to and fro -- everything was intimidating. Although he had a good pretext for 
  coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would 
  suddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers, and order him to get out. O’Brien’s 
  servant, however, had admitted the two of them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in 
  a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face which might have been that 
  of a Chinese. The passage down which he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls 
  and white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was intimidating. Winston could not remember 
  ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human bodies.
  O’Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying it intently. His 
  heavy face, bent down so that one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and 
  intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite 
  towards him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:
  “Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion contained item six 
  doubleplus  ridiculous  verging  crimethink  cancel  stop  unproceed  constructionwise  antegetting 
  plusfull estimates machinery overheads stop end message.”
  He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across the soundless carpet. A 
  little of the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him with the Newspeak words, but 
  his expression was grimmer than usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The 
  terror that Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary embarrassment. 
  It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had 
  he in reality that O’Brien was any kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a 
  single equivocal remark: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a dream. He 
  could not even fall back on the pretence that he had come to borrow the dictionary, because in that 
  case Julia’s presence was impossible to explain. As O’Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed 
  to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. 
  The voice had stopped.
  Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, 
  Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.
  “You can turn it off!” he said.
  “Yes,” said O’Brien, “we can turn it off. We have that privilege.”
  He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them, and the expression 
  on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but 
  about what? Even now it was quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably 
  why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed 
  deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his 
  eyes fixed on O’Brien’s. Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the 
  
  beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic gesture O’Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose.
  “Shall I say it, or will you?” he said.
  “I will say it,” said Winston promptly. “That thing is really turned off?”
  “Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.”
  “We have come here because--”
  He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives. Since he did not in 
  fact know what kind of help he expected from O’Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come 
  here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious:
  “We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working 
  against the Party, and that you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies 
  of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also 
  adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to 
  incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready.”
  He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door had opened. Sure 
  enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in without knocking. Winston saw that he was 
  carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses.
  “Martin is one of us,” said O’Brien impassively. “Bring the drinks over here, Martin. Put them 
  on the round table. Have we enough chairs? Then we may as well sit down and talk in comfort. 
  Bring a chair for yourself, Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant for the next ten 
  minutes.”
  The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with a servant-like air, the air of a 
  valet enjoying a privilege. Winston regarded him out of the corner of his eye. It struck him that the 
  man’s whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed 
  personality even for a moment. O’Brien took the decanter by the neck and filled up the glasses with 
  a dark-red liquid. It aroused in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a 
  hoarding -- a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move up and down and pour 
  its contents into a glass. Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the decanter it 
  gleamed like a ruby. It had a sour-sweet smell. He saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at it with 
  frank curiosity.
  “It is called wine,” said O’Brien with a faint smile. “You will have read about it in books, no 
  doubt. Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am afraid.” His face grew solemn again, and he 
  raised his glass: “I think it is fitting that we should begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To 
  Emmanuel Goldstein.”
  Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing he had read and 
  dreamed  about.  Like  the  glass  paperweight  or  Mr.  Charrington’s  half-remembered  rhymes,  it 
  belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. 
  For some reason he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like that of 
  blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff 
  was distinctly disappointing. The truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it. 
  He set down the empty glass.
  “Then there is such a person as Goldstein?” he said.
  “Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do not know.”
  “And the conspiracy -- the organization? Is it real? It is not simply an invention of the 
  Thought Police?”
  “No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will never learn much more about the 
  Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it. I will come back to that presently.” He 
  looked at his wrist-watch.  “It is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the 
  telescreen for more than half an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and you will have 
  to leave separately. You, comrade” -- he bowed his head to Julia -- “will leave first. We have about 
  twenty  minutes at  our  disposal.  You  will  understand  that  I  must  start  by  asking  you  certain 
  questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to do?”
  “Anything that we are capable of,” said Winston.
  O’Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Winston. He almost 
  ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids 
  flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though 
  this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.
  “You are prepared to give your lives?”
  “Yes.”
  “You are prepared to commit murder?”
  “Yes.”
  “To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?”
  “Yes.”
  “To betray your country to foreign powers?”
  
  “Yes.”
  “You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to 
  distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases -- to do 
  anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?”
  “Yes.”
  “If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s 
  face -- are you prepared to do that?”
  “Yes.”
  “You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-
  worker?”
  “Yes.”
  “You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?”
  “Yes.”
  “You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?”
  “No!” broke in Julia.
  It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he 
  seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, 
  forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again. Until he had 
  said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. “No,” he said finally.
  “You did well to tell me,” said O’Brien. “It is necessary for us to know everything.”
  He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with somewhat more expression in it:
  “Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different person? We may be 
  obliged to give him a new identity. His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of 
  his hair -- even his voice would be different. And you yourself might have become a different 
  person. Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes 
  we even amputate a limb.”
  Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin’s Mongolian face. There 
  were no scars that he could see. Julia had turned a shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, 
  but she faced O’Brien boldly. She murmured something that seemed to be assent.
  “Good. Then that is settled.”
  There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather absent-minded air O’Brien 
  pushed them towards the others, took one himself, then stood up and began to pace slowly to and 
  fro, as though he could think better standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-
  packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. O’Brien looked at his wrist-watch again.
  “You had better go back to your Pantry, Martin,” he said. “I shall switch on in a quarter of an 
  hour. Take a good look at these comrades’ faces before you go. You will be seeing them again. I may 
  not.”
  Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little man’s dark eyes flickered over their 
  faces. There was not a trace of friendliness in his manner. He was memorizing their appearance, but 
  he felt no interest in them, or appeared to feel none. It occurred to Winston that a synthetic face 
  was  perhaps  incapable  of  changing  its  expression.  Without  speaking  or  giving  any  kind  of 
  salutation, Martin went out, closing the door silently behind him. O’Brien was strolling up and down, 
  one hand in the pocket of his black overalls, the other holding his cigarette.
  “You understand,” he said, “that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the 
  dark. You will receive orders and you will obey them, without knowing why. Later I shall send you a 
  book from which you will learn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategy by which 
  we shall destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full members of the Brotherhood. But 
  between the general aims that we are fighting for and the immedi ate tasks of the moment, you will 
  never know anything. I tell you that the Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers 
  a hundred members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge you will never be able to say 
  that it numbers even as many as a dozen. You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed 
  from time to time as they disappear. As this was your first contact, it will be preserved. When you 
  receive orders, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you, it will be 
  through Martin. When you are finally caught, you will confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have 
  very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a 
  handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not even betray me. By that time I may be dead, 
  or I shall have become a different person, with a different face.”
  He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In spite of the bulkiness of his body 
  there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It came out even in the gesture with which he 
  thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an 
  impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony. However much in earnest he 
  might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that belongs to a fanatic. When he spoke of 
  murder, suicide, venereal disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of 
  
  persiflage. “This is unavoidable,” his voice seemed to say; “this is what we have got to do, 
  unflinchingly. But this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth living again.” A wave of 
  admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards O’Brien. For the moment he had 
  forgotten the shadowy figure of Goldstein. When you looked at O’Brien’s powerful shoulders and his 
  blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe that he could be 
  defeated. There was no stratagem that he was not equal to, no danger that he could not foresee. 
  Even Julia seemed to be impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently. 
  O’Brien went on:
  “You will have heard rumours of the existence of the Brotherhood. No doubt you have 
  formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, 
  meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messages on walls, recognizing one another by codewords or 
  by special movements of the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the Brotherhood 
  have no way of recognizing one another, and it is impossible for any one member to be aware of 
  the identity of more than a few others. Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought 
  Police, could not give them a complete list of members, or any information that would lead them to 
  a complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an 
  organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. 
  You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no 
  encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At 
  most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to 
  smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner’s cell. You will have to get used to living without results and 
  without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. 
  Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change 
  will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall 
  take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there 
  is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the 
  area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards 
  from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is 
  no other way.”
  He halted and looked for the third time at his wrist-watch.
  “It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,” he said to Julia. “Wait. The decanter is still half 
  full.”
  He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the stem.
  “What shall it be this time?” he said, still with the same faint suggestion of irony. “To the 
  confusion of the Thought Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?”
  “To the past,” said Winston.
  “The past is more important,” agreed O’Brien gravely.
  They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood up to go. O’Brien took a small 
  box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat white tablet which he told her to place on her 
  tongue. It was important, he said, not to go out smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very 
  observant. As soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared to forget her existence. He took 
  another pace or two up and down, then stopped.
  “There are details to be settled,” he said. “I assume that you have a hiding-place of some 
  kind?”
  Winston explained about the room over Mr. Charrington’s shop.
  “That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something else for you. It is important to 
  change one’s hiding-place frequently. Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of  the book” -- even 
  O’Brien,  Winston  noticed,  seemed  to  pronounce  the  words  as  though  they  were  in  italics  -- 
  “Goldstein’s book, you understand, as soon as possible. It may be some days before I can get hold 
  of one. There are not many in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought Police hunt them down 
  and destroy them almost as fast as we can produce them. It makes very little difference. The book 
  is indestructible. If the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word. Do you 
  carry a brief-case to work with you?” he added.
  “As a rule, yes.”
  “What is it like?”
  “Black, very shabby. With two straps.”
  “Black, two straps, very shabby -- good. One day in the fairly near future -- I cannot give a 
  date -- one of the messages among your morning’s work will contain a misprinted word, and you 
  will have to ask for a repeat. On the following day you will go to work without your brief-case. At 
  some time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say ‘I think you have 
  dropped your brief-case.’ The one he gives you will contain a copy of Goldstein’s book. You will 
  return it within fourteen days.”
  They were silent for a moment.
  
  “There are a couple of minutes before you need go,” said O’Brien. “We shall meet again -- if 
  we do meet again--”
  Winston looked up at him. “In the place where there is no darkness?” he said hesitantly.
  O’Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. “In the place where there is no darkness,” 
  he said, as though he had recognized the allusion. “And in the meantime, is there anything that you 
  wish to say before you leave? Any message? Any question?.”
  Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he wanted to ask: still 
  less  did  he  feel  any  impulse  to  utter  high-sounding  generalities.  Instead of  anything  directly 
  connected with O’Brien or the Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of 
  the  dark  bedroom  where  his  mother  had  spent  her  last  days,  and  the  little  room  over  Mr. 
  Charrington’s shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood frame. 
  Almost at random he said:
  “Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells 
  of St Clement’s’?”
  Again O’Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he completed the stanza:
  “‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s,
  You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s,
  When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey,
  When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.’”
  “You knew the last line!” said Winston.
  “Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go. But wait. You had 
  better let me give you one of these tablets.”
  As Winston stood up O’Brien held out a hand. His powerful grip crushed the bones of 
  Winston’s palm. At the door Winston looked back, but O’Brien seemed already to be in process of 
  putting him out of mind. He was waiting with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen. 
  Beyond him Winston could see the writing-table with its green-shaded lamp and the speakwrite and 
  the wire baskets deep-laden with papers. The incident was closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred 
  to him, O’Brien would be back at his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.
  IX
  Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. It had come into his 
  head spontaneously. His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its translucency. 
  He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood and 
  lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structure 
  of  nerves,  bones,  and  skin.  All  sensations  seemed  to  be  magnified.  His  overalls  fretted  his 
  shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that 
  made his joints creak.
  He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had everyone else in the Ministry. 
  Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to do, no Party work of any description, until 
  tomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. 
  Slowly, in mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction of Mr. Charrington’s 
  shop, keeping one eye open for the patrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was 
  no danger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy brief-case that he was carrying bumped 
  against his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his leg. Inside it 
  was the book, which he had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor 
  even looked at.
  On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the 
  singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of 
  trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed 
  planes, the booming of guns -- after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its 
  climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could 
  have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the 
  last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces -- at just this 
  moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at 
  war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.
  There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became 
  known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the 
  enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the 
  
  moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly 
  floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand 
  schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, 
  a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank 
  locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he 
  gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony 
  arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed 
  forth  an endless catalogue  of  atrocities,  massacres,  deportations,  lootings,  rapings,  torture  of 
  prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost 
  impossible  to  listen  to  him  without  being  first  convinced  and  then  maddened.  At  every  few 
  moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild 
  beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all 
  came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a 
  messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He 
  unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the 
  content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave 
  of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment 
  there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated 
  were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of 
  Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, 
  banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot.  The Spies performed prodigies of activity in 
  clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within 
  two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his 
  shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. 
  One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate 
  continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
  The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from 
  one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking 
  the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the moment of 
  disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not see had tapped 
  him on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, I think you’ve dropped your brief-case.” He took the 
  brief-case  abstractedly,  without  speaking.  He  knew  that  it  would  be  days  before  he  had  an 
  opportunity to look inside it. The instant that the demonstration was over he went straight to the 
  Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the 
  Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to their 
  posts, were hardly necessary.
  Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large 
  part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all 
  kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs -- all had to be rectified at 
  lightning speed.  Although  no directive  was ever issued,  it  was known that the  chiefs  of  the 
  Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with 
  Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so 
  because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the 
  Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of 
  sleep.  Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all  over the corridors: meals 
  consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the 
  canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk 
  clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that 
  another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, halfburying the speakwrite 
  and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat enough 
  pile to give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely 
  mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report 
  of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in 
  transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
  By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed wiping every few 
  minutes. It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right 
  to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had 
  time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the 
  speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in 
  the Department that the forgery should be perfect. On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of 
  cylinders slowed down. For as much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube; then one more 
  cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off. A deep and as 
  it were secret sigh went through the Department. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, 
  
  had been achieved. It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence 
  that the war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was unexpectedly announced 
  that all workers in the Ministry were free till tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case 
  containing the book, which had remained between his feet while he worked and under his body 
  while he slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the water 
  was barely more than tepid.
  With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stair above Mr. Charrington’s 
  shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit the dirty little oilstove and 
  put on a pan of water for coffee. Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book. He sat 
  down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the brief-case.
  A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The print 
  also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as though 
  the book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title-page ran:
  THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
  OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
  by
  Emmanuel Goldstein
  Winston began reading:
  Chapter I
  Ignorance is Strength
  Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been 
  three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in 
  many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their 
  attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society 
  has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same 
  pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however 
  far it is pushed one way or the other.
  The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...
  Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in 
  comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to 
  glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his 
  cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there 
  was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his 
  feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was etemity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of 
  which one knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it at a different 
  place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on reading:
  Chapter III
  War is Peace
  The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and 
  indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by 
  Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and 
  Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after 
  another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three super-states are in some 
  places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they 
  follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and 
  Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic 
  islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller 
  than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the 
  south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and 
  Tibet.
  In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have 
  been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating 
  struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims 
  between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting 
  and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference This is not to say that either the conduct 
  of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On 
  
  the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, 
  looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals 
  against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, 
  when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical 
  sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes 
  comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers 
  whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which 
  guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of civilization war means no more than a 
  continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may 
  cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for 
  which war is waged have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were already present 
  to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth centuury have now become dominant 
  and are consciously recognized and acted upon.
  To understand the nature of the present war -- for in spite of the regrouping which occurs 
  every few years, it is always the same war -- one must realize in the first place that it is impossible 
  for it to be decisive. None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the 
  other  two in  combination.  They  are  too  evenly  matched,  and  their  natural  defences  are  too 
  formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and 
  the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and indus triousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no 
  longer,  in a material  sense, anything to fight about.  With the establishment of self-contained 
  economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for 
  markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for 
  raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of the three super-states is 
  so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far 
  as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between the frontiers of the 
  super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral 
  with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of 
  the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the 
  northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever 
  controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the 
  chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless 
  changes of alignment.
  All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important 
  vegetable  products  such as rubber  which in colder climates it  is necessary  to synthesize  by 
  comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. 
  Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, 
  or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-
  paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the 
  status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal 
  or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour 
  power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be 
  noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of 
  Eurasia flow  back  and  forth between the  basin of  the  Congo  and the  northern shore  of  the 
  Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and 
  recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is 
  never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are 
  largely unihabited and unexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the 
  territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the 
  labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world’s economy. 
  They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of 
  war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another 
  war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. 
  But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, 
  would not be essentially different.
  The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this 
  aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to 
  use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the 
  end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods 
  has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, 
  this problem is obviously not urgent,  and  it might  not  have  become  so,  even if  no artificial 
  processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place 
  compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary 
  future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision 
  
  of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of 
  glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate 
  person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to 
  assume  that  they  would  go  on  developing.  This  failed  to  happen,  partly  because  of  the 
  impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and 
  technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly 
  regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain 
  backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare 
  and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, 
  and  the  ravages  of  the  atomic  war  of  the  nineteen-fifties  have  never  been  fully  repaired. 
  Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the 
  machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human 
  drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine 
  were  used  deliberately  for  that  end,  hunger,  overwork,  dirt,  illiteracy,  and  disease  could  be 
  eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a 
  sort  of  automatic  process  --  by  producing  wealth  which  it  was  sometimes  impossible  not  to 
  distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average humand being very greatly 
  over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth 
  centuries.
  But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- 
  indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone 
  worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and 
  possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important 
  form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer 
  no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which  wealth, in the sense of 
  personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands 
  of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure 
  and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied 
  by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had 
  done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they 
  would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty 
  and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the 
  twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency 
  towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and 
  moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and 
  was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.
  Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of 
  goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 
  and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, 
  capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working 
  and kept half alive by State  charity.  But this,  too,  entailed military weakness,  and since the 
  privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was 
  how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods 
  must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this 
  was by continuous warfare.
  The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of 
  human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in 
  the  depths  of  the  sea,  materials  which  might  otherwise  be  used  to  make  the  masses  too 
  comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually 
  destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing 
  anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that 
  would build  several  hundred  cargo-ships.  Ultimately  it  is  scrapped as obsolete,  never having 
  brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating 
  Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might 
  exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are 
  always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; 
  but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups 
  somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance 
  of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the 
  standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, 
  laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed 
  flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or 
  three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter -- set him in a different world from a member of 
  
  the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with 
  the submerged masses whom we call “the proles”. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, 
  where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. 
  And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the 
  handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
  War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction,  but accomplishes it in a 
  psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of 
  the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by 
  producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the 
  economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the 
  morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the 
  morale  of  the  Party  itself.  Even  the  humblest  Party  member  is  expected  to  be  competent, 
  industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a 
  credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic 
  triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of 
  war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is 
  possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state 
  of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and 
  which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up 
  the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria 
  and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for 
  a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may 
  often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for 
  purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the 
  technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical 
  belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed 
  master of the entire world.
  All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith. It is to 
  be  achieved  either  by  gradually  acquiring  more  and  more  territory  and  so  building  up  an 
  overwhelming  preponderance  of  power,  or  by  the  discovery  of  some  new  and  unanswerable 
  weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining 
  activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at the 
  present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 
  “Science”. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past 
  were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological 
  progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human 
  liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are 
  cultivated  with  horse-ploughs  while  books  are  written  by  machinery.  But  in  matters  of  vital 
  importance  --  meaning, in effect,  war and police  espionage  -- the  empirical  approach  is  still 
  encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the 
  earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore 
  two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, 
  what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in 
  a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this 
  is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, 
  studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of 
  voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical 
  torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special 
  subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in 
  the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost 
  islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply 
  with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and 
  more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new 
  and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to 
  destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all 
  possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a 
  submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others 
  explore  even remoter possibilities such as focusing  the  sun’s  rays  through  lenses suspended 
  thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by 
  tapping the heat at the earth’s centre.
  But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, and none of the three 
  super-states ever gains a significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is that all three 
  powers already possess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any that their 
  
  present researches are likely to discover. Although the Party, according to its habit, claims the 
  invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as the nineteen-forties, and were first used 
  on a large scale about ten years later. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on 
  industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America. The effect was to 
  convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of 
  organized society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement was 
  ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three powers merely continue to produce 
  atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come 
  sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty 
  years. Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largely 
  superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable battleship has given way to the 
  almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, the 
  submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use. And 
  in spite of the endless slaughters reported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate 
  battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a 
  few weeks, have never been repeated.
  None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre which involves the risk of 
  serious defeat. When any large operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an 
  ally. The strategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are 
  following, is the same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes 
  of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival states, and 
  then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as 
  to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at 
  all the strategic spots; finally they will all be fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating as to 
  make retaliation impossible. It will then be time to sign a pact of friendship with the remaining 
  world-power, in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say, is a mere 
  daydream, impossible of realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas 
  round the Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. This explains the 
  fact that in some places the frontiers between the superstates are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, 
  could easily conquer the British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other hand 
  it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this 
  would violate the principle, followed on all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. If 
  Oceania were to conquer the areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it would be 
  necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate a 
  population of about a hundred million people, who, so far as technical development goes, are 
  roughly on the Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all three super-states. It is absolutely 
  necessary to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited 
  extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves. Even the official ally of the moment is always 
  regarded with the darkest suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets 
  eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign 
  languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures 
  similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in 
  which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale 
  depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or 
  Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except 
  bombs.
  Under this  lies a fact never  mentioned aloud,  but  tacitly understood and  acted  upon: 
  namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same. In Oceania the 
  prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is 
  called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as 
  Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the 
  other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and 
  common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems 
  which they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, 
  the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. 
  It follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no 
  advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another 
  up,  like  three  sheaves  of  corn.  And,  as  usual,  the  ruling  groups  of  all  three  powers  are 
  simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives are dedicated to world 
  conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and 
  without victory. Meanwhile the fact that there IS no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of 
  reality which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to 
  repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its 
  
  character.
  In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an 
  end,  usually  in  unmistakable  victory  or  defeat.  In  the  past,  also,  war  was  one  of  the  main 
  instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages 
  have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to 
  encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of 
  independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against 
  defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or 
  politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had 
  to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for 
  efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn 
  from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. 
  Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the 
  kind that is practised today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so 
  far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While 
  wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.
  But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is 
  continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most 
  palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called 
  scientific  are  still  carried  out  for  the  purposes  of  war,  but  they  are  essentially  a  kind  of 
  daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, 
  is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the 
  three super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any 
  perversion of thought can be safely practised. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of 
  everyday life -- the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or 
  stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like. Between life and death, and between physical 
  pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the 
  outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no 
  way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as 
  the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving 
  to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same 
  low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist 
  reality into whatever shape they choose.
  The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. 
  It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that 
  they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up 
  the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a 
  hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling 
  groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the 
  destructiveness  of  war,  did  fight  against  one  another,  and  the  victor  always  plundered  the 
  vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by 
  each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent 
  conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word “war”, therefore, 
  has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has 
  ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age 
  and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. 
  The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, 
  should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case 
  each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external 
  danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This -- although 
  the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense -- is the inner meaning 
  of the Party slogan: War is peace.
  Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket bomb 
  thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, 
  had not worn off.  Solitude and safety were physical sensations,  mixed up somehow with the 
  tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that 
  played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told 
  him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it 
  had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar 
  to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he 
  perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. He had just turned back to Chapter I when 
  he heard Julia’s footstep on the stair and started out of his chair to meet her. She dumped her 
  
  brown tool-bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was more than a week since they had 
  seen one another.
  “I’ve got the book,” he said as they disentangled themselves.
  “Oh, you’ve got it? Good,” she said without much interest, and almost immediately knelt 
  down beside the oil stove to make the coffee.
  They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half an hour. The evening 
  was just cool enough to make it worth while to pull up the counterpane. From below came the 
  familiar sound of singing and the scrape of boots on the flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman 
  whom Winston had seen there on his first visit was almost a fixture in the yard. There seemed to be 
  no hour of daylight when she was not marching to and fro between the washtub and the line, 
  alternately gagging herself with clothes pegs and breaking forth into lusty song. Julia had settled 
  down on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He reached out for the 
  book, which was lying on the floor, and sat up against the bedhead.
  “We must read it,” he said. “You too. All members of the Brotherhood have to read it.”
  “You read it,” she said with her eyes shut. “Read it aloud. That’s the best way. Then you can 
  explain it to me as you go.”
  The clock’s hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had three or four hours ahead of them. 
  He propped the book against his knees and began reading:
  Chapter I
  Ignorance is Strength
  Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been 
  three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in 
  many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their 
  attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society 
  has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same 
  pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibnum, however 
  far it is pushed one way or the other
  “Julia, are you awake?” said Winston.
  “Yes, my love, I’m listening. Go on. It’s marvellous.”
  He continued reading:
  The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain 
  where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when 
  they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by 
  drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to 
  abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history 
  a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the 
  High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they 
  lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then 
  overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are 
  fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the 
  Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new 
  Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins 
  over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving 
  their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of 
  a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off 
  than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or 
  revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, 
  no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
  By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern had become obvious to many 
  observers. There then rose schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and 
  claimed to show that inequality was the unalterable law of human life. This doctrine, of course, had 
  always had its adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put forward there was a significant 
  change. In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of 
  the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like 
  who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of compensation 
  in an imaginary world beyond the grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had 
  always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now, however, the concept of 
  human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not yet in positions of command, but 
  merely hoped to be so before long. In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of 
  equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The new 
  
  Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism, a theory which appeared in 
  the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave 
  rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant 
  of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality 
  was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle years of 
  the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly called, 
  in  Eastasia,  had  the  conscious  aim  of  perpetuating  UNfreedom  and  INequality.  These  new 
  movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service 
  to their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a 
  chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As usual, 
  the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who would then become the High; but this time, by 
  conscious strategy, the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.
  The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of historical knowledge, and the 
  growth of the historical sense, which had hardly existed before the nineteenth century. The cyclical 
  movement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was 
  alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth 
  century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal 
  in  their  native  talents  and that  functions  had  to  be  specialized in  ways that favoured some 
  individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large 
  differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. 
  Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the 
  case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was 
  no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point 
  of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an 
  ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted. In more primitive ages, when a just and 
  peaceful society was in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The idea of an earthly 
  paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without 
  brute labour, had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. And this vision had had a 
  certain hold even on the groups who actually profited by each historical change. The heirs of the 
  French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights 
  of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their 
  conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth 
  century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been 
  discredited at exactly the  moment when it became  realizable.  Every new political  theory,  by 
  whatever  name  it  called  itself,  led  back  to  hierarchy  and  regimentation.  And  in  the  general 
  hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in 
  some cases for hundreds of years -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, 
  public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole 
  populations -- not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people 
  who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.
  It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in 
  all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But 
  they had been foreshadowed by the various systems,  generally called totalitarian, which had 
  appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the 
  prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been 
  equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, 
  technicians,  trade-union  organizers,  publicity  experts,  sociologists,  teachers,  journalists,  and 
  professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper 
  grades of the  working class,  had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of 
  monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past 
  ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, 
  more  conscious  of  what  they  were  doing  and  more  intent  on  crushing  opposition.  This  last 
  difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were 
  half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, 
  and  were  content  to  leave  loose  ends  everywhere,  to  regard  only  the  overt  act  and  to  be 
  uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was 
  tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had 
  the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it 
  easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the 
  development  of  television,  and the  technical  advance  which made  it possible  to  receive  and 
  transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at 
  least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour hours a 
  day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of 
  
  communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the 
  State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
  After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, 
  into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon 
  instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only 
  secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they 
  are possessed jointly. The so-called “abolition of private property” which took place in the middle 
  years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: 
  but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. 
  Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, 
  the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products 
  as it thinks fit. In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding 
  position  almost  unopposed,  because  the  whole  process  was  represented  as  an  act  of 
  collectivization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism 
  must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, 
  houses, transport -- everything had been taken away from them: and since these things were no 
  longer private property, it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the 
  earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in 
  the  Socialist  programme;  with  the  result,  foreseen  and  intended  beforehand,  that  economic 
  inequality has been made permanent.
  But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only 
  four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it 
  governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented 
  Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These 
  causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling 
  class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the 
  determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.
  After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in reality disappeared. Each of 
  the three powers which now divide the world is in fact unconquerable, and could only become 
  conquerable through slow demographic changes which a government with wide powers can easily 
  avert. The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never revolt of their own 
  accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not 
  permitted  to  have  standards  of  comparison,  they  never  even  become  aware  that  they  are 
  oppressed. The recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now 
  permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations can and do happen without having 
  political results, because there is no way in which discontent can become articulate. As for the 
  problem of over-production, which has been latent in our society since the development of machine 
  technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III), which is also useful in 
  keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. From the point of view of our present rulers, 
  therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed, 
  power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The problem, 
  that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the 
  directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness 
  of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way.
  Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already, the general structure 
  of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-
  powerful.  Every  success,  every  achievement,  every  victory,  every  scientific  discovery,  all 
  knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and 
  inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the 
  telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable 
  uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit 
  itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions 
  which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization. Below Big Brother 
  comes the Inner Party. Its numbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per cent of the 
  population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is 
  described as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands. Below that come the dumb 
  masses whom we habitually refer to as “the proles”,  numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the 
  population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low: for the slave population 
  of the equatorial lands who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or 
  necessary part of the structure.
  In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. The child of Inner Party 
  parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by 
  examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked 
  
  domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to 
  be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn 
  from the inhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they 
  are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is 
  a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief lingua franca and 
  Newspeak its official language, it is not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by 
  blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true that our society is stratified, and very 
  rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro 
  movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism or even in the pre-
  industrial age. Between the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount of interchange, but 
  only so much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious 
  members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, in practice, 
  are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly 
  become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But 
  this state of affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party is not a 
  class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; 
  and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly 
  prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat. In the crucial years, 
  the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. The older 
  kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called “class privilege” assumed 
  that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy 
  need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been 
  shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for 
  hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, 
  but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the 
  living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not 
  concerned  with  perpetuating  its  blood  but  with  perpetuating  itself.  Who wields  power  is  not 
  important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
  All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are 
  really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day 
  society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at 
  present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will 
  continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, 
  not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be 
  other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it 
  necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer 
  important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do 
  not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because 
  they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of 
  opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.
  A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he 
  is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or 
  resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is 
  being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour 
  towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in 
  sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any 
  actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous 
  mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He 
  has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand his actions are not regulated 
  by law or by any clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and 
  actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless 
  purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for 
  crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might 
  perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. A Party member is required to have not only 
  the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are 
  never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in 
  Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker), he will in all circumstances 
  know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an 
  elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words 
  crimestop, blackwhite, and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any 
  subject whatever.
  A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. 
  He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, 
  
  triumph  over  victories,  and  self-abasement  before  the  power  and  wisdom  of  the  Party.  The 
  discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated 
  by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a 
  sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first 
  and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in 
  Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the 
  threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to 
  perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, 
  and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical 
  direction.  Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the 
  contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as 
  complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that 
  Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not 
  omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment 
  flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, 
  this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of 
  impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party 
  member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. 
  But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, 
  and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the 
  past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is 
  known in Newspeak as doublethink.
  The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to 
  speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates 
  present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from 
  the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe 
  that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly 
  rising. But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to 
  safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every 
  kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were 
  in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. 
  For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia 
  or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the 
  enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously 
  rewritten. This day-to-day falsification of the  past,  carried out by the Ministry of Truth,  is as 
  necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the 
  Ministry of Love.
  The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no 
  objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories.  The past is 
  whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all 
  records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever 
  the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been 
  altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the 
  moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed. This holds 
  good even when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition several 
  times in the course of a year. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the 
  absolute can never have been different from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of the 
  past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure that all written records agree with 
  the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to remember that 
  events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one’s memories or to 
  tamper with written records, then it is necessary to forget that one has done so. The trick of doing 
  this can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned by the majority of Party members, 
  and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 
  “reality control”. In Newspeak it is called doublethink, though doublethink comprises much else as 
  well.
  Doublethink means  the  power  of  holding  two  contradictory  beliefs  in  one’s  mind 
  simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his 
  memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the 
  exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be 
  conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, 
  or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of 
  Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the 
  firmness  of  purpose  that  goes  with  complete  honesty.  To  tell  deliberate  lies  while  genuinely 
  
  believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes 
  necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence 
  of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is 
  indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. 
  For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink 
  one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. 
  Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able -- and may, for all we know, 
  continue to be able for thousands of years -- to arrest the course of history.
  All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they 
  grew  soft.  Either  they  became  stupid  and  arrogant,  failed  to  adjust  themselves  to  changing 
  circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when 
  they should have used force, and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either 
  through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have 
  produced a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other 
  intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to 
  continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to 
  combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.
  It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented 
  doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have 
  the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it 
  is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less 
  sane. One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in 
  the social scale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the subject 
  peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which 
  sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete 
  indifference to them. They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be 
  doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as the old 
  ones.  The  slightly  more  favoured  workers  whom  we  call  “the  proles”  are  only  intermittently 
  conscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but 
  when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It 
  is in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. 
  World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar 
  linking-together of opposites -- knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism -- is one of the 
  chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even 
  when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for 
  which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It 
  preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past,  and it dresses its 
  members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that 
  reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name 
  which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by 
  which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The 
  Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with 
  torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do 
  they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by 
  reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient 
  cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, 
  are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled 
  insanity.
  But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored. It is; why should 
  human equality  be  averted? Supposing  that  the  mechanics of  the  process have  been rightly 
  described,  what is the  motive  for this huge, accurately planned effort to freeze  history at a 
  particular moment of time?
  Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen. the mystique of the Party, and above all 
  of the Inner Party, depends upon  doublethink But deeper than this lies the original motive, the 
  never-questioned  instinct  that  first  led to  the  seizure  of  power  and  brought  doublethink,  the 
  Thought  Police,  continuous  warfare,  and  all  the  other  necessary  paraphernalia  into  existence 
  afterwards. This motive really consists...
  Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound. It seemed to him 
  that Julia had been very still for some time past. She was lying on her side, naked from the waist 
  upwards, with her cheek pillowed on her hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Her 
  breast rose and fell slowly and regularly.
  “Julia.”
  
  No answer.
  “Julia, are you awake?”
  No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it carefully on the floor, lay down, and 
  pulled the coverlet over both of them.
  He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood how; he did not 
  understand why. Chapter I, like Chapter III, had not actually told him anything that he did not know, 
  it had merely systematized the knowledge that he possessed already. But after reading it he knew 
  better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make 
  you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the 
  whole world, you were not mad. A yellow beam from the sinking sun slanted in through the window 
  and fell across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face and the girl’s smooth body touching 
  his own gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell 
  asleep murmuring “Sanity is not statistical,” with the feeling that this remark contained in it a 
  profound wisdom.
  When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept for a long time, but a glance at the 
  old-fashioned clock told him that it was only twenty-thirty. He lay dozing for a while; then the usual 
  deep-lunged singing struck up from the yard below:
  “It was only an ’opeless fancy,
  It passed like an Ipril dye,
  But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred
  They ’ave stolen my ’eart awye!”
  The driveling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still heard it all over the place. It 
  had outlived the Hate Song. Julia woke at the sound, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of 
  bed.
  “I’m hungry,” she said. “Let’s make some more coffee. Damn! The stove’s gone out and the 
  water’s cold.” She picked the stove up and shook it. “There’s no oil in it.”
  “We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.”
  “The funny thing is I made sure it was full. I’m going to put my clothes on,” she added. “It 
  seems to have got colder.”
  Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable voice sang on:
  “They sye that time ’eals all things,
  They sye you can always forget;
  But the smiles an’ the tears acrorss the years
  They twist my ’eart-strings yet!”
  As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window. The sun must have 
  gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the yard any longer. The flagstones were wet 
  as though they had just been washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so 
  fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, 
  corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more 
  and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of 
  twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across to his side; together they gazed down with a 
  sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he looked at the woman in her characteristic 
  attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck 
  him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a 
  woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by 
  work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and 
  after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping 
  red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the 
  fruit be held inferior to the flower?
  “She’s beautiful,” he murmured.
  “She’s a metre across the hips, easily,” said Julia.
  “That is her style of beauty,” said Winston.
  He held Julia’s supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her flank 
  was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing they could 
  never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman 
  down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered 
  how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary 
  
  flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized 
  fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, 
  cooking,  sweeping,  polishing,  mending,  scrubbing,  laundering,  first  for  children,  then  for 
  grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical 
  reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, 
  stretching away behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was curious to think that the 
  sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the 
  sky were also very much the same -- everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of 
  millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of 
  hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same -- people who had never learned to think but who 
  were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the 
  world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of the book, he knew 
  that that must be Goldstein’s final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he be 
  sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, 
  Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity. 
  Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change 
  into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that 
  valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though 
  it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from 
  body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.
  “Do you remember,” he said, “the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the 
  wood?”
  “He wasn’t singing to us,” said Julia. “He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He 
  was just singing.”
  The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and 
  New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the 
  streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and 
  Japan -- everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and 
  childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of 
  conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share 
  in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret 
  doctrine that two plus two make four.
  “We are the dead,” he said.
  “We are the dead,” echoed Julia dutifully.
  “You are the dead,” said an iron voice behind them.
  They sprang apart. Winston’s entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see the 
  white all round the irises of Julia’s eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that 
  was still  on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin 
  beneath.
  “You are the dead,” repeated the iron voice.
  “It was behind the picture,” breathed Julia.
  “It was behind the picture,”  said the  voice. “Remain exactly where you are. Make no 
  movement until you are ordered.”
  It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing except stand gazing into one 
  another’s eyes. To run for life, to get out of the house before it was too late -- no such thought 
  occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall. There was a snap as though 
  a catch had been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had fallen to the floor 
  uncovering the telescreen behind it.
  “Now they can see us,” said Julia.
  “Now we can see you,” said the voice. “Stand out in the middle of the room. Stand back to 
  back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one another.”
  They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia’s body shaking. Or 
  perhaps it was merely the shaking of his own. He could just stop his teeth from chattering, but his 
  knees were beyond his control. There was a sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and 
  outside. The yard seemed to be full of men. Something was being dragged across the stones. The 
  woman’s singing had stopped abruptly. There was a long, rolling clang, as though the washtub had 
  been flung across the yard, and then a confusion of angry shouts which ended in a yell of pain.
  “The house is surrounded,” said Winston.
  “The house is surrounded,” said the voice.
  He heard Julia snap her teeth together. “I suppose we may as well say good-bye,” she said.
  “You may as well say good-bye,” said the voice. And then another quite different voice, a 
  thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in; “And by 
  the way, while we are on the subject, Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a 
  
  chopper to chop off your head!”
  Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston’s back. The head of a ladder had been 
  thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window. 
  There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with 
  iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands.
  Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he barely moved. One thing alone 
  mattered; to keep still, to keep still and not give them an excuse to hit you! A man with a smooth 
  prize-fighter’s jowl in which the mouth was only a slit paused opposite him balancing his truncheon 
  meditatively between thumb and forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The feeling of nakedness, with 
  one’s hands behind one’s head and one’s face and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. The 
  man protruded the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and then 
  passed on. There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table 
  and smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.
  The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across 
  the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was! There was a gasp and a thump 
  behind him, and he received a violent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. One 
  of the men had smashed his fist into Julia’s solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler. She was 
  thrashing about on the floor, fighting for breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a 
  millimetre, but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within the angle of his vision. Even in his 
  terror it was as though he could feel the pain in his own body, the deadly pain which nevertheless 
  was less urgent than the struggle to get back her breath. He knew what it was like; the terrible, 
  agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not be suffered yet, because before all else it 
  was necessary to be able to breathe. Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, 
  and carried her out of the room like a sack. Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow 
  and contorted, with the eyes shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that was the 
  last he saw of her.
  He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which came of their own accord but 
  seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind. He wondered whether they had got Mr. 
  Charrington. He wondered what they had done to the woman in the yard. He noticed that he badly 
  wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago. He 
  noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light seemed too 
  strong. Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an August evening? He wondered 
  whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the time -- had slept the clock round and thought it was 
  twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning. But he did not pursue 
  the thought further. It was not interesting.
  There ws another, lighter step in the passage. Mr. Charrington came into the room. The 
  demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also 
  changed in Mr. Charrington’s appearance. His eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight.
  “Pick up those pieces,” he said sharply.
  A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared; Winston suddenly realized 
  whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the telescreen. Mr. Charrington was 
  still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also 
  he was not wearing his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his 
  identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was still recognizable, but he was not the same 
  person any longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had 
  undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black 
  eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have 
  altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty. 
  It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member 
  of the Thought Police.
  PART III
  I
  He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love, but there was no 
  way of making certain. He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white 
  porcelain. 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. 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. There were four telescreens, one in each wall.
  There was a dull aching in his belly. It had been there ever since they had bundled him into 
  the closed van and driven him away. But he was also hungry, with a gnawing, unwholesome kind of 
  hunger. It might be twenty-four hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did not 
  know, probably never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when they arrested 
  him. Since he was arrested he had not been fed.
  He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his hands crossed on his knee. He had 
  already learned to sit still. If you made unexpected movements they yelled at you from the 
  telescreen. But the craving for food was growing upon him. What he longed for above all was a 
  piece of bread. He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs in the pocket of his overalls. It 
  was even possible -- he thought this because from time to time something seemed to tickle his leg 
  -- that there might be a sizeable bit of crust there. In the end the temptation to find out overcame 
  his fear; he slipped a hand into his pocket.
  “Smith!” yelled a voice from the telescreen. “6079 Smith W! Hands out of pockets in the 
  cells!”
  He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Before being brought here he had been 
  taken to another place which must have been an ordinary prison or a temporary lock-up used by 
  the patrols. He did not know how long he had been there; some hours at any rate; with no clocks 
  and no daylight it was hard to gauge the time. It was a noisy, evil-smelling place. They had put him 
  into a cell similar to the one he was now in, but filthily dirty and at all times crowded by ten or 
  fifteen people.  The  majority  of  them were  common criminals,  but  there  were  a  few  political 
  prisoners among them. 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.  The  Party 
  prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing for 
  anybody.  They yelled  insults  at  the  guards,  fought  back  fiercely  when  their  belongings  were 
  impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled food which they produced from 
  mysterious hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when it tried to 
  restore order. 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. The guards, 
  too, treated the common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle them 
  roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour camps to which most of the  prisoners 
  expected to be sent. It was “all right” in the camps, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts 
  and knew the ropes. There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was 
  homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol distilled from potatoes. The positions 
  of trust were given only to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers, who 
  formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals.
  There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every description: drug-peddlers, thieves, 
  bandits, black-marketeers, drunks, prostitutes. Some of the drunks were so violent that the other 
  prisoners had to combine to suppress them. 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. 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. The woman hoisted herself upright and followed 
  them out with a yell of “F-- bastards!” Then, noticing that she was sitting on something uneven, she 
  slid off Winston’s knees on to the bench.
  “Beg pardon, dearie,” she said. “I wouldn’t ’a sat on you, only the buggers put me there. 
  They dono ’ow to treat a lady, do they?” She paused, patted her breast, and belched. “Pardon,” she 
  said, “I ain’t meself, quite.”
  She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.
  “Thass better,” she said, leaning back with closed eyes. “Never keep it down, thass what I 
  say. Get it up while it’s fresh on your stomach, like.”
  She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and seemed immediately to take a 
  fancy to him. She put a vast arm round his shoulder and drew him towards her, breathing beer and 
  vomit into his face.
  “Wass your name, dearie?” she said.
  “Smith,” said Winston.
  “Smith?”  said  the  woman.  “Thass  funny.  My  name’s  Smith  too.  Why,”  she  added 
  sentimentally, “I might be your mother!”
  She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about the right age and physique, and 
  it was probable that people changed somewhat after twenty years in a forced-labour camp.
  No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent the ordinary criminals ignored the 
  
  Party prisoners. “The polits,” they called them, with a sort of uninterested contempt. The Party 
  prisoners seemed terrified of speaking to anybody, and above all of speaking to one another. Only 
  once, when two Party members, both women, were pressed close together on the bench, he 
  overheard amid the din of voices a few hurriedly-whispered words; and in particular a reference to 
  something called “room one-oh-one”, which he did not understand.
  It might be two or three hours ago that they had brought him here. The dull pain in his belly 
  never went away, but sometimes it grew better and sometimes worse, and his thoughts expanded 
  or contracted accordingly. When it grew worse he thought only of the pain itself, and of his desire 
  for food. When it grew better, panic took hold of him. There were moments when he foresaw the 
  things that would happen to him with such actuality that his heart galloped and his breath stopped. 
  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. He hardly thought of Julia. He 
  could not fix his mind on her. He loved her and would not betray her; but that was only a fact, 
  known as he knew the rules of arithmetic. He felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered 
  what was happening to her. He thought oftener of O’Brien, with a flickering hope. O’Brien might 
  know that he had been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried to save its members. 
  But there was the razor blade; they would send the razor blade if they could. There would be 
  perhaps five seconds before the guard could rush into the cell. The blade would bite into him with a 
  sort of burning coldness, and even the fingers that held it would be cut to the bone. Everything 
  came back to his sick body, which shrank trembling from the smallest pain. He was not certain that 
  he would use the razor blade even if he got the chance. 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.
  Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain bricks in the walls of the cell. It 
  should have been easy, but he always lost count at some point or another. More often he wondered 
  where he was, and what time of day it was. At one moment he felt certain that it was broad daylight 
  outside,  and  at  the  next  equally  certain  that  it  was  pitch  darkness.  In  this  place,  he  knew 
  instinctively, the lights would never be turned out. It was the place with no darkness: he saw now 
  why O’Brien had seemed to recognize the allusion. In the Ministry of Love there were no windows. 
  His cell might be at the heart of the building or against its outer wall; it might be ten floors below 
  ground, or thirty above it. 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.
  There was a sound of marching boots outside. The steel door opened with a clang. 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 
  motioned to the guards outside to bring in the prisoner they were leading. The poet Ampleforth 
  shambled into the cell. The door clanged shut again.
  Ampleforth made one or two uncertain movements from side to side, as though having 
  some idea that there was another door to go out of, and then began to wander up and down the 
  cell. He had not yet noticed Winston’s presence. His troubled eyes were gazing at the wall about a 
  metre above the level of Winston’s head. He was shoeless; large, dirty toes were sticking out of the 
  holes in his socks. He was also several days away from a shave. A scrubby beard covered his face 
  to the cheekbones, giving him an air of ruffianism that went oddly with his large weak frame and 
  nervous movements.
  Winston roused hirnself a little from his lethargy. He must speak to Ampleforth, and risk the 
  yell from the telescreen. It was even conceivable that Ampleforth was the bearer of the razor blade.
  “Ampleforth,” he said.
  There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth paused, mildly startled. His eyes focused 
  themselves slowly on Winston.
  “Ah, Smith!” he said. “You too!”
  “What are you in for?”
  “To tell you the truth --.” He sat down awkwardly on the bench opposite Winston. “There is 
  only one offence, is there not?” he said.
  “And have you committed it?”
  “Apparently I have.”
  He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for a moment, as though trying to 
  remember something.
  “These things happen,” he began vaguely. “I have been able to recall one instance -- a 
  possible instance. It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the 
  poems of Kipling. I allowed the word ‘God’ to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!” he 
  added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. “It was impossible to change the line. 
  The rhyme was ‘rod’. Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to ‘rod’ in the entire 
  language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme.”
  
  The expression on his face changed. The annoyance passed out of it and for a moment he 
  looked almost pleased. A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out some 
  useless fact, shone through the dirt and scrubby hair.
  “Has it ever occurred to you,” he said, “that the whole history of English poetry has been 
  determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?”
  No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston. Nor, in the circumstances, did it 
  strike him as very important or interesting.
  “Do you know what time of day it is?” he said.
  Ampleforth looked startled again. “I had hardly thought about it. They arrested me -- it could 
  be two days ago -- perhaps three.” His eyes flitted round the walls, as though he half expected to 
  find a window somewhere. “There is no difference between night and day in this place. I do not see 
  how one can calculate the time.”
  They talked desultorily for some minutes, then, without apparent reason, a yell from the 
  telescreen bade them be silent. Winston sat quietly, his hands crossed. Ampleforth, too large to sit 
  in comfort on the narrow bench, fidgeted from side to side, clasping his lank hands first round one 
  knee, then round the other. The telescreen barked at him to keep still. Time passed. Twenty 
  minutes, an hour -- it was difficult to judge. Once more there was a sound of boots outside. 
  Winston’s entrails contracted. Soon, very soon, perhaps in five minutes, perhaps now, the tramp of 
  boots would mean that his own turn had come.
  The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped into the cell. With a brief movement 
  of the hand he indicated Ampleforth.
  “Room 101,” he said.
  Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards,  his face vaguely perturbed, but 
  uncomprehending.
  What seemed like a long time passed. The pain in Winston’s belly had revived. His mind 
  sagged round and round on the same trick, like a ball falling again and again into the same series of 
  slots. He had only six thoughts. The pain in his belly; a piece of bread; the blood and the screaming; 
  O’Brien; Julia; the razor blade. There was another spasm in his entrails, the heavy boots were 
  approaching. As the door opened, the wave of air that it created brought in a powerful smell of cold 
  sweat. Parsons walked into the cell. He was wearing khaki shorts and a sports-shirt.
  This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness.
  “You here!” he said.
  Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there was neither interest nor surprise, but only 
  misery.  He  began walking  jerkily  up  and  down,  evidently  unable  to  keep  still.  Each time  he 
  straightened his pudgy knees it was apparent that they were trembling. His eyes had a wide-open, 
  staring look, as though he could not prevent himself from gazing at something in the middle 
  distance.
  “What are you in for?” said Winston.
  “Thoughtcrime!” said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone of his voice implied at once a 
  complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous horror that such a word could be applied to 
  himself. He paused opposite Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: “You don’t think they’ll 
  shoot me, do you, old chap? They don’t shoot you if you haven’t actually done anything -- only 
  thoughts, which you can’t help? I know they give you a fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They’ll 
  know my record, won’t they? You know what kind of chap I was. Not a bad chap in my way. Not 
  brainy, of course, but keen. I tried to do my best for the Party, didn’t I? I’ll get off with five years, 
  don’t you think? Or even ten years? A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in a labour-
  camp. They wouldn’t shoot me for going off the rails just once?”
  “Are you guilty?” said Winston.
  “Of course I’m guilty!” cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. “You don’t think 
  the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?” His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a 
  slightly  sanctimonious  expression.  “Thoughtcrime  is  a  dreadful  thing,  old  man,”  he  said 
  sententiously. “It’s insidious. It can get hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how 
  it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that’s a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit -- 
  never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you 
  know what they heard me saying?”
  He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to utter an obscenity.
  “‘Down with Big Brother!’ Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again, it seems. Between you 
  and me, old man, I’m glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I’m going to 
  say to them when I go up before the tribunal? ‘Thank you,’ I’m going to say, ‘thank you for saving 
  me before it was too late.’“
  “Who denounced you?” said Winston.
  “It was my little daughter,” said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. “She listened at the 
  keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a 
  
  nipper of seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud of her. It shows I brought 
  her up in the right spirit, anyway.”
  He made a few more jerky movements up and down, several times, casting a longing glance 
  at the lavatory pan. Then he suddenly ripped down his shorts.
  “Excuse me, old man,” he said. “I can’t help it. It’s the waiting.”
  He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory pan. Winston covered his face with his 
  hands.
  “Smith!” yelled the voice from the telescreen. “6079 Smith W! Uncover your face. No faces 
  covered in the cells.”
  Winston uncovered his face. Parsons used the lavatory, loudly and abundantly. It then turned 
  out that the plug was defective and the cell stank abominably for hours afterwards.
  Parsons was removed. More prisoners came and went, mysteriously. One, a woman, was 
  consigned to “Room 101”, and, Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel and turn a different colour when 
  she heard the words. A time came when, if it had been morning when he was brought here, it would 
  be afternoon; or if it had been afternoon, then it would be midnight. There were six prisoners in the 
  cell, men and women. All sat very still. Opposite Winston there sat a man with a chinless, toothy 
  face exactly like that of some large, harmless rodent. 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. His 
  pale-grey eyes flitted timorously from face to face and turned quickly away again when he caught 
  anyone’s eye.
  The door opened, and another prisoner was brought in whose appearance sent a momentary 
  chill  through  Winston.  He  was  a  commonplace,  mean-looking  man  who  might  have  been  an 
  engineer or technician of some kind. But what was startling was the emaciation of his face. It was 
  like a skull. 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.
  The man sat down on the bench at a little distance from Winston. 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. Suddenly he realized what was the matter. The man was dying of starvation. 
  The same thought seemed to occur almost simultaneously to everyone in the cell. There was a very 
  faint stirring all the way round the bench. The eyes of the chinless man kept flitting towards the 
  skull-faced man, then turning guiltily away, then being dragged back by an irresistible attraction. 
  Presently he began to fidget on his seat. 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.
  There was a furious, deafening roar from the telescreen. The chinless man jumped in his 
  tracks. The skull-faced man had quickly thrust his hands behind his back, as though demonstrating 
  to all the world that he refused the gift.
  “Bumstead!” roared the voice. “2713 Bumstead J! Let fall that piece of bread!”
  The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor.
  “Remain standing where you are,” said the voice. “Face the door. Make no movement.”
  The chinless man obeyed. His large pouchy cheeks were quivering uncontrollably. The door 
  clanged open. As the young officer entered and stepped aside, there emerged from behind him a 
  short stumpy guard with enormous arms and shoulders. He took his stand opposite the chinless 
  man, and then, at a signal from the officer, let free a frightful blow, with all the weight of his body 
  behind it, full in the chinless man’s mouth. The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the 
  floor. His body was flung across the cell and fetched up against the base of the lavatory seat. For a 
  moment he lay as though stunned, with dark blood oozing from his mouth and nose. A very faint 
  whimpering or squeaking, which seemed unconscious, came out of him. Then he rolled over and 
  raised himself unsteadily on hands and knees. Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the two halves of 
  a dental plate fell out of his mouth.
  The prisoners sat very still, their hands crossed on their knees. The chinless man climbed 
  back into his place. Down one side of his face the flesh was darkening. His mouth had swollen into a 
  shapeless cherry-coloured mass with a black hole in the middle of it.
  From time to time a little blood dripped on to the breast of his overalls. His grey eyes still 
  flitted from face to face, more guiltily than ever, as though he were trying to discover how much the 
  others despised him for his humiliation.
  The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indicated the skull-faced man.
  “Room 101,” he said.
  There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston’s side. The man had actually flung himself on his 
  knees on the floor, with his hand clasped together.
  “Comrade! Officer!” he cried. “You don’t have to take me to that place! Haven’t I told you 
  everything already? What else is it you want to know? There’s nothing I wouldn’t confess, nothing! 
  Just tell me what it is and I’ll confess straight off. Write it down and I’ll sign it -- anything! Not room 
  
  101!”
  “Room 101,” said the officer.
  The  man’s  face,  already  very  pale,  turned  a  colour  Winston  would  not  have  believed 
  possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of green.
  “Do anything to me!” he yelled. “You’ve been starving me for weeks. Finish it off and let me 
  die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you want me to 
  give away? Just say who it is and I’ll tell you anything you want. I don’t care who it is or what you do 
  to them. I’ve got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn’t six years old. You can take the 
  whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I’ll stand by and watch it. But not 
  Room 101!”
  “Room 101,” said the officer.
  The man looked frantically round at the other prisoners, as though with some idea that he 
  could put another victim in his own place. His eyes settled on the smashed face of the chinless 
  man. He flung out a lean arm.
  “That’s the one you ought to be taking, not me!” he shouted. “You didn’t hear what he was 
  saying after they bashed his face. Give me a chance and I’ll tell you every word of it. He’s the one 
  that’s against the Party, not me.” The guards stepped forward. The man’s voice rose to a shriek. 
  “You didn’t hear him!” he repeated. “Something went wrong with the telescreen. He’s the one you 
  want. Take him, not me!”
  The two sturdy guards had stooped to take him by the arms. But just at this moment he 
  flung himself across the floor of the cell and grabbed one of the iron legs that supported the bench. 
  He had set up a wordless howling, like an animal. The guards took hold of him to wrench him loose, 
  but he clung on with astonishing strength. For perhaps twenty seconds they were hauling at him. 
  The prisoners sat quiet, their hands crossed on their knees, looking straight in front of them. The 
  howling stopped; the man had no breath left for anything except hanging on. Then there was a 
  different kind of cry. A kick from a guard’s boot had broken the fingers of one of his hands. They 
  dragged him to his feet.
  “Room 101,” said the officer.
  The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with head sunken, nursing his crushed hand, all 
  the fight had gone out of him.
  A long time passed. If it had been midnight when the skull-faced man was taken away, it was 
  morning: if morning, it was afternoon. Winston was alone, and had been alone for hours. The pain of 
  sitting on the narrow bench was such that often he got up and walked about, unreproved by the 
  telescreen. The piece of bread still lay where the chinless man had dropped it. At the beginning it 
  needed a hard effort not to look at it, but presently hunger gave way to thirst. His mouth was sticky 
  and evil-tasting. The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a sort of faintness, an 
  empty feeling inside his head. He would get up because the ache in his bones was no longer 
  bearable, and then would sit down again almost at once because he was too dizzy to make sure of 
  staying on his feet. Whenever his physical sensations were a little under control the terror returned. 
  Sometimes with a fading hope he thought of O’Brien and the razor blade. It was thinkable that the 
  razor blade might arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed. More dimly he thought of Julia. 
  Somewhere or other she was suffering perhaps far worse than he. She might be screaming with 
  pain at this moment. He thought: “If I could save Julia by doubling my own pain, would I do it? Yes, I 
  would.” But that was merely an intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to take 
  it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and foreknowledge of 
  pain. Besides, was it possible, when you were actually suffering it, to wish for any reason that your 
  own pain should increase? But that question was not answerable yet.
  The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O’Brien came in.
  Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had driven all caution out of him. For the 
  first time in many years he forgot the presence of the telescreen.
  “They’ve got you too!” he cried.
  “They got me a long time ago,” said O’Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony. He stepped 
  aside. From behind him there emerged a broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his 
  hand.
  “You know this, Winston,” said O’Brien. “Don’t deceive yourself. You did know it -- you have 
  always known it.”
  Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no time to think of that. All he had 
  eyes for was the truncheon in the guard’s hand. It might fall anywhere; on the crown, on the tip of 
  the ear, on the upper arm, on the elbow--
  The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralysed, clasping the stricken elbow with 
  his other hand. Everything had exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one 
  blow could cause such pain! The light cleared and he could see the other two looking down at him. 
  The guard was laughing at his contortions. One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any 
  
  reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that 
  it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. 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.
  II
  He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except that it was higher off the 
  ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he could not move. Light that seemed 
  stronger than usual was falling on his face. O’Brien was standing at his side, looking down at him 
  intently. At the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe.
  Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings only gradually. He had the 
  impression of swimming up into this room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater 
  world far beneath it. How long he had been down there he did not know. Since the moment when 
  they  arrested  him  he  had  not  seen  darkness  or  daylight.  Besides,  his  memories  were  not 
  continuous. 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. But whether the intervals were 
  of days or weeks or only seconds, there was no way of knowing.
  With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had started. Later he was to realize that all 
  that then happened was merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners 
  were subjected. There was a long range of crimes -- espionage, sabotage, and the like -- to which 
  everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession was a formality, though the torture 
  was real. How many times he had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could not 
  remember. Always there were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it 
  was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots. 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 were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable 
  thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not force hirnself 
  into losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve so forsook him that he began shouting 
  for mercy even before the beating began, when the mere sight of a fist drawn back for a blow was 
  enough to make him pour forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes. There were other times 
  when he started out with the resolve of confessing nothing, when every word had to be forced out 
  of him between gasps of pain, and there were times when he feebly tried to compromise, when he 
  said to himself: “I will confess, but not yet. I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable. Three 
  more kicks, two more kicks, and then I will tell them what they want.” 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. There were also longer periods of 
  recovery. He remembered them dimly, because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor. He 
  remembered a cell with a plank bed, a sort of shelf sticking out from the wall, and a tin wash-basin, 
  and meals of hot soup and bread and sometimes coffee. He remembered a surly barber arriving to 
  scrape his chin and crop his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his 
  pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over him in search for 
  broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make him sleep.
  The beatings grew less frequent, and became mainly a threat, a horror to which he could be 
  sent back at any moment when his answers were unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not 
  ruffians in black uniforms but Party intellectuals, little rotund men with quick movements and 
  flashing spectacles, who worked on him in relays over periods which lasted -- he thought, he could 
  not be sure -- ten or twelve hours at a stretch. These other questioners saw to it that he was in 
  constant slight pain, but it was not chiefly pain that they relied on. 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. Their real weapon was the merciless questioning that went on 
  and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything that he said, 
  convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction until he began weeping as much from 
  shame as from nervous fatigue Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a single session. 
  Most of the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened at every hesitation to deliver him 
  over to the guards again; but sometimes they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, 
  appeal to him in the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even now he 
  had not enough loyalty to the Party left to make him wish to undo the evil he had done. When his 
  
  nerves were in rags after hours of questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling 
  tears. In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of 
  the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed, whatever was demanded 
  of him. His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it 
  quickly, before the bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party 
  members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public funds, sale of military 
  secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian 
  government as far back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of 
  capitalism, and a sexual pervert. He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, 
  and his questioners must have known, that his wife was still alive. He confessed that for years he 
  had been in personal touch with Goldstein and had been a member of an underground organization 
  which had included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confess 
  everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true that he had been 
  the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought 
  and the deed.
  There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in his mind disconnectedly, like 
  pictures with blackness all round them.
  He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light, because he could see nothing 
  except a pair of eyes. Near at hand some kind of instrument was ticking slowly and regularly. The 
  eyes grew larger and more luminous. Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes, and 
  was swallowed up.
  He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, under dazzling lights. A man in a white 
  coat was reading the dials. There was a tramp of heavy boots outside. The door clanged open. The 
  waxed-faced officer marched in, followed by two guards.
  “Room 101,” said the officer.
  The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not look at Winston either; he was 
  looking only at the dials.
  He was rolling down a mighty corridor, a kilometre wide, full of glorious, golden light, roaring 
  with laughter and shouting out confessions at the top of his voice. He was confessing everything, 
  even the things he had succeeded in holding back under the torture. He was relating the entire 
  history of his life to an audience who knew it already. With him were the guards, the other 
  questioners, the men in white coats, O’Brien, Julia, Mr Charrington, all rolling down the corridor 
  together and shouting with laughter. Some dreadful thing which had lain embedded in the future 
  had somehow been skipped over and had not happened. Everything was all right, there was no 
  more pain, the last detail of his life was laid bare, understood, forgiven.
  He was starting up from the plank bed in the half-certainty that he had heard O’Brien’s 
  voice. All through his interrogation, although he had never seen him, he had had the feeling that 
  O’Brien was at his elbow, just out of sight. It was O’Brien who was directing everything. It was he 
  who set the guards on to Winston and who prevented them from killing him. 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. It was he who asked the 
  questions and suggested the answers. He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the 
  inquisitor, he was the friend. And once -- Winston could not remember whether it was in drugged 
  sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in a moment of wakefulness -- a voice murmured in his ear: 
  “Don’t worry, Winston; you are in my keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the 
  turning-point has come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.” He was not sure whether it was 
  O’Brien’s voice; but it was the same voice that had said to him, “We shall meet in the place where 
  there is no darkness,” in that other dream, seven years ago.
  He did not remember any ending to his interrogation. There was a period of blackness and 
  then the cell, or room, in which he now was had gradually materialized round him. He was almost 
  flat on his back, and unable to move. His body was held down at every essential point. Even the 
  back of his head was gripped in some manner. O’Brien was looking down at him gravely and rather 
  sadly. His face, seen from below, looked coarse and worn, with pouches under the eyes and tired 
  lines from nose to chin. He was older than Winston had thought him; he was perhaps forty-eight or 
  fifty. Under his hand there was a dial with a lever on top and figures running round the face.
  “I told you,” said O’Brien, “that if we met again it would be here.”
  “Yes,” said Winston.
  Without any warning except a slight movement of O’Brien’s hand, a wave of pain flooded his 
  body. It was a frightening pain, because he could not see what was happening, and he had the 
  feeling that some mortal injury was being done to him. He did not know whether the thing was 
  really happening, or whether the effect was electrically produced; but his body was being wrenched 
  out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart. Although the pain had brought the sweat out 
  on his forehead, the worst of all was the fear that his backbone was about to snap. He set his teeth 
  
  and breathed hard through his nose, trying to keep silent as long as possible.
  “You are afraid,” said O’Brien, watching his face, “that in another moment something is 
  going to break. Your especial fear is that it will be your backbone. You have a vivid mental picture of 
  the vertebrae snapping apart and the spinal fluid dripping out of them. That is what you are 
  thinking, is it not, Winston?”
  Winston did not answer. O’Brien drew back the lever on the dial. The wave of pain receded 
  almost as quickly as it had come.
  “That was forty,” said O’Brien. “You can see that the numbers on this dial run up to a 
  hundred. 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? 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. Do you understand that?”
  “Yes,” said Winston.
  O’Brien’s manner became less severe. He resettled his spectacles thoughtfully, and took a 
  pace or two up and down. When he spoke his voice was gentle and patient. He had the air of a 
  doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish.
  “I am taking trouble with you, Winston,” he said, “because you are worth trouble. You know 
  perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought 
  against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are 
  unable to remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which 
  never happened. Fortunately it is curable. You have never cured yourself of it, because you did not 
  choose to. There was a small effort of the will that you were not ready to make. Even now, I am well 
  aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue. Now we will take an 
  example. At this moment, which power is Oceania at war with?”
  “When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with Eastasia.”
  “With Eastasia. Good. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, has it not?”
  Winston drew in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak and then did not speak. He could 
  not take his eyes away from the dial.
  “The truth, please, Winston. Your truth. Tell me what you think you remember.”
  “I remember that until only a week before I was arrested, we were not at war with Eastasia 
  at all. We were in alliance with them. The war was against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. 
  Before that--”
  O’Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand.
  “Another example,” he said. “Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You 
  believed that three men, three one-time Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford 
  men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession -- 
  were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable 
  documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph 
  about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was 
  a photograph something like this.”
  An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’s fingers. For perhaps five 
  seconds it was within the angle of Winston’s vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question 
  of its identity. It was THE photograph. 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. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he 
  had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the 
  top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For 
  the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers 
  again, or at least to see it.
  “It exists!” he cried.
  “No,” said O’Brien.
  He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted 
  the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was 
  vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.
  “Ashes,” he said. “Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.”
  “But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.”
  “I do not remember it,” said O’Brien.
  Winston’s heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he 
  could have been certain that O’Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was 
  perfectly possible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would 
  have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be 
  sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: 
  that was the thought that defeated him.
  
  O’Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher 
  taking pains with a wayward but promising child.
  “There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,” he said. “Repeat it, if you 
  please.”
  “‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,’” 
  repeated Winston obediently.
  “‘Who controls the present controls the past,’” said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow 
  approval. “Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?”
  Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. 
  He not only did not know whether “yes” or “no” was the answer that would save him from pain; he 
  did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.
  O’Brien smiled faintly. “You are no metaphysician, Winston,” he said. “Until this moment you 
  had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist 
  concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is 
  still happening?”
  “No.”
  “Then where does the past exist, if at all?”
  “In records. It is written down.”
  “In records. And--?”
  “In the mind. In human memories.”
  “In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. 
  Then we control the past, do we not?”
  “But how can you stop people remembering things?” cried Winston again momentarily 
  forgetting the dial. “It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have 
  not controlled mine!”
  O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
  “On the contrary,” he said, “you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. 
  You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of 
  submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the 
  disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, 
  existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude 
  yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing 
  as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and 
  nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: 
  only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the 
  truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is 
  the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the 
  will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.”
  He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to sink in.
  “Do you remember,” he went on, “writing in your diary, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that 
  two plus two make four’?”
  “Yes,” said Winston.
  O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four 
  fingers extended.
  “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
  “Four.”
  “And if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?”
  “Four.”
  The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat 
  had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans 
  which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still 
  extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
  “How many fingers, Winston?”
  “Four.”
  The needle went up to sixty.
  “How many fingers, Winston?”
  “Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!”
  The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the 
  four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and 
  seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
  “How many fingers, Winston?”
  “Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!”
  “How many fingers, Winston?”
  
  “Five! Five! Five!”
  “No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, 
  please?”
  “Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!”
  Abruptly he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost 
  consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt 
  very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his 
  cheeks. For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round 
  his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that 
  came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.
  “You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
  “How can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two 
  and two are four.”
  “Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they 
  are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
  He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbs tightened again, but the pain had 
  ebbed away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold. O’Brien motioned 
  with his head to the man in the white coat, who had stood immobile throughout the proceedings. 
  The man in 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.
  “Again,” said O’Brien.
  The pain flowed into Winston’s body. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He had 
  shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there, and still four. All that mattered was 
  somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whether he was crying 
  out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O’Brien had drawn back the lever.
  “How many fingers, Winston?”
  “Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.”
  “Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?”
  “Really to see them.”
  “Again,” said O’Brien.
  Perhaps the needle was eighty -- ninety. Winston could not intermittently remember why the 
  pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a 
  sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was 
  trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count 
  them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain 
  died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. 
  Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and 
  recrossing. He shut his eyes again.
  “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
  “I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six -- in all honesty 
  I don’t know.”
  “Better,” said O’Brien.
  A needle slid into Winston’s arm. Almost in the same instant a blissful, healing warmth 
  spread all through his body. The pain was already half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up 
  gratefully at O’Brien. At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligent, his heart seemed 
  to turn over. If he could have moved he would have stretched out a hand and laid it on O’Brien arm. 
  He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the 
  pain. The old feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy, 
  had come back. O’Brien was a person who could be talked to. Perhaps one did not want to be loved 
  so much as to be understood. O’Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it 
  was certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference. In some sense that went deeper 
  than friendship, they were intimates: somewhere or other, although the actual words might never 
  be spoken, there was a place where they could meet and talk. O’Brien was looking down at him with 
  an expression which suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind. When he spoke it 
  was in an easy, conversational tone.
  “Do you know where you are, Winston?” he said.
  “I don’t know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.”
  “Do you know how long you have been here?”
  “I don’t know. Days, weeks, months -- I think it is months.”
  “And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?”
  “To make them confess.”
  “No, that is not the reason. Try again.”
  “To punish them.”
  
  “No!” exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly 
  become both stern and animated. “No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. 
  Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, 
  Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not 
  interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt 
  act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do 
  you understand what I mean by that?”
  He was bending over Winston. His face looked enormous because of its nearness, and 
  hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover it was filled with a sort of exaltation, a 
  lunatic intensity. Again Winston’s heart shrank. If it had been possible he would have cowered 
  deeper  into  the  bed.  He  felt  certain  that  O’Brien  was  about  to  twist  the  dial  out  of  sheer 
  wantonness. At this moment, however, O’Brien turned away. He took a pace or two up and down. 
  Then he continued less vehemently:
  “The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms. You have 
  read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisitlon. It was a 
  failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at 
  the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in 
  the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they 
  were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all 
  the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the 
  twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis 
  and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had 
  done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any 
  rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they 
  deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude 
  until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, 
  covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for 
  mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had 
  become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, 
  because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make 
  mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And 
  above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will 
  vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream 
  of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, 
  not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well 
  as in the future. You will never have existed.”
  Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a momentary bitterness. O’Brien 
  checked his step as though Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came nearer, 
  with the eyes a little narrowed.
  “You are thinking,” he said, “that since we intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing that 
  you say or do can make the smallest difference -- in that case, why do we go to the trouble of 
  interrogating you first? That is what you were thinking, was it not?”
  “Yes,” said Winston.
  O’Brien smiled slightly. “You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be 
  wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are 
  not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you 
  surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists 
  us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we 
  reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in 
  appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is 
  intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and 
  powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days 
  the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. 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. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old 
  despotisms was ‘Thou shalt not’. The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt’. Our command 
  is ‘Thou art’. No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed 
  clean. Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed -- Jones, Aaronson, 
  and Rutherford -- in the end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw 
  them gradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping -- and in the end it was not with pain 
  or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of 
  men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. 
  It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die 
  
  while their minds were still clean.”
  His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his 
  face. He is not pretending, thought Winston, he is not a hypocrite, he believes every word he says. 
  What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched the 
  heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision. O’Brien was a 
  being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that 
  O’Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind contained Winston’s mind. But 
  in that case how could it be true that O’Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad. 
  O’Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had grown stern again.
  “Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to 
  us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the 
  natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. 
  Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming 
  back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. 
  Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. 
  Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or 
  courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with 
  ourselves.”
  He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston was aware of some heavy piece 
  of apparatus being pushed into place behind his head. O’Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that 
  his face was almost on a level with Winston’s.
  “Three thousand,” he said, speaking over Winston’s head to the man in the white coat.
  Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against Winston’s temples. He 
  quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O’Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, 
  on his.
  “This time it will not hurt,” he said. “Keep your eyes fixed on mine.”
  At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like an explosion, though 
  it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. 
  Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the 
  thing happened, he had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that position. A terrific 
  painless blow had flattened him out. Also something had happened inside his head. 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.
  “It will not last,” said O’Brien. “Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?”
  Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania and that he himself was a citizen of 
  Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not 
  know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war.
  “I don’t remember.”
  “Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that now?”
  “Yes.”
  “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the 
  beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, 
  always the same war. Do you remember that?”
  “Yes.”
  “Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been condemned to 
  death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent. 
  No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You 
  remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?”
  “Yes.”
  “Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember 
  that?”
  “Yes.”
  O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
  “There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?”
  “Yes.”
  And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw 
  five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the 
  hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment -- he did 
  not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps -- of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of 
  O’Brien’s had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two 
  could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded but before 
  O’Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one 
  
  remembers a vivid experience at some period of one’s life when one was in effect a different 
  person.
  “You see now,” said O’Brien, “that it is at any rate possible.”
  “Yes,” said Winston.
  O’Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left Winston saw the man in the white coat 
  break an ampoule and draw back the plunger of a syringe. O’Brien turned to Winston with a smile. 
  In almost the old manner he resettled his spectacles on his nose.
  “Do you remember writing in your diary,” he said, “that it did not matter whether I was a 
  friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You 
  were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that 
  you happen to be insane. Before we bring the session to an end you can ask me a few questions, if 
  you choose.”
  “Any question I like?”
  “Anything.” He saw that Winston’s eyes were upon the dial. “It is switched off. What is your 
  first question?”
  “What have you done with Julia?” said Winston.
  O’Brien smiled again. “She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately-unreservedly. I have seldom 
  seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw her. All her 
  rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness -- everything has been burned out of her. 
  It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.”
  “You tortured her?”
  O’Brien left this unanswered. “Next question,” he said.
  “Does Big Brother exist?”
  “Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.”
  “Does he exist in the same way as I exist?”
  “You do not exist,” said O’Brien.
  Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him. He knew, or he could imagine, the 
  arguments which proved his own nonexistence; but they were nonsense, they were only a play on 
  words. Did not the statement, “You do not exist”, contain a logical absurdity? But what use was it to 
  say so? His mind shrivelled as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments with which O’Brien 
  would demolish him.
  “I think I exist,” he said wearily. “I am conscious of my own identity. I was born and I shall 
  die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the 
  same point simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?”
  “It is of no importance. He exists.”
  “Will Big Brother ever die?”
  “Of course not. How could he die? Next question.”
  “Does the Brotherhood exist?”
  “That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with 
  you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that 
  question is Yes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.”
  Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little faster. He still had not asked the question 
  that had come into his mind the first. He had got to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue 
  would not utter it. There was a trace of amusement in O’Brien’s face. Even his spectacles seemed 
  to wear an ironical gleam. He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows what I am going to ask! 
  At the thought the words burst out of him:
  “What is in Room 101?”
  The expression on O’Brien’s face did not change. He answered drily:
  “You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.”
  He raised a finger to the man in the white coat. Evidently the session was at an end. A 
  needle jerked into Winston’s arm. He sank almost instantly into deep sleep.
  III
  “There are three stages in your reintegration,” said O’Brien. “There is learning, there is 
  understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.”
  As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his bonds were looser. They still 
  held him to the bed, but he could move his knees a little and could turn his head from side to side 
  and raise his arms from the elbow. The dial, also, had grown to be less of a terror. He could evade 
  its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he showed stupidity that O’Brien pulled 
  the lever. Sometimes they got through a whole session without use of the dial. He could not 
  
  remember how many sessions there had been. 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.
  “As you lie there,” said O’Brien, “you have often wondered -- you have even asked me -- why 
  the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble on you. And when you were free you 
  were puzzled by what was essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the 
  Society you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, ‘I 
  understand how: I do not understand why’? It was when you thought about ‘why’ that you doubted 
  your own sanity. You have read the book, Goldstein’s book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you 
  anything that you did not know already?”
  “You have read it?” said Winston.
  “I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you 
  know.”
  “Is it true, what it says?”
  “A description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret accumulation of 
  knowledge -- a gradual spread of enlightenment -- ultimately a proletarian rebellion -- the overthrow 
  of the Party. You foresaw yourself that that was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians 
  will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not have to tell you the 
  reason: you know it already. If you have ever cherished any dreams of violent insurrection, you 
  must abandon them. There is no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is 
  for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.”
  He came closer to the bed. “For ever!” he repeated. “And now let us get back to the 
  question of ‘how’ and ‘why’. You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power. 
  Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak,” 
  he added as Winston remained silent.
  Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or two. A feeling of weariness had 
  overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come back into O’Brien’s face. He knew 
  in advance what O’Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for 
  the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly 
  creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically 
  deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between 
  freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the 
  party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, 
  sacrificing its own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing 
  was that when O’Brien said this he would believe it. You could see it in his face. O’Brien knew 
  everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what the world was really like, in what 
  degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them 
  there. He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified by the 
  ultimate purpose. 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?
  “You are ruling over us for our own good,” he said feebly. “You believe that human beings 
  are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore--”
  He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O’Brien had 
  pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.
  “That was stupid, Winston, stupid!” he said. “You should know better than to say a thing like 
  that.”
  He pulled the lever back and continued:
  “Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for 
  its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not 
  wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will 
  understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we 
  are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. 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. 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. We are not like that. We know that no one 
  ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does 
  not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to 
  establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. 
  The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
  Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of O’Brien’s face. It was 
  strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which 
  he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from 
  
  the cheekbones. O’Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.
  “You are thinking,” he said, “that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of 
  power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, 
  Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. 
  Do you die when you cut your fingernails?”
  He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his 
  pocket.
  “We are the priests of power,” he said. “God is power. But at present power is only a word so 
  far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first 
  thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he 
  ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: ‘Freedom is Slavery’. Has it ever occurred to 
  you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone -- free -- the human being is always defeated. It 
  must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if 
  he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself 
  in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to 
  realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. 
  Power over matter -- external reality, as you would call it -- is not important. Already our control 
  over matter is absolute.”
  For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise himself into a 
  sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully.
  “But how can you control matter?” he burst out. “You don’t even control the climate or the 
  law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death--”
  O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. “We control matter because we control the 
  mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could 
  not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do 
  not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas 
  about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.”
  “But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? 
  You have not conquered them yet.”
  “Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference 
  would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.”
  “But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny helpless! How long has he been 
  in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.”
  “Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists 
  except through human consciousness.”
  “But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals -- mammoths and mastodons and 
  enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.”
  “Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists 
  invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would 
  be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.”
  “But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-
  years away. They are out of our reach for ever.”
  “What are the stars?” said O’Brien indifferently. “They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. 
  We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the 
  universe. The sun and the stars go round it.”
  Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien 
  continued as though answering a spoken objection:
  “For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. 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. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond 
  us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need 
  them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?”
  Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a 
  bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside 
  your own mind -- surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been 
  exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile 
  twitched the corners of O’Brien’s mouth as he looked down at him.
  “I told you, Winston,” he said, “that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are 
  trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you 
  like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,” he added in a 
  different tone. “The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over 
  things, but over men.” He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster 
  questioning a promising pupil: “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”
  
  Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.
  “Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you 
  be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. 
  Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your 
  own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact 
  opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and 
  treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not 
  less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more 
  pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon 
  hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. 
  Everything else we shall destroy -- everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought 
  which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, 
  and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a 
  friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from 
  their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation 
  will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our 
  neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. 
  There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of 
  triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are 
  omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and 
  ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will 
  be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of 
  power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be 
  the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of 
  the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.”
  He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to shrink back into 
  the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O’Brien 
  went on:
  “And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The 
  heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over 
  again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands -- all that will 
  continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the 
  disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The 
  more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the 
  despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be 
  defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have 
  played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after 
  generation, always in subtler forms. 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. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory 
  after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the 
  nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end 
  you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.”
  Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. “You can’t!” he said weakly.
  “What do you mean by that remark, Winston?”
  “You  could  not  create  such  a  world  as  you  have  just  described.  It  is  a  dream.  It  is 
  impossible.”
  “Why?”
  “It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never 
  endure.”
  “Why not?”
  “It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.”
  “Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why 
  should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear 
  ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. 
  Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not 
  death? The party is immortal.”
  As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if 
  he persisted in his disagreement O’Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep 
  silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what 
  O’Brien had said, he returned to the attack.
  “I don’t know -- I don’t care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will 
  defeat you.”
  
  “We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called 
  human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human 
  nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the 
  proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like 
  the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside -- irrelevant.”
  “I don’t care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you 
  are, and then they will tear you to pieces.”
  “Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it should?”
  “No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe -- I don’t know, 
  some spirit, some principle -- that you will never overcome.”
  “Do you believe in God, Winston?”
  “No.”
  “Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?”
  “I don’t know. The spirit of Man.”
  “And do you consider yourself a man?.”
  “Yes.”
  “If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. 
  Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent.” His manner 
  changed and he said more harshly: “And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies 
  and our cruelty?”
  “Yes, I consider myself superior.”
  O’Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment Winston recognized 
  one of them as his own. It was a sound-track of the conversation he had had with O’Brien, on the 
  night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, 
  to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to 
  throw vitriol in a child’s face. O’Brien made a small impatient gesture, as though to say that the 
  demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped.
  “Get up from that bed,” he said.
  The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself to the floor and stood up 
  unsteadily.
  “You are the last man,” said O’Brien. “You are the guardian of the human spirit. You shall see 
  yourself as you are. Take off your clothes.”
  Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip fastener had long 
  since been wrenched out of them. He could not remember whether at any time since his arrest he 
  had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy 
  yellowish rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid them to the ground he 
  saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room. He approached it, then stopped 
  short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.
  “Go on,” said O’Brien. “Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall see the side view as 
  well.”
  He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing was 
  coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it 
  to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature’s face seemed to be protruded, because 
  of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird’s face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a 
  crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful. The 
  cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed 
  to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be 
  different from the ones he felt. He had gone partially bald. For the first moment he had thought that 
  he had gone grey as well, but it was only the scalp that was grey. Except for his hands and a circle 
  of his face, his body was grey all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. 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. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The 
  barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were 
  thicker than the thighs. He saw now what O’Brien had meant about seeing the side view. The 
  curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a 
  cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull. At 
  a guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant 
  disease.
  “You have thought sometimes,” said O’Brien, “that my face -- the face of a member of the 
  Inner Party -- looks old and worn. What do you think of your own face?”
  He seized Winston’s shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing him.
  “Look at the condition you are in!” he said. “Look at this filthy grime all over your body. Look 
  at the dirt between your toes. Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that 
  
  you stink like a goat? Probably you have ceased to notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see? I 
  can make my thumb and forefinger meet round your bicep. I could snap your neck like a carrot. Do 
  you know that you have lost twenty-five kilograms since you have been in our hands? Even your 
  hair is coming out in handfuls. Look!” He plucked at Winston’s head and brought away a tuft of hair. 
  “Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How many had you when you came to us? And the 
  few you have left are dropping out of your head. Look here!”
  He  seized  one  of  Winston’s  remaining  front  teeth  between  his  powerful  thumb  and 
  forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston’s jaw. O’Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out 
  by the roots. He tossed it across the cell.
  “You are rotting away,” he said; “you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now 
  turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. 
  If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.”
  Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements. Until now he had not seemed to 
  notice how thin and weak he was. Only one thought stirred in his mind: that he must have been in 
  this place longer than he had imagined. Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round himself 
  a feeling of pity for his ruined body overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing he had 
  collapsed on to a small stool that stood beside the bed and burst into tears. He was aware of his 
  ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh 
  white light: but he could not stop himself. O’Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly.
  “It will not last for ever,” he said. “You can escape from it whenever you choose. Everything 
  depends on yourself.”
  “You did it!” sobbed Winston. “You reduced me to this state.’
  “No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you set yourself up 
  against the Party. It was all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did not 
  foresee.”
  He paused, and then went on:
  “We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You have seen what your body is 
  like. Your mind is in the same state. I do not think there can be much pride left in you. You have 
  been kicked and flogged and insulted, you have screamed with pain, you have rolled on the floor in 
  your own blood and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed everybody and 
  everything. Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?”
  Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still oozing out of his eyes. He looked 
  up at O’Brien.
  “I have not betrayed Julia,” he said.
  O’Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. “No,” he said; “no; that is perfectly true. You have 
  not betrayed Julia.”
  The peculiar reverence for O’Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy, flooded Winston’s 
  heart again. How intelligent, he thought, how intelligent! Never did O’Brien fail to understand what 
  was said to him. Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly that he had betrayed Julia. 
  For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under the torture? He had told them 
  everything he knew about her, her habits, her character, her past life; he had confessed in the most 
  trivial detail everything that had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to her and she to 
  him, their black-market meals, their adulteries, their vague plottings against the Party -- everything. 
  And yet, in the sense in which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not stopped 
  loving her; his feelings towards her had remained the same. O’Brien had seen what he meant 
  without the need for explanation.
  “Tell me,” he said, “how soon will they shoot me?”
  “It might be a long time,” said O’Brien. “You are a difficult case. But don’t give up hope. 
  Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.”
  IV
  He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger every day, if it was proper to 
  speak of days.
  The white light and the humming sound were the same as ever, but the cell was a little more 
  comfortable than the others he had been in. There was a pillow and a mattress on the plank bed, 
  and a stool to sit on. They had given him a bath, and they allowed him to wash himself fairly 
  frequently in a tin basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They had given him new 
  underclothes and a clean suit of overalls.  They had dressed his varicose  ulcer with soothing 
  ointment. They had pulled out the remnants of his teeth and given him a new set of dentures.
  Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to keep count of the 
  
  passage of time, if he had felt any interest in doing so, since he was being fed at what appeared to 
  be regular intervals. He was getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he 
  wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food was surprisingly good, 
  with meat at every third meal. Once there was even a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but 
  the never-speaking guard who brought his food would give him a light. 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.
  They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied to the corner. At first he made 
  no use of it. Even when he was awake he was completely torpid. Often he would lie from one meal 
  to the next almost without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries in 
  which it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He had long grown used to sleeping with a strong 
  light on his face. It seemed to make no difference, except that one’s dreams were more coherent. 
  He dreamed a great deal all through this time, and they were always happy dreams. He was in the 
  Golden Country, or he was sitting among enormous glorious, sunlit ruins, with his mother, with Julia, 
  with O’Brien -- not doing anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such 
  thoughts as he had when he was awake were mostly about his dreams. He seemed to have lost the 
  power of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he 
  had no desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to 
  have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying.
  By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still felt no impulse to get off the 
  bed. All he cared for was to lie quiet and feel the strength gathering in his body. He would finger 
  himself here and there, trying to make sure that it was not an illusion that his muscles were growing 
  rounder and his skin tauter. Finally it was established beyond a doubt that he was growing fatter; 
  his thighs were now definitely thicker than his knees. After that, reluctantly at first, he began 
  exercising himself regularly. In a little while he could walk three kilometres, measured by pacing the 
  cell, and his bowed shoulders were growing straighter. He attempted more elaborate exercises, and 
  was astonished and humiliated to find what things he could not do. He could not move out of a 
  walk, he could not hold his stool out at arm’s length, he could not stand on one leg without falling 
  over. He squatted down on his heels, and found that with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he could 
  just lift himself to a standing position. He lay flat on his belly and tried to lift his weight by his 
  hands. It was hopeless, he could not raise himself a centimetre. But after a few more days -- a few 
  more mealtimes -- even that feat was accomplished. A time came when he could do it six times 
  running. He began to grow actually proud of his body, and to cherish an intermittent belief that his 
  face also was growing back to normal. Only when he chanced to put his hand on his bald scalp did 
  he remember the seamed, ruined face that had looked back at him out of the mirror.
  His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank bed, his back against the wall and the 
  slate on his knees, and set to work deliberately at the task of re-educating himself.
  He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now, he had been ready to 
  capitulate long before he had taken the decision. From the moment when he was inside the Ministry 
  of Love -- and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while the iron 
  voice from the telescreen told them what to do -- he had grasped the frivolity, the shallowness of 
  his attempt to set himself up against the power of the Party. He knew now that for seven years the 
  Thought police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, 
  no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to 
  infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary they had carefully replaced. They had 
  played sound-tracks to him, shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia and 
  himself. Yes, even... He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the 
  right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external 
  standard could you check its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of 
  learning to think as they thought. Only--!
  The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down the thoughts that 
  came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:
  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
  Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:
  TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE
  But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though shying away from something, seemed 
  unable to concentrate. He knew that he knew what came next, but for the moment he could not 
  recall it. When he did recall it, it was only by consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not 
  come of its own accord. He wrote:
  
  GOD IS POWER
  He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania 
  was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and 
  Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph 
  that disproved their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered remembering 
  contrary things, but those were false memories, products of self-deception. How easy it all was! 
  Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you 
  backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the 
  current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined 
  thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, 
  except--!
  Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was 
  nonsense. “If I wished,” O’Brien had said, “I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.” Winston 
  worked it out. “If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then 
  the thing happens.” Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, 
  the thought burst into his mind: “It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.” He 
  pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or 
  other, outside oneself, there was a “real” world where “real” things happened. But how could there 
  be  such  a  world?  What  knowledge  have  we  of  anything,  save  through  our  own  minds?  All 
  happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
  He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger of succumbing to it. 
  He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The mind should develop a 
  blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself.  The process should be  automatic, 
  instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.
  He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions -- 
  “the Party says the earth is flat”, “the party says that ice is heavier than water” -- and trained 
  himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It 
  needed  great  powers  of  reasoning  and  improvisation.  The  arithmetical  problems  raised,  for 
  instance, by such a statement as “two and two make five” were beyond his intellectual grasp. 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. Stupidity was as necessary 
  as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
  All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how soon they would shoot him. 
  “Everything depends on yourself,” O’Brien had said; but he knew that there was no conscious act 
  by which he could bring it nearer. It might be ten minutes hence, or ten years. 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. It was perfectly possible that before he was shot the whole drama 
  of his arrest and interrogation would be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that 
  death never came at an expected moment. The tradition -- the unspoken tradition: somehow you 
  knew it, though you never heard it said -- was that they shot you from behind; always in the back of 
  the head, without warning, as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell.
  One day -- but “one day” was not the right expression; just as probably it was in the middle 
  of the night: once -- he fell into a strange, blissful reverie. He was walking down the corridor, 
  waiting for the bullet. He knew that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled, 
  smoothed out, reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more pain, no more 
  fear. His body was healthy and strong. He walked easily, with a joy of movement and with a feeling 
  of walking in sunlight. 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. He was in the Golden Country, following the foot-track across the old 
  rabbit-cropped pasture. He could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine 
  on his face. At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring, and somewhere beyond that 
  was the stream where the dace lay in the green pools under the willows.
  Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat broke out on his backbone. He had 
  heard himself cry aloud:
  “Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!”
  For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence. She had seemed 
  to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of his skin. 
  In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and 
  free. Also he knew that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
  He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What had he done? How many years 
  had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness?
  
  In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside. They could not let such an 
  outburst go unpunished. They would know now, if they had not known before, that he was breaking 
  the agreement he had made with them. He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old 
  days he had hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had retreated a 
  step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate. He 
  knew that he was in the wrong, but he preferred to be in the wrong. They would understand that -- 
  O’Brien would understand it. It was all confessed in that single foolish cry.
  He would have to start all over again. It might take years. He ran a hand over his face, trying 
  to familiarize himself with the new shape. There were deep furrows in the cheeks, the cheekbones 
  felt sharp, the nose flattened. Besides, since last seeing himself in the glass he had been given a 
  complete new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve inscrutability when you did not know what 
  your face looked like. In any case, mere control of the features was not enough. For the first time he 
  perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all 
  the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness 
  in any shape that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must 
  feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of 
  matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.
  One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would happen, but a few 
  seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking down a 
  corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world inside him could turn over. 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. 
  Hatred would fill him like an enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would 
  go the bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could 
  reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They 
  would have blown a hole in their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.
  He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual discipline. It was a 
  question of degrading himself, mutilating himself. He had got to plunge into the filthiest of filth. 
  What was the most horrible, sickening thing of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous face 
  (because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as being a metre wide), with its 
  heavy black moustache and the eyes that followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of 
  its own accord. What were his true feelings towards Big Brother?
  There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel door swung open with a clang. 
  O’Brien walked into the cell. Behind him were the waxen-faced officer and the black-uniformed 
  guards.
  “Get up,” said O’Brien. “Come here.”
  Winston stood opposite him. O’Brien took Winston’s shoulders between his strong hands and 
  looked at him closely.
  “You have had thoughts of deceiving me,” he said. “That was stupid. Stand up straighter. 
  Look me in the face.”
  He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:
  “You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong with you. It is only emotionally 
  that you have failed to make progress. Tell me, Winston -- and remember, no lies: you know that I 
  am always able to detect a lie -- tell me, what are your true feelings towards Big Brother?”
  “I hate him.”
  “You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love 
  Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.”
  He released Winston with a little push towards the guards.
  “Room 101,” he said.
  V
  At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know, whereabouts he was 
  in the windowless building. Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure. The cells where 
  the guards had beaten him were below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated by 
  O’Brien was high up near the roof. This place was many metres underground, as deep down as it 
  was possible to go.
  It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But he hardly noticed his surroundings. 
  All he noticed was that there were two small tables straight in front of him, each covered with green 
  baize. One was only a metre or two from him, the other was further away, near the door. He was 
  strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad 
  
  gripped his head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of him.
  For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O’Brien came in.
  “You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the 
  answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”
  The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket 
  of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O’Brien was 
  standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.
  “The worst thing in the world,” said O’Brien, “varies from individual to individual. It may be 
  burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are 
  cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.”
  He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the 
  table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was 
  something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or 
  four  metres  away  from  him,  he  could  see  that  the  cage  was  divided  lengthways  into  two 
  compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.
  “In your case,” said O’Brien, “the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.”
  A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston 
  as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like 
  attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.
  “You can’t do that!” he cried out in a high cracked voice. “You couldn’t, you couldn’t! It’s 
  impossible.”
  “Do you remember,” said O’Brien, “the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? 
  There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was 
  something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared 
  not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.”
  “O’Brien!”  said  Winston,  making  an  effort  to  control  his  voice.  “You  know  this  is  not 
  necessary. What is it that you want me to do?”
  O’Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner that 
  he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an 
  audience somewhere behind Winston’s back.
  “By itself,” he said, “pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being 
  will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something 
  unendurable -- something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If 
  you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep 
  water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. 
  It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you 
  cannot withstand. even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.
  “But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don’t know what it is?”
  O’Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the nearer table. He set it down carefully 
  on the baize cloth. Winston could hear the blood singing in his ears. He had the feeling of sitting in 
  utter loneliness. He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with sunlight, 
  across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances. Yet the cage with the rats was not 
  two metres away from him. They were enormous rats. They were at the age when a rat’s muzzle 
  grows blunt and fierce and his fur brown instead of grey.
  “The  rat,”  said  O’Brien,  still  addressing  his  invisible  audience,  “although  a  rodent,  is 
  carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor 
  quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for 
  five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will strip it to the 
  bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a 
  human being is helpless.”
  There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed to reach Winston from far away. 
  The rats were fighting; they were trying to get at each other through the partition. He heard also a 
  deep groan of despair. That, too, seemed to come from outside himself.
  O’Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed something in it. There was a sharp 
  click. Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself loose from the chair. It was hopeless; every part 
  of him, even his head, was held immovably. O’Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a 
  metre from Winston’s face.
  “I have pressed the first lever,” said O’Brien. “You understand the construction of this cage. 
  The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage 
  will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap 
  through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the 
  eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.”
  The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of shrill cries which 
  
  appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To 
  think, to think, even with a split second left -- to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty 
  odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he 
  almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming 
  animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to 
  save himself. He must interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between 
  himself and the rats.
  The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else. The 
  wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now. 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. Winston could see the whiskers and the 
  yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.
  “It was a common punishment in Imperial China,” said O’Brien as didactically as ever.
  The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then -- no, it was not 
  relief,  only  hope,  a  tiny  fragment  of  hope.  Too  late,  perhaps  too  late.  But  he  had  suddenly 
  understood that in the whole world there was just  one person to whom he could transfer his 
  punishment -- one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting 
  frantically, over and over.
  “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, 
  strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”
  He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still strapped in 
  the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, 
  through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars -- 
  always away, away, away from the rats. He was light years distant, but O’Brien was still standing at 
  his side. There was still the cold touch of wire against his cheek. But through the darkness that 
  enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and 
  not open.
  VI
  The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on 
  dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens.
  Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at 
  a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU the caption 
  said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops 
  from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the 
  speciality of the café.
  Winston was listening to the telescreen. At present only music was coming out of it, but 
  there was a possibility that at any moment there might be a special bulletin from the Ministry of 
  Peace. The news from the African front was disquieting in the extreme. On and off he had been 
  worrying about it all day. A Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with Eurasia: Oceania had always 
  been at war with Eurasia) was moving southward at terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin had not 
  mentioned any definite area, but it was probable that already the mouth of the Congo was a 
  battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger. One did not have to look at the map to see 
  what it meant. It was not merely a question of losing Central Africa: for the first time in the whole 
  war, the territory of Oceania itself was menaced.
  A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated excitement, flared up in 
  him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about the war. In these days he could never fix his mind 
  on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at 
  a gulp. As always, the gin made him shudder and even retch slightly. The stuff was horrible. 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. They were something that he was half-aware of, hovering close to his face, a smell 
  that clung to his nostrils. As the gin rose in him he belched through purple lips. He had grown fatter 
  since they released him, and had regained his old colour -- indeed, more than regained it. His 
  features had thickened, the skin on nose and cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald scalp was 
  too deep a pink. A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of the 
  Times, with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston’s glass was 
  empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no need to give orders. They knew his 
  
  habits. The chessboard was always waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; even 
  when the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him. 
  He never even bothered to count his drinks. At irregular intervals they presented him with a dirty 
  slip of paper which they said was the bill, but he had the impression that they always undercharged 
  him. It would have made no difference if it had been the other way about. He had always plenty of 
  money nowadays. He even had a job, a sinecure, more highly-paid than his old job had been.
  The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took over. Winston raised his head to 
  listen. No bulletins from the front, however. It was merely a brief announcement from the Ministry of 
  Plenty. In the preceding quarter, it appeared, the Tenth Three-Year Plan’s quota for bootlaces had 
  been overfulfilled by 98 per cent.
  He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a 
  couple of knights. “White to play and mate in two moves.” Winston looked up at the portrait of Big 
  Brother.  White  always  mates,  he  thought  with  a  sort  of  cloudy  mysticism.  Always,  without 
  exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever 
  won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed 
  back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.
  The voice from the telescreen paused and added in a different and much graver tone: “You 
  are warned to stand by for an important announcement at fifteen-thirty. Fifteen-thirty! This is news 
  of the highest importance. Take care not to miss it. Fifteen-thirty!” The tinking music struck up 
  again.
  Winston’s heart stirred. That was the bulletin from the front; instinct told him that it was bad 
  news that was coming. All day, with little spurts of excitement, the thought of a smashing defeat in 
  Africa had been in and out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Eurasian army swarming 
  across the never-broken frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa like a column of ants. Why 
  had it not been possible to outflank them in some way? The outline of the West African coast stood 
  out vividly in his mind. He picked up the white knight and moved it across the board. There was the 
  proper  spot.  Even  while  he  saw  the  black  horde  racing  southward  he  saw  another  force, 
  mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear, cutting their comunications by land and 
  sea. He felt that by willing it he was bringing that other force into existence. But it was necessary to 
  act quickly. If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if they had airfields and submarine bases 
  at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in two. It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision 
  of the world, the destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath. 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 spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place, but for the moment he could 
  not settle down to serious study of the chess problem. His thoughts wandered again. Almost 
  unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table:
  2 + 2 =
  “They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. “What happens to 
  you here is for ever,” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, 
  from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
  He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no danger in it. He knew as though 
  instinctively that they now took almost no interest in his doings. He could have arranged to meet 
  her a second time if either of them had wanted to. Actually it was by chance that they had met. It 
  was in the Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when 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. He was hurrying along with frozen hands and 
  watering eyes when he saw her not ten metres away from him. It struck him at once that she had 
  changed in some ill-defined way. They almost passed one another without a sign, then he turned 
  and followed her, not very eagerly. He knew that there was no danger, nobody would take any 
  interest in him. She did not speak. She walked obliquely away across the grass as though trying to 
  get rid of him, then seemed to resign herself to having him at her side. Presently they were in 
  among a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for concealment or as protection from the 
  wind. They halted. It was vilely cold. The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional, 
  dirty-looking crocuses. He put his arm round her waist.
  There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden microphones: besides, they could be 
  seen. It did not matter, nothing mattered. They could have lain down on the ground and done that if 
  they had wanted to. His flesh froze with horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever 
  to the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself. He knew now what had changed 
  in her. Her face was sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her 
  forehead and temple; but that was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in 
  a surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion of a rocket bomb, he 
  had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had been astonished not only by the incredible 
  
  weight of the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like 
  stone than flesh. Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture of her skin would be 
  quite different from what it had once been.
  He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As they walked back across the grass, 
  she looked directly at him for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and 
  dislike. He wondered whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it was 
  inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept squeezing from his eyes. They sat 
  down on two iron chairs, side by side but not too close together. He saw that she was about to 
  speak. She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig. Her feet 
  seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.
  “I betrayed you,” she said baldly.
  “I betrayed you,” he said.
  She gave him another quick look of dislike.
  “Sometimes,” she said, “they threaten you with something something you can’t stand up to, 
  can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-
  and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it 
  to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do 
  mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself 
  that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you 
  care about is yourself.”
  “All you care about is yourself,” he echoed.
  “And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer.”
  “No,” he said, “you don’t feel the same.”
  There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind plastered their thin overalls 
  against their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing to sit there in silence: besides, it was 
  too cold to keep still. She said something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.
  “We must meet again,” he said.
  “Yes,” she said, “we must meet again.”
  He followed irresolutely for a little distance, half a pace behind her. They did not speak 
  again. She did not actually try to shake him off, but walked at just such a speed as to prevent his 
  keeping abreast of her. He had made up his mind that he would accompany her as far as the Tube 
  station, but suddenly this process of trailing along in the cold seemed pointless and unbearable. He 
  was overwhelmed by a desire not so much to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut 
  Tree Café, which had never seemed so attractive as at this moment. He had a nostalgic vision of his 
  corner table, with the newspaper and the chessboard and the ever-flowing gin. Above all, it would 
  be warm in there. The next moment, not altogether by accident, he allowed himself to become 
  separated from her by a small knot of people. He made a halfhearted attempt to catch up, then 
  slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite direction. When he had gone fifty metres he 
  looked back. The street was not crowded, but already he could not distinguish her. Any one of a 
  dozen hurrying figures might have been hers. Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no longer 
  recognizable from behind.
  “At the time when it happens,” she had said, “you do mean it.” He had meant it. He had not 
  merely said it, he had wished it. He had wished that she and not he should be delivered over to 
  the--
  Something changed in the music that trickled from the telescreen. A cracked and jeering 
  note, a yellow note, came into it. 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. A passing waiter noticed that his glass was empty and came 
  back with the gin bottle.
  He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but more horrible with every 
  mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and his 
  resurrection. It was gin that sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every 
  morning. When he woke, seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids and fiery mouth 
  and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been impossible even to rise from the 
  horizontal if it had not been for the bottle and teacup placed beside the bed overnight. Through the 
  midday hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the telescreen. From fifteen to 
  closing-time he was a fixture in the Chestnut Tree. No one cared what he did any longer, no whistle 
  woke him, no telescreen admonished him. Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went to a dusty, 
  forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of Truth and did a little work, or what was called work. 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. 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 
  something to do with the question of whether commas should be placed inside brackets, or outside. 
  There were four others on the committee, all of them persons similar to himself. 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. 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. And then suddenly 
  the life would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct 
  eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.
  The telescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his head again. The bulletin! But no, 
  they were merely changing the music. He had the map of Africa behind his eyelids. 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. As though for reassurance he looked up at the 
  imperturbable face in the portrait. Was it conceivable that the second arrow did not even exist?
  His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of gin, picked up the white knight and 
  made a tentative move. Check. But it was evidently not the right move, because--
  Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a candle-lit room with a vast white-
  counterpaned bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on the floor, shaking a dice-box, and 
  laughing excitedly. His mother was sitting opposite him and also laughing.
  It must have been about a month before she disappeared. It was a moment of reconciliation, 
  when the nagging hunger in his belly was forgotten and his earlier affection for her had temporarily 
  revived. He remembered the day well, a pelting, drenching day when the water streamed down the 
  window-pane and the light indoors was too dull to read by. The boredom of the two children in the 
  dark, cramped bedroom became unbearable. Winston whined and grizzled, made futile demands for 
  food, fretted about the room pulling everything out of place and kicking the wainscoting until the 
  neighbours banged on the wall, while the younger child wailed intermittently. In the end his mother 
  said, “Now be good, and I’Il buy you a toy. A lovely toy -- you’ll love it”; and then she had gone out 
  in the rain, to a little general shop which was still sporadically open nearby, and came back with a 
  cardboard box containing an outfit of Snakes and Ladders. He could still remember the smell of the 
  damp cardboard. It was a miserable outfit. The board was cracked and the tiny wooden dice were so 
  ill-cut that they would hardly lie on their sides. Winston looked at the thing sulkily and without 
  interest. But then his mother lit a piece of candle and they sat down on the floor to play. 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. They played eight 
  games, winning four each. 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. For a whole afternoon 
  they had all been happy together, as in his earlier childhood.
  He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was troubled by false 
  memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were. Some 
  things had happened, others had not happened. He turned back to the chessboard and picked up 
  the white knight again. Almost in the same instant it dropped on to the board with a clatter. He had 
  started as though a pin had run into him.
  A shrill trumpet-call had pierced the air. It was the bulletin! Victory! It always meant victory 
  when a trumpet-call preceded the news. A sort of electric drill ran through the café. Even the 
  waiters had started and pricked up their ears.
  The trumpet-call had let loose an enormous volume of noise. Already an excited voice was 
  gabbling from the telescreen, but even as it started it was almost drowned by a roar of cheering 
  from outside. The news had run round the streets like magic. 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. 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!”
  Under the table Winston’s feet made convulsive movements. He had not stirred from his 
  seat, but in his mind he was running, swiftly running, he was with the crowds outside, cheering 
  himself deaf. He looked up again at the portrait of Big Brother. The colossus that bestrode the 
  world! The rock against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain! He thought how ten 
  
  minutes ago -- yes, only ten minutes -- there had still  been equivocation in his heart as he 
  wondered whether the news from the front would be of victory or defeat. Ah, it was more than a 
  Eurasian army that had perished! Much had changed in him since that first day in the Ministry of 
  Love, but the final, indispensable, healing change had never happened, until this moment.
  The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and 
  slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back to their 
  work. One of them approached with the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no 
  attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the 
  Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, 
  confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with 
  the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The longhoped-for bullet was 
  entering his brain.
  He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile 
  was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-
  willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it 
  was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over 
  himself. He loved Big Brother.
  1949
  THE END
  Appendix
  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. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who 
  used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading 
  articles in the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out 
  by  a  specialist.  It  was  expected  that  Newspeak  would  have  finally  superseded  Oldspeak  (or 
  Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, 
  all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more 
  in their everyday speech. 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. It is with the final, perfected version, as 
  embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.
  The purpose of Newspeak was not only to 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. 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. 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. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but 
  chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox 
  meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The 
  word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free 
  from lice” or “This field is free from weeds”. 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. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical 
  words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be 
  dispensed with was allowed to survive. 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.
  Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak 
  sentences,  even when not containing newly-created  words,  would  be  barely  intelligible  to an 
  English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as 
  
  the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary. 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. 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 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. All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them. 
  So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound 
  expressing  one clearly understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use the A 
  vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to 
  express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.
  The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an 
  almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in 
  principle this applied even to very abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, 
  noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and the noun form, when they were of the same root, 
  there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. 
  The word thought, for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by think, which did 
  duty for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was followed here: in some cases it was the 
  original noun that was chosen for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and verb of 
  kindred  meaning  were  not  etymologically  connected,  one  or  other  of  them  was  frequently 
  suppressed. There was, for example, no such word as cut, its meaning being sufficiently covered by 
  the noun-verb knife. Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix -ful to the noun-verb, and adverbs 
  by adding -wise. Thus for example, speedful meant “rapid” and speedwise meant “quickly”. Certain 
  of our present-day adjectives, such as good, strong, big, black, soft, were retained, but their total 
  number was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could 
  be arrived at by adding -ful to a noun-verb. None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except 
  for a very few already ending in -wise: the -wise termination was invariable. The word  well, for 
  example, was replaced by goodwise.
  In addition, any word -- this again applied in principle to every word in the language -- could 
  be negatived by adding the affix un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater 
  emphasis,  doubleplus-.  Thus,  for  example,  uncold meant  “warm”,  while  pluscold and 
  doublepluscold meant, respectively, “very cold” and “superlatively cold”. It was also possible, as in 
  present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as 
  ante-, post-, up-, down-, etc. By such methods it was found possible to bring about an enormous 
  diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word good, there was no need for such a word as 
  bad, since the required meaning was equally well -- indeed, better -- expressed by ungood. All that 
  was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide 
  which of them to suppress.  Dark, for example, could be replaced by  unlight, or  light by  undark, 
  according to preference.
  The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity. Subject to a few 
  exceptions which are mentioned below all inflexions followed the same rules. Thus, in all verbs the 
  preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in -ed. The preterite of steal was stealed, 
  the preterite of  think was thinked, and so on throughout the language, all such forms as swam, 
  gave, brought, spoke, taken, etc., being abolished. All plurals were made by adding -s or -es as the 
  case might be. The plurals of man, ox, life, were mans, oxes, lifes. Comparison of adjectives was 
  invariably made by adding -er, -est (good, gooder, goodest), irregular forms and the more, most 
  formation being suppressed.
  The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the 
  relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. 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. There were also certain irregularities 
  in word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech. 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. But this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion with the B vocabulary. Why so great 
  an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in this essay.
  The  B vocabulary.  The  B  vocabulary  consisted  of  words  which  had  been  deliberately 
  constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political 
  
  implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. 
  Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. 
  In some cases they 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. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a 
  few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.
  The B words were in all cases compound words[2]. They consisted of two or more words, or 
  portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was 
  always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. 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”. This inflected as follows: noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past 
  participle,  goodthinked;  present  participle,  goodthinking;  adjective,  goodthinkful;  adverb, 
  goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker.
  The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. 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. In the word  crimethink 
  (thoughtcrime), for instance, the think came second, whereas in thinkpol (Thought Police) it came 
  first, and in the latter word  police had lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficulty in 
  securing  euphony,  irregular  formations  were  commoner  in  the  B  vocabulary  than  in  the  A 
  vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of Minitrue, Minipax, and Miniluv were, respectively, 
  Minitruthful,  Minipeaceful,  and  Minilovely,  simply  because  -trueful,  -paxful,  and  -loveful were 
  sliightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in 
  exactly the same way.
  Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had 
  not mastered the language as a whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a Times 
  leading article as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. The shortest rendering that one could make of this 
  in Oldspeak would be: “Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full 
  emotional  understanding  of  the  principles  of  English  Socialism.”  But  this  is  not  an  adequate 
  translation. To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted 
  above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by Ingsoc. 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. But the special function of 
  certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to 
  destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they 
  contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a 
  single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the 
  compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to 
  make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by 
  their existence.
  As we have already seen in the case of the word  free, words which had once borne a 
  heretical  meaning  were  sometimes  retained  for  the  sake  of  convenience,  but  only  with  the 
  undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, 
  internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words 
  covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. 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. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party 
  member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much 
  else, that all nations other than his own worshipped “false gods”. He did not need to know that 
  these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew 
  about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he 
  knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat 
  the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, 
  generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for 
  example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words  sexcrime (sexual immorality) and 
  goodsex (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, 
  homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own 
  sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, 
  in principle, all punishable by death. 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. He knew what was meant by goodsex -- that is to say, normal 
  intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical 
  
  pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was sexcrime. In Newspeak it was seldom possible to 
  follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical: beyond that point the 
  necessary words were nonexistent.
  No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. 
  Such words,  for instance, as  joycamp (forced-labour camp) or  Minipax (Ministry of Peace, i.e. 
  Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on 
  the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic 
  society. An example was prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which 
  the Party handed out to the masses. Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation 
  “good” when applied to the Party and “bad” when applied to its enemies. 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.
  So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of 
  any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, or 
  doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar 
  shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would 
  preserve the original derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in 
  which Winston Smith worked, was called  Recdep, the Fiction Department was called  Ficdep, the 
  Teleprogrammes Department was called  Teledep, and so on. This was not done solely with the 
  object of saving time. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and 
  phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed 
  that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and 
  totalitarian  organizations.  Examples  were  such  words  as  Nazi,  Gestapo,  Comintern,  Inprecorr, 
  Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it 
  was used with  a conscious purpose.  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. The words Communist International, for instance, call up a composite picture 
  of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word 
  Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body 
  of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair 
  or a table.  Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought,  whereas 
  Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the 
  same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than 
  those called up by Ministry of Truth. 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.
  In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. 
  Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since 
  what was required,  above  all  for political  purposes,  was short clipped words of unmistakable 
  meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s 
  mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were 
  very much alike. 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 use of them encouraged a 
  gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed 
  at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically 
  neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it 
  was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before 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. His training fitted him to do this, 
  the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their 
  harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the 
  process still further.
  So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak 
  vocabulary was tiny,  and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, 
  indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger 
  every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the 
  temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx 
  without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak 
  word  duckspeak, meaning “to quack like a duck”. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, 
  duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were 
  orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of 
  the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.
  
  The C vocabulary. The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely 
  of scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were 
  constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them 
  of undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules as the words in the other two 
  vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political 
  speech. Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted to 
  his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other 
  lists. Only a very few words were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the 
  function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular 
  branches. There was, indeed, no word for “Science”, any meaning that it could possibly bear being 
  already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.
  From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox 
  opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter 
  heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to 
  say Big Brother is ungood. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-
  evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary 
  words were not available. 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. One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for 
  unorthodox  purposes by  illegitimately  translating  some  of  the  words  back  into  Oldspeak.  For 
  example,  All mans are equal was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in 
  which All men are redhaired is a possible Oldspeak sentence. 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. The 
  concept of political equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been 
  purged  out  of  the  word  equal.  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. In practice it was not difficult for any person well grounded in 
  doublethink to avoid doing this, but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such a 
  lapse would have vaished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more 
  know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of “politically equal”, or that free had once 
  meant “intellectually free”, than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be 
  aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and 
  errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and 
  therefore unimaginable. 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.
  When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have 
  been severed. 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. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to 
  survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of 
  Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple 
  everyday action, or was already orthodox (goodthinkful would be the Newspeak expression) in 
  tendency.  In  practice  this  meant  that  no  book  written  before  approximately  1960  could  be 
  translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation 
  -- that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known 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.  That  to  secure  these  rights, 
  Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of 
  the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those 
  ends,  it  is  the  right  of  the  People  to  alter  or  abolish  it,  and  to  institute  new 
  Government...
  It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense 
  of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up 
  in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby 
  Jefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.
  A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. 
  
  Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, 
  while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various 
  writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in 
  process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that 
  survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and 
  difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second 
  decade of the twenty-first century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature -- 
  indispensable technical manuals, and the like -- that had to be treated in the same way. It was 
  chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of 
  Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.
  1949
  ________
  [1] Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and 
  etymology see Appendix.
  [2] Compound words such as speakwrite, were of course to be found in the A vocabulary, but 
  these were merely convenient abbreviations and had no special ideologcal colour.
  THE END
  ________________________________
  GEORGE ORWELL: 'NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR', A NOVEL
  First published by Secker & Warburg, London in 1949
  ____
  ERIC ARTHUR BLAIR (aka GEORGE ORWELL)
  Born: June 25, 1903, Motihari in Bengal, India
  Died: January 21, 1950, London, GB
  ____
  OCR: Chernyshev Mihail Vladimirovich
  Machine-readable version and checking: O. Dag
  E-mail: dag@orwell.ru
  URL: http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/
  Last modified on April, 2002
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Vault2.0.-.Fiction-and-audiobooks/Books/O/Orwell, George/1984.pdf