Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written.
Chapter 1, Part 1
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 streetlevel 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 -- 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 ricespirit. 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 speakwrite 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 sandyhaired
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: vaporized 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.
[to be continued. . .]
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