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

In the corner, on the gateleg table, the
glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out
of the half-darkness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the corner, on the gateleg table, the
glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out
of the half-darkness.

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

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

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

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

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


It was only an 'opeless fancy.

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

The weather was baking hot.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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


Chapter III
War is Peace

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

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

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

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

'They were quite common in the
fifties.

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

It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class
were expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the
capitalists had been expropriated.

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

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

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

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

I've
got varicose veins.

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

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

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

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

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

Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all!

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

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


Chapter III
War is Peace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was hopeless even as a daydream.

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

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

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

I've
got varicose veins.

War was a
sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned
it was probably the most important of all safeguards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes we even amputate a limb.'

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

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

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

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


Chapter III
War is Peace

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

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

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

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

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

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

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

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

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

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

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

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

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

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

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

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

To his astonishment she capped the line:


'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey----'


'I can't remember how it goes on after that.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

She lived in a hostel with thirty other
girls ('Always in the stink of women!

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

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

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

But the physical difficulty of
meeting was enormous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 9



Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

It is
true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what
at first sight appear to be hereditary lines.

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

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

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

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

It is
true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what
at first sight appear to be hereditary lines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a little chunk of history that
they've forgotten to alter.

In the moment when he had seen her fall on
the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.

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

The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught him came back into
his head, and he added half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons, say the
bells of St Clement's!"

Winston and Julia clung
together, fascinated.

Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all!

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

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

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.

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.

And in the Youth Movement.

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.

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

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

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

In the moment when he had seen her fall on
the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at
hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

After having been recognized, he could not go and sit at
a table with an unattended girl.

The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague
frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round
the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You'll have to remember this.

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

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

It was a scrap of paper
folded into a square.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winston stopped short.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The inscription on the title-page ran:


THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


Winston began reading:


Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you
thought that if I had a quarter of a chance I'd denounce you as a
thought-criminal and get you killed off?'

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

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

To turn his head and look at her would have
been inconceivable folly.

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

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

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

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

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

In the
afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way
she put it was:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not merely the love of one
person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that
was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.

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

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

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

He did not look at her.

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

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

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

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

One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the
crowd.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

What was more
important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable
because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.

It
came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket,
or manipulated a cigarette.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Actually, few
people ever wrote letters.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tonight was one of his nights at the
Community Centre.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight.

As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Never go home
the same way as you went out,' she said, as though enunciating an important
general principle.

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.

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.

A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her.

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

The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity.

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

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

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

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.

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

In the moment when he had seen her fall on
the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.

And don't be
too downhearted.

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

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

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

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.

It was a scrap of paper
folded into a square.

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.

But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew.

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.

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.

'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty.

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.

Presumably she had been changed on to a later shift.

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

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

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

A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had been
achieved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the moment when he had seen her fall on
the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.

That is unavoidable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It was a common accident
in the Fiction Department.

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.

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.

Late at night, when crowds of
rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air.

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

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

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

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

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

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!"

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Already he had instinctively
started forward to help her.

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

For whom, for what, was that bird singing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

For whom, for what, was that bird singing?

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 fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught him came back into
his head, and he added half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons, say the
bells of St Clement's!"

Actually, few
people ever wrote letters.

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

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.

Any identifiable reference to him would have
been mortally dangerous.

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

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

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

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

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

The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...

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.

'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of
innocent people?'

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

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

A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart.

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

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

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

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

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


It was only an 'opeless fancy.

St Clement Danes its name was.'

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

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

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

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

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

'That thing is really turned off?'

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

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

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

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

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.

Winston woke first.

On the evening
beforehand they met briefly in the street.

'Black market,' she said indifferently.

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

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

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

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

The afternoon was more bearable.

He unrolled and read it without
pausing in his speech.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not blackberry leaves.'

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

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

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

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.

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

The way
she put it was:

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

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

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

Julia, however, seemed unable to mention
the Party, and especially the Inner Party, without using the kind of words
that you saw chalked up in dripping alley-ways.

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

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

'It's nothing.

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.

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

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

'Well, perhaps not exactly that.

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

'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?'

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

But the issue still struck her as
unimportant.

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'.

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

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

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.

Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly.

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.

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

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

They torture you.'

I've got five false teeth.'

In
reality there was no escape.

It was a scrap of paper
folded into a square.

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

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

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

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.

There
was no enquiry he could make.

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

He was
aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow
connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.

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

Chapter 2



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

A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart.

A blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew,
was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On it was written, in a large
unformed handwriting:

I LOVE YOU.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her
hair conquering the pigeon dung.

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

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

The family could not actually be
abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their
children, in almost the old-fashioned way.

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

Chapter 2



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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His heart bumped in his breast with
frightening loudness.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had certainly turned
very pale.

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

At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity.

There was no
question that she had done it intentionally.

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

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

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

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

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.

'Where can we meet?'

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

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

Meaning naturally
orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?'

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

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

Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all!

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

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

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

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

Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time.

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

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

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

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

There were
telescreens all round the pediment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed.

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

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

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

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

Although the Party, according to its
habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as
early as the nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about
ten years later.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Did
you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She 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.

She spoke as though her heart were fluttering.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

So far as he could see there were two possibilities.

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

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

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.

'And a good job too,'
said Julia, 'otherwise they'd have had my name out of him when he
confessed.'

We cannot act
collectively.

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.

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

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

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

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

It was something small and
flat.

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

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

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

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

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

It was the girl with dark hair.

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

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

To his astonishment she capped the line:


'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey----'


'I can't remember how it goes on after that.

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

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

It was the girl with dark hair.

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

The 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.

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

The room was darkening.

But you have to get in earlier than that,
because--Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!'

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

One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly
content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes
inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers
and singing rubbish.

Confession is not betrayal.

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

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

Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not
really necessary to the world's economy.

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

On it was written, in a large
unformed handwriting:

I LOVE YOU.

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

He 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

But at the
last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his
and gave it a fleeting squeeze.

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

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

The air
seemed to kiss one's skin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

It'll be all right in a second.'

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.

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.

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.

It was as though the surface of the glass
had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere
complete.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

She had grown up since the
Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the
fifties and sixties.

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

We are
also adulterers.

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.

So far as he could see there were two possibilities.

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

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

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

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

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

'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.

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

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

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

She seemed to have
become completely spiritless.

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

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

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

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

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

She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him, as though
to reassure him with the warmth of her body.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the girl was part of it!

Do
you carry a brief-case to work with you?' he added.

On it was written, in a large
unformed handwriting:

I LOVE YOU.

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

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

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

It was a common accident
in the Fiction Department.

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.

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

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

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

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

Winston and Julia clung
together, fascinated.

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

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.

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

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.

The afternoon was more bearable.

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

His heart bumped in his breast with
frightening loudness.

A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might
lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him!

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

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

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.

He did not know why the Thought Police should
choose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had
their reasons.

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.

No mate,
no rival was watching it.

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.

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.

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

It would even
have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to
oneself.

As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets
flooded his nostrils.

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.

Chapter 2



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

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.

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.

Chapter 2



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

A 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.

Whichever way you turned, the telescreen faced you.

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.

If the
machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt,
illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.

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.

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.

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

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.

It would not have occurred to her that an action which is
ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless.

I'm good at
spotting people who don't belong.

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

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.

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

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 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.

After having been recognized, he could not go and sit at
a table with an unattended girl.

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.

Surely enough, she was at
a table in about the same place, and again alone.

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.

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

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

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

And next time we
come here I'll bring some plaster and bung it up properly.'

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

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.

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.

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

But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like
a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive.

They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences
are too formidable.

They
passed each other without a glance.

'Not physically.

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.

Hours
and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London.

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.

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

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.

But at this moment there was a din of
shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left.

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

The girl's shoulder, and
her arm right down to the elbow, were pressed against his.

Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and
a coverless bolster.

In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a
basis of poverty and ignorance.

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.

By comparison with that existing today, all the
tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient.

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

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...

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.

With the curious,
disarming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the gesture he
resettled his spectacles on his nose.

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.

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.

For
in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever
from the sobering influence of external danger.

Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent
forgeries that he committed there.

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.

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 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.

As he had foreseen, Mr Charrington had made no
difficulty about letting the room.

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.

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.

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

We may be obliged to give him a new identity.

It was like the two halves of a countersign.

It was early, and the place was not very full.

A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her.

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.

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.

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.

And with that she walked on in the direction in which she had been going,
as briskly as though it had really been nothing.

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.

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.

'It just occurred to me you might be interested,' he
would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new
fragment.

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.

His heart bumped in his breast with
frightening loudness.

Newspapers and history
books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of
the kind that is practised today would have been impossible.

Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books,
pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs--all had to be rectified at
lightning speed.

But for the moment they could not
extricate themselves from the crowd.

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

A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might
lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him!

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.

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.

Hours
and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London.

In
so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter.

It was a good
hiding-place when once you got there, but the getting there was very
dangerous.

It was like trying to make a move at chess when you
were already mated.

Their lives are
dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that
the war should continue everlastingly and without victory.

The girl nipped nimbly
round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush.

They were probably brown, but people with dark hair
sometimes had blue eyes.

The Spies performed prodigies of activity in
clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from
the chimneys.

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

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.

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.

He began telling Julia of
something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another
sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.

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

The tank, the
submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand
grenade are still in use.

He did not consider any longer the
possibility that she might be laying some kind of trap for him.

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

The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting
to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

They had played a similar
trick with the instinct of parenthood.

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.

For whom, for what, was that bird singing?

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

It was not very skilfully done, but
Winston's standards in such matters were not high.

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.

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

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

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.

They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed.

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

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.

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.

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

We're all
right here.'

The third, Eastasia, only
emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting.

'It doesn't matter if there's a crowd.'

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Actually, 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.

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.

You
take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?'

Oceania has
no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody
knows.

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.

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

Dirty or
clean, the room was paradise.

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.

Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton?

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.

I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.'

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.

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

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

What time do they cut the
lights off at your flats?'

We have that privilege.'

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'.

They were both sleepy.

He began speaking with the peculiar grave
courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members.

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.

If it once
became general, wealth would confer no distinction.

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.

Even in sleep he could not altogether escape from her image.

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

But you could not have pure
love or pure lust nowadays.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But if the object
was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately
make?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

By a routine that
was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,' she said
indistinctly.

Except where it touched upon her own life she had no
interest in Party doctrine.

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.

Any kind of
organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure,
struck her as stupid.

As he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his
pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers.

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.

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

The family could not actually be
abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their
children, in almost the old-fashioned way.

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

Winston and Julia clung
together, fascinated.

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

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.

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

He began speaking with the peculiar grave
courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members.

This happened to a great extent during
the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940.

It was the second of May. From somewhere deeper
in the heart of the wood came the droning of ring-doves.

It was obvious that it
ought to be divided into three equal parts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible
to Party propaganda.

But by the fourth decade of the
twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were
authoritarian.

In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a
basis of poverty and ignorance.

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.

The girl's table filled up a few minutes later.

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

He felt as though a
fire were burning in his belly.

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.

As he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his
pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers.

I always
carry one end of a banner in the processions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?'

Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard,
he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.

It was like trying to make a move at chess when you
were already mated.

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.

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.

He settled
deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender.

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

Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard,
he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The rat had never come back, but the bugs
had multiplied hideously in the heat.

In general you could not assume that you were much safer in the
country than in London.

'A rat.

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.

He started forward
to take her in his arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly,
partly because she was still holding the tool-bag.

In the
street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion.

Her voice floated
upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of
happy melancholy.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross his
mind.

Julia's unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the
production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

There was no
question that she had done it intentionally.

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.

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

It paid, she said, it was camouflage.

The clever thing was to break the rules and stay
alive all the same.

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

'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.

It would even
have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to
oneself.

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.

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

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

It was 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.

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.

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.

Winston peeped out, secure in the
protection of the muslin curtain.

Both
Winston and the girl were eating steadily.

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.

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.

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 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.

He began telling Julia of
something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another
sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.

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.

'Never go home
the same way as you went out,' she said, as though enunciating an important
general principle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A peace that was truly
permanent would be the same as a permanent war.

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.

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.

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.

I thought I'd take a chance.

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.

He pretended not to hear.

But the truth was that he had no physical sensation, except that of mere
contact.

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


It was only an 'opeless fancy.

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.

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

With the curious,
disarming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the gesture he
resettled his spectacles on his nose.

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.

War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but
accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way.

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.

Thanks, comrade!'

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.

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.

She had never heard of
the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence.

A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out
from Winston towards O'Brien.

There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as
surely as 99 precedes 100.

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.

Julia rolled sleepily
against him, murmuring something that might have been 'What's the matter?'

After having been recognized, he could not go and sit at
a table with an unattended girl.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

There was a long, nagging argument that went round and
round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings.

But
in matters of vital importance--meaning, in effect, war and police
espionage--the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least
tolerated.

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

It was obvious that it
ought to be divided into three equal parts.

We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to
individual, generation after generation.

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.

His heart bumped in his breast with
frightening loudness.

It was impossible that this affair should end
successfully; such things did not happen in real life.

Winston
could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not
grimy from the contact of human bodies.

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.

'They were quite common in the
fifties.

Both of them knew that it was lunacy.

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.

As soon as she
realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy.

On it was written, in a large
unformed handwriting:

I LOVE YOU.

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

The
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.

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

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

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.

If
the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word.

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

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'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.

A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might
lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him!

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.

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

Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry on their
intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives.

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

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.

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.

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

The proles, normally apathetic about the war,
were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism.

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.

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.

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.

Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin's
Mongolian face.

Without opening her
eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.

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

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.

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'.

In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest.

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.

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.

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

There was a long, nagging argument that went round and
round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings.

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.

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.

A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart.

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 agents of Goldstein had been at work!

And with that she walked on in the direction in which she had been going,
as briskly as though it had really been nothing.

They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor.

Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by
restricting the output of goods.

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.

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

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.

The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was in his arms.

It was more than a month distant, but the enormous, complex
preparations that it entailed were throwing extra work on to everybody.

With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own
brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the open.

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

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.

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.

'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly.

She must have
fallen right on the injured arm.

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.

Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water
to boil.

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

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

A week had gone by since
she had first approached him.

Put them on the round table.

He did not consider any longer the
possibility that she might be laying some kind of trap for him.

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.

Even now it was
quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he
had been interrupted.

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

They did not discuss the possibility of getting married.

The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the
fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might
evaporate.

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.

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.

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

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

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

She
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.

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

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.

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 went on picking bluebells.

Presently they had reached the edge of the little wood.

'It just occurred to me you might be interested,' he
would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new
fragment.

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.

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

'We have come here because----'

He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of
his own motives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

(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.)

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.

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.

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.

He stopped
thinking and merely felt.

Pure in word and deed.

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

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

I'll wear silk stockings and high-heeled
shoes!

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.

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

Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, as well
she might be.

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

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.

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

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

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

But if the
same thing happened today, I should keep it.'

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.

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

The person immediately
ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like man
with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes.

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

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

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.

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.

If the
machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt,
illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.

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.

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.

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

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

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 girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a
tribute to the excellence of her disguise.

The air
seemed to kiss one's skin.

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.