Part
One
Chapter
1
It
was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to
escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors
of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl
of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end
of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been
tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more
than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with
a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston
made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the
best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric
current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the
economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven
flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose
ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times
on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster
with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those
pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about
when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption
beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures
which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The
voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which
formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned
a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still
distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called)
could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness
of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were
the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally
sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades
and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.
Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and
torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the
sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except
the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd
face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on
the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING
YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into
Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one
corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and
uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance
a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant
like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight.
It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The
patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still
babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth
Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously.
Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper,
would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within
the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could
be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing
whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often,
or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual
wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your
wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from
habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound
you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement
scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer,
though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre
away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and
white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort
of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One,
itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He
tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him
whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always
these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides
shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard
and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls
sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster
dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the
heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a
larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden
dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not
remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of
bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly
unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly
different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal
structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after
terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it
was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant
lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR
IS PEACE
FREEDOM
IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE
IS STRENGTH
The
Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms
above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered
about London there were just three other buildings of similar
appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding
architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could
see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the
four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government
was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with
news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry
of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love,
which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which
was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak:
Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were
no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry
of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible
to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating
through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and
hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer
barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms,
armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the
expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when
facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen.
By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed
his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food
in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had
got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast. He took down from the
shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked
VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese
ricespirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself
for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his
eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing
it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head
with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his
belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He
took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES
and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out
on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went
back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood
to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out
a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank
book with a red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual
position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall,
where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall,
opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove
in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were
built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting
in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain
outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He
could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present
position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography
of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now
about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken
out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth
creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had
not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could
guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had
seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a
slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember)
and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to
possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary
shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule
was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such
as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get
hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down
the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for
two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting
it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home
in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising
possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was
not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any
laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would
be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour
camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to
get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom
used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and
with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful
creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used
to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual
to dictate everything into the speakwrite which was of course
impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the
ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through
his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy
letters he wrote:
April
4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon
him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this
was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was
fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he
had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays
to pin down any date within a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing
this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for
a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up
with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the
first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to
him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature
impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which
case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it,
and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen
had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that
he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself,
but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended
to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment,
and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed
except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to
do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue
that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this
moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose
ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because
if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking
by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page
in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring
of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware
of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting
straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters
and finally even its full stops:
April
4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good
one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to
swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing
along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the
helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round
him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had
let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank.
then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering
over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess
sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old
in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head
between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her
and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although
she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up
as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the
bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in
among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood.
then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up
right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must
have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party
seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly
started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed
it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front
of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont
suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles
say typical prole reaction they never --
Winston
stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He
did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish.
But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally
different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point
where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now
realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly
decided to come home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous
could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where
Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles
and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen,
in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking
his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew
by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the
room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors.
He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction
Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with
oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job
on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl,
of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift,
athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior
Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her
overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of
her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment
of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere
of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general
clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He
disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty
ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who
were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of
slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But
this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous
than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him
a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him
and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had
even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought
Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued
to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as
well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner
Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston
had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over
the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls
of an Inner Party member approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly
man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In
spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner.
He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which
was curiously disarming -- in some indefinable way, curiously
civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought
in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman
offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen
times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and
not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's
urbane manner and his prize-fighter's physique. Much more it was
because of a secretly held belief -- or perhaps not even a belief,
merely a hope -- that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was not perfect.
Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps
it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but
simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of
being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat
the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest
effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing
so. At this moment O'Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that
it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in
the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He
took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away.
A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to
Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting
immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous
machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at
the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge
and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had
started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People,
had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there
among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak
of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider
who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had
been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level
with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary
activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously
escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate
varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein
was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest
defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the
Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations,
sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was
still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond
the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps
even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place
in Oceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face
of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean
Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small
goatee beard -- a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable,
with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the
end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the
face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality.
Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines
of the Party -- an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child
should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people,
less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was
abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the
Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with
Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press,
freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically
that the revolution had been betrayed -- and all this in rapid
polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual
style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak
words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would
normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should
be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap
covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless
columns of the Eurasian army -- row after row of solid-looking
men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface
of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar.
The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background
to Goldstein's bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable
exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in
the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and
the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too
much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein
produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred
more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania
was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace
with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein
was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held
up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were
in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.
Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A
day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions
were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander
of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators
dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its
name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of
a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein
was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there.
It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all,
simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through
vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was
a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there
was a way of avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping
up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their
voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that
came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned
bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that
of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was
sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling
and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of
a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out
'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak
dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose
and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment
Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking
his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible
thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged
to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to
avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always
unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire
to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed
to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current,
turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming
lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected
emotion which could be switched from one object to another like
the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary,
against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at
such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic
on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of
lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people
about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to
be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed
into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible,
fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of
Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness,
and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like
some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice
of wrecking the structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this
way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent
effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow
in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from
the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid,
beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog
her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to
a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He
would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better
than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated
her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,
because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so,
because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you
to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet
sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become
an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into
that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of
a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible,
his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the
surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front
row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same
moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile
figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd,
full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost
filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying.
It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words
that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually
but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the
face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans
of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
WAR
IS PEACE
FREEDOM
IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE
IS STRENGTH
But
the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds
on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's
eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandyhaired
woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in
front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!'
she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her
face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B! ...B-B!' -- over and over again, very
slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B' and the second-a
heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background
of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing
of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it
up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming
emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty
of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis,
a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate
he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human
chanting of 'B-B! ...B-B!' always filled him with horror. Of course
he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To
dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone
else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space
of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes
might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this
moment that the significant thing happened -- if, indeed, it did
happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He
had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling
them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was
a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as
it took to happen Winston knew-yes, he knew!-that O'Brien
was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message
had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the
thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes.
'I am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely
what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred,
your disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the
flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable
as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened.
Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to
keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself
were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground
conspiracies were true after all -- perhaps the Brotherhood really
existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and
confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was
not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not.
There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean
anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint
scribbles on lavatory walls -- once, even, when two strangers
met, a small movement of the hand which had looked as though it
might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely
he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without
looking at O'Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary
contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably
dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For
a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance,
and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable
event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch.
The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat
helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic
action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting
as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper,
printing in large neat capitals -
DOWN
WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN
WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN
WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN
WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN
WITH BIG BROTHER
over
and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since
the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than
the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was
tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise
altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless.
Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether
he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went
on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no
difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He
had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never
set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others
in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not
a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully
for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound
to get you.
It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night.
The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder,
the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round
the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no
report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during
the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record
of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence
was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated:
vaporized was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing
in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll
shoot me i dont care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i
dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back
of the neck i dont care down with big brother --
He
sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down
the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking
at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever
it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking
was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart
was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably
expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards the door.
..
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