kitchen sink steel

1984 by george orwell part ii chapter 1 it was the middle of the morning, and winstonhad left the cubicle to go to the lavatory. a solitary figure was coming towards him fromthe other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor. it was the girl with dark hair. four dayshad gone past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop. as shecame nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a distance becauseit was of the same colour as her overalls. probably she had crushed her hand while swinginground one of the big kaleidoscopes on which

the plots of novels were 'roughed in'. itwas a common accident in the fiction department. they were perhaps four metres apart when thegirl stumbled and fell almost flat on her face. a sharp cry of pain was wrung out ofher. she must have fallen right on the injured arm. winston stopped short. the girl had risento her knees. her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her mouth stoodout redder than ever. her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression thatlooked more like fear than pain. a curious emotion stirred in winston's heart.in front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was ahuman creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. already he had instinctivelystarted forward to help her. in the moment

when he had seen her fall on the bandagedarm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body. 'you're hurt?' he said. 'it's nothing. my arm. it'll be all rightin a second.' she spoke as though her heart were fluttering.she had certainly turned very pale. 'you haven't broken anything?' 'no, i'm all right. it hurt for a moment,that's all.' she held out her free hand to him, and hehelped her up. she had regained some of her colour, and appeared very much better.

'it's nothing,' she repeated shortly. 'i onlygave my wrist a bit of a bang. thanks, comrade!' and with that she walked on in the directionin which she had been going, as briskly as though it had really been nothing. the wholeincident could not have taken as much as half a minute. not to let one's feelings appearin one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in any casethey had been standing straight in front of a telescreen when the thing happened. neverthelessit had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or threeseconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand. therewas no question that she had done it intentionally. it was something small and flat. as he passedthrough the lavatory door he transferred it

to his pocket and felt it with the tips ofhis fingers. it was a scrap of paper folded into a square. while he stood at the urinal he managed, witha little more fingering, to get it unfolded. obviously there must be a message of somekind written on it. for a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets andread it at once. but that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. there was no placewhere you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously. he went back to his cubicle, sat down, threwthe fragment of paper casually among the other papers on the desk, put on his spectaclesand hitched the speakwrite towards him. 'five

minutes,' he told himself, 'five minutes atthe very least!' his heart bumped in his breast with frightening loudness. fortunately thepiece of work he was engaged on was mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures,not needing close attention. whatever was written on the paper, it musthave some kind of political meaning. so far as he could see there were two possibilities.one, much the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the thought police, just ashe had feared. he did not know why the thought police should choose to deliver their messagesin such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons. the thing that was written on thepaper might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description.but there was another, wilder possibility

that kept raising its head, though he triedvainly to suppress it. this was, that the message did not come from the thought policeat all, but from some kind of underground organization. perhaps the brotherhood existedafter all! perhaps the girl was part of it! no doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprunginto his mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his hand. it was nottill a couple of minutes later that the other, more probable explanation had occurred tohim. 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 hisheart banged, and it was with difficulty that he kept his voice from trembling as he murmuredhis figures into the speakwrite.

he rolled up the completed bundle of workand slid it into the pneumatic tube. eight minutes had gone by. he re-adjusted his spectacleson his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work towards him, with the scrap of paperon top of it. he flattened it out. on it was written, in a large unformed handwriting: i love you. for several seconds he was too stunned evento throw the incriminating thing into the memory hole. when he did so, although he knewvery well the danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once again,just to make sure that the words were really there.

for the rest of the morning it was very difficultto work. what was even worse than having to focus his mind on a series of niggling jobswas the need to conceal his agitation from the telescreen. he felt as though a fire wereburning in his belly. lunch in the hot, crowded, noise-filled canteen was torment. he had hopedto be alone for a little while during the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have itthe imbecile parsons flopped down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating thetinny smell of stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for hate week.he was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of big brother's head, two metres wide,which was being made for the occasion by his daughter's troop of spies. the irritatingthing was that in the racket of voices winston

could hardly hear what parsons was saying,and was constantly having to ask for some fatuous remark to be repeated. just once hecaught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other girls at the far end of the room.she appeared not to have seen him, and he did not look in that direction again. the afternoon was more bearable. immediatelyafter lunch there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hoursand necessitated putting everything else aside. it consisted in falsifying a series of productionreports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast discredit on a prominent member ofthe inner party, who was now under a cloud. this was the kind of thing that winston wasgood at, and for more than two hours he succeeded

in shutting the girl out of his mind altogether.then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire to bealone. until he could be alone it was impossible to think this new development out. tonightwas one of his nights at the community centre. he wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen,hurried off to the centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group', playedtwo games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and sat for half an hour througha lecture entitled 'ingsoc in relation to chess'. his soul writhed with boredom, butfor once he had had no impulse to shirk his evening at the centre. at the sight of thewords i love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minorrisks suddenly seemed stupid. it was not till

twenty-three hours, when he was home and inbed — in the darkness, where you were safe even from the telescreen so long as you keptsilent — that he was able to think continuously. it was a physical problem that had to be solved:how to get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting. he did not consider any longerthe possibility that she might be laying some kind of trap for him. he knew that it wasnot so, because of her unmistakable agitation when she handed him the note. obviously shehad been frightened out of her wits, as well she might be. nor did the idea of refusingher advances even cross his mind. only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing herskull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance. he thought of her naked,youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream.

he had imagined her a fool like all the restof them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. a kind of fever seizedhim at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away fromhim! what he feared more than anything else was that she would simply change her mindif he did not get in touch with her quickly. but the physical difficulty of meeting wasenormous. it was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated. whicheverway you turned, the telescreen faced you. actually, all the possible ways of communicatingwith her had occurred to him within five minutes of reading the note; but now, with time tothink, he went over them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments on a table.

obviously the kind of encounter that had happenedthis morning could not be repeated. if she had worked in the records department it mighthave been comparatively simple, but he had only a very dim idea whereabouts in the buildingthe fiction departrnent lay, and he had no pretext for going there. if he had known whereshe lived, and at what time she left work, he could have contrived to meet her somewhereon her way home; but to try to follow her home was not safe, because it would mean loiteringabout outside the ministry, which was bound to be noticed. as for sending a letter throughthe mails, it was out of the question. by a routine that was not even secret, all letterswere opened in transit. actually, few people ever wrote letters. for the messages thatit was occasionally necessary to send, there

were printed postcards with long lists ofphrases, and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable. in any case he did notknow the girl's name, let alone her address. finally he decided that the safest place wasthe canteen. if he could get her at a table by herself, somewhere in the middle of theroom, 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 exchangea few words. for a week after this, life was like a restlessdream. on the next day she did not appear in the canteen until he was leaving it, thewhistle having already blown. presumably she had been changed on to a later shift. theypassed each other without a glance. on the

day after that she was in the canteen at theusual time, but with three other girls and immediately under a telescreen. then for threedreadful days she did not appear at all. his whole mind and body seemed to be afflictedwith an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, everysound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. even in sleephe could not altogether escape from her image. he did not touch the diary during those days.if there was any relief, it was in his work, in which he could sometimes forget himselffor ten minutes at a stretch. he had absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her. therewas no enquiry he could make. she might have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide,she might have been transferred to the other

end of oceania: worst and likeliest of all,she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him. the next day she reappeared. her arm was outof the sling and she had a band of sticking-plaster round her wrist. the relief of seeing herwas so great that he could not resist staring directly at her for several seconds. on thefollowing day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her. when he came into the canteenshe was sitting at a table well out from the wall, and was quite alone. it was early, andthe place was not very full. the queue edged forward till winston was almost at the counter,then was held up for two minutes because someone in front was complaining that he had not receivedhis tablet of saccharine. but the girl was

still alone when winston secured his trayand began to make for her table. he walked casually towards her, his eyes searching fora place at some table beyond her. she was perhaps three metres away from him. anothertwo seconds would do it. then a voice behind him called, 'smith!' he pretended not to hear.'smith!' repeated the voice, more loudly. it was no use. he turned round. a blond-headed,silly-faced young man named wilsher, whom he barely knew, was inviting him with a smileto a vacant place at his table. it was not safe to refuse. after having been recognized,he could not go and sit at a table with an unattended girl. it was too noticeable. hesat down with a friendly smile. the silly blond face beamed into his. winston had ahallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe

right into the middle of it. the girl's tablefilled up a few minutes later. but she must have seen him coming towardsher, and perhaps she would take the hint. next day he took care to arrive early. surelyenough, she was at a table in about the same place, and again alone. the person immediatelyahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like man with a flat face and tiny,suspicious eyes. as winston turned away from the counter with his tray, he saw that thelittle man was making straight for the girl's table. his hopes sank again. there was a vacantplace at a table further away, but something in the little man's appearance suggested thathe would be sufficiently attentive to his own comfort to choose the emptiest table.with ice at his heart winston followed. it

was no use unless he could get the girl alone.at this moment there was a tremendous crash. the little man was sprawling on all fours,his tray had gone flying, two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across the floor.he started to his feet with a malignant glance at winston, whom he evidently suspected ofhaving tripped him up. but it was all right. five seconds later, with a thundering heart,winston was sitting at the girl's table. he did not look at her. he unpacked his trayand promptly began eating. it was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else came,but now a terrible fear had taken possession of him. a week had gone by since she had firstapproached him. she would have changed her mind, she must have changed her mind! it wasimpossible that this affair should end successfully;

such things did not happen in real life. hemight 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 placeto sit down. in his vague way ampleforth was attached to winston, and would certainly sitdown at his table if he caught sight of him. there was perhaps a minute in which to act.both winston and the girl were eating steadily. the stuff they were eating was a thin stew,actually a soup, of haricot beans. in a low murmur winston began speaking. neither ofthem looked up; steadily they spooned the watery stuff into their mouths, and betweenspoonfuls exchanged the few necessary words in low expressionless voices.

'what time do you leave work?' 'eighteen-thirty.' 'where can we meet?' 'victory square, near the monument.' 'it's full of telescreens.' 'it doesn't matter if there's a crowd.' 'any signal?' 'no. don't come up to me until you see meamong a lot of people. and don't look at me. just keep somewhere near me.'

'what time?' 'nineteen hours.' 'all right.' ampleforth failed to see winston and sat downat another table. they did not speak again, and, so far as it was possible for two peoplesitting on opposite sides of the same table, they did not look at one another. the girlfinished her lunch quickly and made off, while winston stayed to smoke a cigarette. winston was in victory square before the appointedtime. he wandered round the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which big brother'sstatue 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 torepresent oliver cromwell. at five minutes past the hour the girl had still not appeared.again the terrible fear seized upon winston. she was not coming, she had changed her mind!he walked slowly up to the north side of the square and got a sort of pale-coloured pleasurefrom identifying st. martin's church, whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed 'youowe me three farthings.' then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, readingor pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column. it was not safe to go nearher until some more people had accumulated.

there were telescreens all round the pediment.but at this moment there was a din of shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhereto the left. suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square. the girl nippednimbly round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush. winston followed.as he ran, he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of eurasian prisoners was passing. already a dense mass of people was blockingthe south side of the square. winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitatesto the outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward intothe heart of the crowd. soon he was within arm's length of the girl, but the way wasblocked by an enormous prole and an almost

equally enormous woman, presumably his wife,who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of flesh. winston wriggled himself sideways,and with a violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them. for a moment itfelt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp between the two muscular hips, thenhe had broken through, sweating a little. he was next to the girl. they were shoulderto shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them. a long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guardsarmed with sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down thestreet. in the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammedclose together. their sad, mongolian faces

gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterlyincurious. occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all theprisoners were wearing leg-irons. truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces passed.winston knew they were there but he saw them only intermittently. the girl's shoulder,and her arm right down to the elbow, were pressed against his. her cheek was almostnear enough for him to feel its warmth. she had immediately taken charge of the situation,just as she had done in the canteen. she began speaking in the same expressionless voiceas before, with lips barely moving, a mere murmur easily drowned by the din of voicesand the rumbling of the trucks. 'can you hear me?'

'yes.' 'can you get sunday afternoon off?' 'then listen carefully. you'll have to rememberthis. go to paddington station—' with a sort of military precision that astonishedhim, she outlined the route that he was to follow. a half-hour railway journey; turnleft 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 mosson it. it was as though she had a map inside her head. 'can you remember all that?' shemurmured finally. 'you turn left, then right, then left again.and the gate's got no top bar.'

'yes. what time?' 'about fifteen. you may have to wait. i'llget there by another way. are you sure you remember everything?' 'then get away from me as quick as you can.' she need not have told him that. but for themoment they could not extricate themselves from the crowd. the trucks were still filingpost, the people still insatiably gaping. at the start there had been a few boos andhisses, but it came only from the party members among the crowd, and had soon stopped. theprevailing emotion was simply curiosity. foreigners, whether from eurasia or from eastasia, werea kind of strange animal. one literally never

saw them except in the guise of prisoners,and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. nor did one knowwhat became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the others simplyvanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. the round mogol faces had given way to facesof a more european type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. from over scrubby cheekbones eyeslooked into winston's, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. the convoywas drawing to an end. in the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a mass ofgrizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him, as though he wereused to having them bound together. it was almost time for winston and the girl to part.but at the last moment, while the crowd still

hemmed them in, her hand felt for his andgave it a fleeting squeeze. it could not have been ten seconds, and yetit seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. he had time to learn everydetail of her hand. he explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palmwith its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. merely from feeling it hewould have known it by sight. in the same instant it occurred to him that he did notknow what colour the girl's eyes were. they were probably brown, but people with darkhair sometimes had blue eyes. to turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivablefolly. with hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadilyin front of them, and instead of the eyes

of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisonergazed mournfully at winston out of nests of hair. chapter : 2 winston picked his way up the lane throughdappled light and shade, stepping out into pools of gold wherever the boughs parted.under the trees to the left of him the ground was misty with bluebells. the air seemed tokiss one's skin. it was the second of may. from somewhere deeper in the heart of thewood came the droning of ring doves. he was a bit early. there had been no difficultiesabout the journey, and the girl was so evidently experienced that he was less frightened thanhe would normally have been. presumably she

could be trusted to find a safe place. ingeneral you could not assume that you were much safer in the country than in london.there were no telescreens, of course, but there was always the danger of concealed microphonesby which your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to makea journey by yourself without attracting attention. for distances of less than 100 kilometresit was not necessary to get your passport endorsed, but sometimes there were patrolshanging about the railway stations, who examined the papers of any party member they foundthere and asked awkward questions. however, no patrols had appeared, and on the walk fromthe station he had made sure by cautious backward glances that he was not being followed. thetrain was full of proles, in holiday mood

because of the summery weather. the wooden-seatedcarriage 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 anafternoon with 'in-laws' in the country, and, as they freely explained to winston, to gethold of a little blackmarket butter. the lane widened, and in a minute he cameto the footpath she had told him of, a mere cattle-track which plunged between the bushes.he had no watch, but it could not be fifteen yet. the bluebells were so thick underfootthat it was impossible not to tread on them. he knelt down and began picking some partlyto pass the time away, but also from a vague idea that he would like to have a bunch offlowers to offer to the girl when they met.

he had got together a big bunch and was smellingtheir faint sickly scent when a sound at his back froze him, the unmistakable crackle ofa foot on twigs. he went on picking bluebells. it was the best thing to do. it might be thegirl, or he might have been followed after all. to look round was to show guilt. he pickedanother and another. a hand fell lightly on his shoulder. he looked up. it was the girl. she shook herhead, evidently as a warning that he must keep silent, then parted the bushes and quicklyled the way along the narrow track into the wood. obviously she had been that way before,for she dodged the boggy bits as though by habit. winston followed, still clasping hisbunch of flowers. his first feeling was relief,

but as he watched the strong slender bodymoving in front of him, with the scarlet sash that was just tight enough to bring out thecurve of her hips, the sense of his own inferiority was heavy upon him. even now it seemed quitelikely that when she turned round and looked at him she would draw back after all. thesweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves daunted him. already on the walkfrom the station the may sunshine had made him feel dirty and etiolated, a creature ofindoors, with the sooty dust of london in the pores of his skin. it occurred to himthat till now she had probably never seen him in broad daylight in the open. they cameto the fallen tree that she had spoken of. the girl hopped over and forced apart thebushes, in which there did not seem to be

an opening. when winston followed her, hefound that they were in a natural clearing, a tiny grassy knoll surrounded by tall saplingsthat shut it in completely. the girl stopped and turned. 'here we are,' she said. he was facing her at several paces" distance.as yet he did not dare move nearer to her. 'i didn't want to say anything in the lane,'she went on, 'in case there's a mike hidden there. i don't suppose there is, but therecould be. there's always the chance of one of those swine recognizing your voice. we'reall right here.' he still had not the courage to approach her.'we're all right here?' he repeated stupidly.

'yes. look at the trees.' they were smallashes, which at some time had been cut down and had sprouted up again into a forest ofpoles, none of them thicker than one's wrist. 'there's nothing big enough to hide a mikein. besides, i've been here before.' they were only making conversation. he hadmanaged to move closer to her now. she stood before him very upright, with a smile on herface that looked faintly ironical, as though she were wondering why he was so slow to act.the bluebells had cascaded on to the ground. they seemed to have fallen of their own accord.he took her hand. 'would you believe,' he said, 'that till thismoment i didn't know what colour your eyes were?' they were brown, he noted, a ratherlight shade of brown, with dark lashes. 'now

that you've seen what i'm really like, canyou still bear to look at me?' 'yes, easily.' 'i'm thirty-nine years old. i've got a wifethat i can't get rid of. i've got varicose veins. i've got five false teeth.' 'i couldn't care less,' said the girl. the next moment, it was hard to say by whoseact, she was in his his arms. at the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity.the youthful body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against hisface, and yes! actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth.she had clasped her arms about his neck, she

was calling him darling, precious one, lovedone. he had pulled her down on to the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do whathe liked with her. but the truth was that he had no physical sensation, except thatof mere contact. all he felt was incredulity and pride. he was glad that this was happening,but he had no physical desire. it was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightenedhim, he was too much used to living without women — he did not know the reason. thegirl picked herself up and pulled a bluebell out of her hair. she sat against him, puttingher arm round his waist. 'never mind, dear. there's no hurry. we'vegot the whole afternoon. isn't this a splendid hide-out? i found it when i got lost onceon a community hike. if anyone was coming

you could hear them a hundred metres away.' 'what is your name?' said winston. 'julia. i know yours. it's winston — winstonsmith.' 'how did you find that out?' 'i expect i'm better at finding things outthan you are, dear. tell me, what did you think of me before that day i gave you thenote?' he did not feel any temptation to tell liesto her. it was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst. 'i hated the sight of you,' he said. 'i wantedto rape you and then murder you afterwards.

two weeks ago i thought seriously of smashingyour head in with a cobblestone. if you really want to know, i imagined that you had somethingto do with the thought police.' the girl laughed delightedly, evidently takingthis as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise. 'not the thought police! you didn't honestlythink that?' 'well, perhaps not exactly that. but fromyour 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. purein word and deed. banners, processions, slogans, games, community hikes all that stuff. andyou thought that if i had a quarter of a chance

i'd denounce you as a thought-criminal andget you killed off?' 'yes, something of that kind. a great manyyoung girls are like that, you know.' 'it's this bloody thing that does it,' shesaid, ripping off the scarlet sash of the junior anti-sex league and flinging it onto a bough. then, as though touching her waist had reminded her of something, she felt inthe pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate. she broke it in halfand gave one of the pieces to winston. even before he had taken it he knew by the smellthat it was very unusual chocolate. it was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silverpaper. chocolate normally was dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one coulddescribe it, like the smoke of a rubbish fire.

but at some time or another he had tastedchocolate like the piece she had given him. the first whiff of its scent had stirred upsome memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling. 'where did you get this stuff?' he said. 'black market,' she said indifferently. 'actuallyi am that sort of girl, to look at. i'm good at games. i was a troop-leader in the spies.i do voluntary work three evenings a week for the junior anti-sex league. hours andhours i've spent pasting their bloody rot all over london. i always carry one end ofa banner in the processions. i always iook cheerful and i never shirk anything. alwaysyell with the crowd, that's what i say. it's

the only way to be safe.' the first fragment of chocolate had meltedon winston's tongue. the taste was delightful. but there was still that memory moving roundthe edges of his consciousness, something strongly felt but not reducible to definiteshape, like an object seen out of the corner of one's eye. he pushed it away from him,aware only that it was the memory of some action which he would have liked to undo butcould not. 'you are very young,' he said. 'you are tenor fifteen years younger than i am. what could you see to attract you in a man like me?' 'it was something in your face. i thoughti'd take a chance. i'm good at spotting people

who don't belong. as soon as i saw you i knewyou were against them.' them, it appeared, meant the party, and aboveall the inner party, about whom she talked with an open jeering hatred which made winstonfeel uneasy, although he knew that they were safe here if they could be safe anywhere.a thing that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her language. party memberswere supposed not to swear, and winston himself very seldom did swear, aloud, at any rate.julia, however, seemed unable to mention the party, and especially the inner party, withoutusing the kind of words that you saw chalked up in dripping alley-ways. he did not dislikeit. it was merely one symptom of her revolt against the party and all its ways, and somehowit seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze

of a horse that smells bad hay. they had leftthe clearing and were wandering again through the chequered shade, with their arms roundeach other's waists whenever it was wide enough to walk two abreast. he noticed how much softerher waist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone. they did not speak above a whisper.outside the clearing, julia said, it was better to go quietly. presently they had reachedthe edge of the little wood. she stopped him. 'don't go out into the open. there might besomeone watching. we're all right if we keep behind the boughs.' they were standing in the shade of hazel bushes.the sunlight, filtering through innumerable leaves, was still hot on their faces. winstonlooked out into the field beyond, and underwent

a curious, slow shock of recognition. he knewit by sight. an old, closebitten pasture, with a footpath wandering across it and amolehill here and there. in the ragged hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elmtrees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in densemasses like women's hair. surely somewhere nearby, but out of sight, there must be astream with green pools where dace were swimming? 'isn't there a stream somewhere near here?'he whispered. 'that's right, there is a stream. it's atthe edge of the next field, actually. there are fish in it, great big ones. you can watchthem lying in the pools under the willow trees, waving their tails.'

'it's the golden country — almost,' he murmured. 'the golden country?' 'it's nothing, really. a landscape i've seensometimes in a dream.' 'look!' whispered julia. a thrush had alighted on a bough not fivemetres away, almost at the level of their faces. perhaps it had not seen them. it wasin the sun, they in the shade. it spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into placeagain, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, andthen began to pour forth a torrent of song. in the afternoon hush the volume of soundwas startling. winston and julia clung together,

fascinated. the music went on and on, minuteafter minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as thoughthe bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. sometimes it stopped for a fewseconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and againburst into song. winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. for whom, for what,was that bird singing? no mate, no rival was watching it. what made it sit at the edgeof the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? he wondered whether after allthere was a microphone hidden somewhere near. he and julia had spoken only in low whispers,and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would pick up the thrush. perhaps atthe other end of the instrument some small,

beetle-like man was listening intently — listeningto that. but by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. itwas as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed upwith the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. he stopped thinking and merely felt.the girl's waist in the bend of his arm was soft and warm. he pulled her round so thatthey were breast to breast; her body seemed to melt into his. wherever his hands movedit was all as yielding as water. their mouths clung together; it was quite different fromthe hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. when they moved their faces apart again bothof them sighed deeply. the bird took fright and fled with a clatter of wings.

winston put his lips against her ear. 'now,'he whispered. 'not here,' she whispered back. 'come backto the hideout. it's safer.' quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs,they threaded their way back to the clearing. when they were once inside the ring of saplingsshe turned and faced him. they were both breathing fast. but the smile had reappeared round thecorners of her mouth. she stood looking at him for an instant, then felt at the zipperof her overalls. and, yes! it was almost as in his dream. almost as swiftly as he hadimagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was withthat same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated. herbody gleamed white in the sun. but for a moment

he did not look at her body; his eyes wereanchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile. he knelt down before her and tookher hands in his. 'have you done this before?' 'of course. hundreds of times — well, scoresof times anyway.' 'with party members?' 'yes, always with party members.' 'with members of the inner party?' 'not with those swine, no. but there's plentythat would if they got half a chance. they're not so holy as they make out.'

his heart leapt. scores of times she had doneit: he wished it had been hundreds — thousands. anything that hinted at corruption alwaysfilled him with a wild hope. who knew, perhaps the party was rotten under the surface, itscult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity. if he could haveinfected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have doneso! anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! he pulled her down so that they were kneelingface to face. 'listen. the more men you've had, the morei love you. do you understand that?' 'yes, perfectly.' 'i hate purity, i hate goodness! i don't wantany virtue to exist anywhere. i want everyone

to be corrupt to the bones.' 'well then, i ought to suit you, dear. i'mcorrupt to the bones.' 'you like doing this? i don't mean simplyme: i mean the thing in itself?' 'i adore it.' that was above all what he wanted to hear.not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiateddesire: that was the force that would tear the party to pieces. he pressed her down uponthe grass, among the fallen bluebells. this time there was no difficulty. presently therising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed, and in a sort of pleasanthelplessness they fell apart. the sun seemed

to have grown hotter. they were both sleepy.he reached out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her. almost immediatelythey fell asleep and slept for about half an hour. winston woke first. he sat up and watchedthe freckled face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand. except forher mouth, you could not call her beautiful. there was a line or two round the eyes, ifyou looked closely. the short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and soft. it occurredto him that he still did not know her surname or where she lived. the young, strong body, now helpless in sleep,awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling.

but the mindless tenderness that he had feltunder the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back. he pulledthe overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. in the old days, he thought,a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end ofthe story. but you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. no emotion was pure,because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. their embrace had been a battle,the climax a victory. it was a blow struck against the party. it was a political act. chapter : 3 'we can come here once again,' said julia.'it's generally safe to use any hide-out twice.

but not for another month or two, of course.' as soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed.she became alert and business-like, put her clothes on, knotted the scarlet sash abouther waist, and began arranging the details of the journey home. it seemed natural toleave this to her. she obviously had a practical cunning which winston lacked, and she seemedalso to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside round london, stored away frominnumerable community hikes. the route she gave him was quite different from the oneby which he had come, and brought him out at a different railway station. 'never gohome the same way as you went out,' she said, as though enunciating an important generalprinciple. she would leave first, and winston

was to wait half an hour before followingher. she had named a place where they could meetafter work, four evenings hence. it was a street in one of the poorer quarters, wherethere was an open market which was generally crowded and noisy. she would be hanging aboutamong the stalls, pretending to be in search of shoelaces or sewing-thread. if she judgedthat the coast was clear she would blow her nose when he approached; otherwise he wasto walk past her without recognition. but with luck, in the middle of the crowd, itwould be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting. 'and now i must go,' she said as soon as hehad mastered his instructions. 'i'm due back

at nineteen-thirty. i've got to put in twohours for the junior anti-sex league, handing out leaflets, or something. isn't it bloody?give me a brush-down, would you? have i got any twigs in my hair? are you sure? then good-bye,my love, good-bye!' she flung herself into his arms, kissed himalmost violently, and a moment later pushed her way through the saplings and disappearedinto the wood with very little noise. even now he had not found out her surname or heraddress. however, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that they could evermeet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication. as it happened, they never went back to theclearing in the wood. during the month of

may there was only one further occasion onwhich they actually succeeded in making love. that was in another hidlng-place known tojulia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where anatomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. it was a good hiding-place when once you gotthere, but the getting there was very dangerous. for the rest they could meet only in the streets,in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. in thestreet it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. as they drifted down the crowdedpavements, 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, suddenlynipped 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 asthey parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the followingday. julia appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation, which she called 'talkingby instalments'. she was also surprisingly adept at speaking without moving her lips.just once in almost a month of nightly meetings they managed to exchange a kiss. they werepassing in silence down a side-street (julia would never speak when they were away fromthe main streets) when there was a deafening roar, the earth heaved, and the air darkened,and winston found himself lying on his side, bruised and terrified. a rocket bomb musthave dropped quite near at hand. suddenly

he became aware of julia's face a few centimetresfrom his own, deathly white, as white as chalk. even her lips were white. she was dead! heclasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live warm face. but there wassome powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips. both of their faces were thicklycoated with plaster. there were evenings when they reached theirrendezvous and then had to walk past one another without a sign, because a patrol had justcome round the corner or a helicopter was hovering overhead. even if it had been lessdangerous, it would still have been difficult to find time to meet. winston's working weekwas sixty hours, julia's was even longer, and their free days varied according to thepressure of work and did not often coincide.

julia, in any case, seldom had an eveningcompletely free. she spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations,distributing literature for the junior anti-sex league, preparing banners for hate week, makingcollections for the savings campaign, and such-like activities. it paid, she said, itwas camouflage. if you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. she even inducedwinston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munitionwork which was done voluntarily by zealous party members. so, one evening every week,winston spent four hours of paralysing boredom, screwing together small bits of metal whichwere probably parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit workshop where the knocking of hammersmingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.

when they met in the church tower the gapsin their fragmentary conversation were filled up. it was a blazing afternoon. the air inthe little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringlyof pigeon dung. they sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered floor, one orother of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the arrowslits andmake sure that no one was coming. julia was twenty-six years old. she livedin a hostel with thirty other girls ('always in the stink of women! how i hate women!'she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machinesin the fiction department. she enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running andservicing a powerful but tricky electric motor.

she was 'not clever', but was fond of usingher hands and felt at home with machinery. she could describe the whole process of composinga novel, from the general directive issued by the planning committee down to the finaltouching-up by the rewrite squad. but she was not interested in the finished product.she 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. books were just a commodity that had to beproduced, like jam or bootlaces. she had no memories of anything before theearly 'sixties and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the daysbefore the revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. at schoolshe had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running.she had been a troop-leader in the spies and

a branch secretary in the youth league beforejoining the junior anti-sex league. she had always borne an excellent character. she hadeven (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in pornosec, the sub-sectionof the fiction department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among theproles. it was nicknamed muck house by the people who worked in it, she remarked. thereshe had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles likespanking stories or one night in a girls" school, to be bought furtively by proletarianyouths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal. 'what are these books like?' said winstoncuriously.

'oh, ghastly rubbish. they're boring, really.they only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. of course i was only on the kaleidoscopes.i was never in the rewrite squad. i'm not literary, dear — not even enough for that.' he learned with astonishment that all theworkers in pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were girls. the theory was thatmen, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater dangerof being corrupted by the filth they handled. 'they don't even like having married womenthere,' she added. girls are always supposed to be so pure. here's one who isn't, anyway. she had had her first love-affair when shewas sixteen, with a party member of sixty

who later committed suicide to avoid arrest.'and a good job too,' said julia, 'otherwise they'd have had my name out of him when heconfessed.' since then there had been various others. life as she saw it was quite simple.you wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the party, wanted to stop you having it; you brokethe rules as best you could. she seemed to think it just as natural that 'they' shouldwant to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. shehated the party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism ofit. except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in party doctrine. henoticed that she never used newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everydayuse. she had never heard of the brotherhood,

and refused to believe in its existence. anykind of organized revolt against the party, which was bound to be a failure, struck heras stupid. the clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. he wonderedvaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who hadgrown up in the world of the revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the party as somethingunalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as arabbit dodges a dog. they did not discuss the possibility of gettingmarried. it was too remote to be worth thinking about. no imaginable committee would eversanction such a marriage even if katharine, winston's wife, could somehow have been gotrid of. it was hopeless even as a daydream.

'what was she like, your wife?' said julia. 'she was — do you know the newspeak wordgoodthinkful? meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?' 'no, i didn't know the word, but i know thekind of person, right enough.' he began telling her the story of his marriedlife, but curiously enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already. shedescribed to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of katharine'sbody as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing him fromher with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him. with juliahe felt no difficulty in talking about such

things: katharine, in any case, had long ceasedto be a painful memory and became merely a distasteful one. 'i could have stood it if it hadn't been forone thing,' he said. he told her about the frigid little ceremony that katharine hadforced him to go through on the same night every week. 'she hated it, but nothing wouldmake her stop doing it. she used to call it — but you'll never guess.' 'our duty to the party,' said julia promptly. 'how did you know that?' 'i've been at school too, dear. sex talksonce a month for the over-sixteens. and in

the youth movement. they rub it into you foryears. i dare say it works in a lot of cases. but of course you can never tell; people aresuch hypocrites.' she began to enlarge upon the subject. withjulia, everything came back to her own sexuality. as soon as this was touched upon in any wayshe was capable of great acuteness. unlike winston, she had grasped the inner meaningof the party's sexual puritanism. it was not merely that the sex instinct created a worldof its own which was outside the party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed ifpossible. what was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which wasdesirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. the wayshe put it was:

'when you make love you're using up energy;and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. they can't bear you tofeel like that. they want you to be bursting with energy all the time. all this marchingup and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. if you're happy insideyourself, why should you get excited about big brother and the three-year plans and thetwo minutes hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?' that was very true, he thought. there wasa direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. for how could thefear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the party needed in its members be keptat the right pitch, except by bottling down

some powerful instinct and using it as a drivingforce? the sex impulse was dangerous to the party, and the party had turned it to account.they had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. the family could not actuallybe abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost theold-fashioned way. the children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against theirparents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. the family had become ineffect an extension of the thought police. it was a device by means of which everyonecould be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately. abruptly his mind went back to katharine.katharine would unquestionably have denounced

him to the thought police if she had not happenedto be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions. but what really recalledher to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had brought thesweat out on his forehead. he began telling julia of something that had happened, or ratherhad failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago. it was three or four months after they weremarried. they had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in kent. they had only laggedbehind the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and presentlyfound themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry. it was a sheer dropof ten or twenty metres, with boulders at

the bottom. there was nobody of whom theycould ask the way. as soon as she realized that they were lost katharine became veryuneasy. to be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing.she wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start searching in the other direction.but at this moment winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of thecliff beneath them. one tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently growingon the same root. he had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called to katharineto come and look at it. 'look, katharine! look at those flowers. thatclump down near the bottom. do you see they're two different colours?'

she had already turned to go, but she didrather fretfully come back for a moment. she even leaned out over the cliff face to seewhere he was pointing. he was standing a little behind her, and he put his hand on her waistto steady her. at this moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone theywere. there was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake.in a place like this the danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very small,and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up sounds. it was the hottest sleepiesthour of the afternoon. the sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face. andthe thought struck him... 'why didn't you give her a good shove?' saidjulia. 'i would have.'

'yes, dear, you would have. i would, if i'dbeen the same person then as i am now. or perhaps i would — i'm not certain.' 'are you sorry you didn't?' 'yes. on the whole i'm sorry i didn't.' they were sitting side by side on the dustyfloor. he pulled her closer against him. her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasantsmell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. she was very young, he thought, she stillexpected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient personover a cliff solves nothing. 'actually it would have made no difference,'he said.

'then why are you sorry you didn't do it?' 'only because i prefer a positive to a negative.in this game that we're playing, we can't win. some kinds of failure are better thanother kinds, that's all.' he felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent.she always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. she would not accept it as alaw of nature that the individual is always defeated. in a way she realized that she herselfwas doomed, that sooner or later the thought police would catch her and kill her, but withanother part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secretworld in which you could live as you chose. all you needed was luck and cunning and boldness.she did not understand that there was no such

thing as happiness, that the only victorylay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring waron the party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse. 'we are the dead,' he said. 'we're not dead yet,' said julia prosaically. 'not physically. six months, a year — fiveyears, conceivably. i am afraid of death. you are young, so presumably you're more afraidof it than i am. obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. but it makes very littledifference. so long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.'

'oh, rubbish! which would you sooner sleepwith, me or a skeleton? don't you enjoy being alive? don't you like feeling: this is me,this is my hand, this is my leg, i'm real, i'm solid, i'm alive! don't you like this?' she twisted herself round and pressed herbosom against him. he could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls. her bodyseemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigour into his. 'yes, i like that,' he said. 'then stop talking about dying. and now listen,dear, we've got to fix up about the next time we meet. we may as well go back to the placein the wood. we've given it a good long rest.

but you must get there by a different waythis time. i've got it all planned out. you take the train — but look, i'll draw itout for you.' and in her practical way she scraped togethera small square of dust, and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on thefloor. chapter : 4 winston looked round the shabby little roomabove mr. charrington's shop. beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with raggedblankets and a coverless bolster. the old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was tickingaway on the mantelpiece. in the corner, on the gateleg table, the glass paperweight whichhe had bought on his last visit gleamed softly

out of the half-darkness. in the fender was a battered tin oilstove,a saucepan, and two cups, provided by mr. charrington. winston lit the burner and seta pan of water to boil. he had brought an envelope full of victory coffee and some saccharinetablets. the clock's hands said seventeen-twenty: it was nineteen-twenty really. she was comingat nineteen-thirty. folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious,gratuitous, suicidal folly. of all the crimes that a party member could commit, this onewas the least possible to conceal. actually the idea had first floated into his head inthe form of a vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table.as he had foreseen, mr. charrington had made

no difficulty about letting the room. he wasobviously glad of the few dollars that it would bring him. nor did he seem shocked orbecome offensively knowing when it was made clear that winston wanted the room for thepurpose of a love-affair. instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in generalities,with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he had become partly invisible. privacy,he said, was a very valuable thing. everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally.and when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew ofit to keep his knowledge to himself. he even, seeming almost to fade out of existence ashe did so, added that there were two entries to the house, one of them through the backyard, which gave on an alley.

under the window somebody was singing. winstonpeeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. the june sun was still highin 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 toand fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white thingswhich winston recognized as babies" diapers. whenever her mouth was not corked with clothespegs she was singing in a powerful contralto: it was only an 'opeless fancy.it passed like an ipril dye, but a look an' a word an' the dreams theystirred they 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!

the tune had been haunting london for weekspast. it was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles bya sub-section of the music department. the words of these songs were composed withoutany human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. but the woman sangso tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. he could hearthe woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the childrenin the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the roomseemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen. folly, folly, folly! he thought again. itwas inconceivable that they could frequent

this place for more than a few weeks withoutbeing caught. but the temptation of having a hiding-place that was truly their own, indoorsand near at hand, had been too much for both of them. for some time after their visit tothe church belfry it had been impossible to arrange meetings. working hours had been drasticallyincreased in anticipation of hate week. it was more than a month distant, but the enormous,complex preparations that it entailed were throwing extra work on to everybody. finallyboth of them managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day. they had agreed to go backto the clearing in the wood. on the evening beforehand they met briefly in the street.as usual, winston hardly looked at julia as they drifted towards one another in the crowd,but from the short glance he gave her it seemed

to him that she was paler than usual. 'it's all off,' she murmured as soon as shejudged it safe to speak. 'tomorrow, i mean.' 'what?' 'tomorrow afternoon. i can't come.' 'why not?' 'oh, the usual reason. it's started earlythis time.' for a moment he was violently angry. duringthe month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed. at thebeginning there had been little true sensuality in it. their first love-making had been simplyan act of the will. but after the second time

it was different. the smell of her hair, thetaste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into theair all round him. she had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wantedbut felt that he had a right to. when she said that she could not come, he had the feelingthat she was cheating him. but just at this moment the crowd pressed them together andtheir hands accidentally met. she gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemedto invite not desire but affection. it struck him that when one lived with a woman thisparticular disappointment must be a normal, recurring event; and a deep tenderness, suchas he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. he wished that they werea married couple of ten years" standing. he

wished that he were walking through the streetswith her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear, talking of trivialitiesand buying odds and ends for the household. he wished above all that they had some placewhere they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love everytime they met. it was not actually at that moment, but at some time on the followingday, that the idea of renting mr. charrington's room had occurred to him. when he suggestedit to julia she had agreed with unexpected readiness. both of them knew that it was lunacy.it was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves. as he sat waitingon the edge of the bed he thought again of the cellars of the ministry of love. it wascurious how that predestined horror moved

in and out of one's consciousness. there itlay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. one could notavoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by aconscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened. at this moment there was a quick step on thestairs. julia burst into the room. she was carrying a tool-bag of coarse brown canvas,such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and fro at the ministry. he started forwardto take her in his arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly because shewas still holding the tool-bag. 'half a second,' she said. 'just let me showyou what i've brought. did you bring some

of that filthy victory coffee? i thought youwould. you can chuck it away again, because we shan't be needing it. look here.' she fell on her knees, threw open the bag,and tumbled out some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it. underneathwere a number of neat paper packets. the first packet that she passed to winston had a strangeand yet vaguely familiar feeling. it was filled with some kind of heavy, sand-like stuff whichyielded wherever you touched it. 'it isn't sugar?' he said. 'real sugar. not saccharine, sugar. and here'sa loaf of bread — proper white bread, not our bloody stuff — and a little pot of jam.and here's a tin of milk — but look! this

is the one i'm really proud of. i had to wrapa bit of sacking round it, because—' but she did not need to tell him why she hadwrapped it up. the smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed likean emanation from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with evennow, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriouslyin a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again. 'it's coffee,' he murmured, 'real coffee.' 'it's inner party coffee. there's a wholekilo here,' she said. 'how did you manage to get hold of all thesethings?'

'it's all inner party stuff. there's nothingthose swine don't have, nothing. but of course waiters and servants and people pinch things,and — look, i got a little packet of tea as well.' winston had squatted down beside her. he toreopen a corner of the packet. 'it's real tea. not blackberry leaves.' 'there's been a lot of tea about lately. they'vecaptured india, or something,' she said vaguely. 'but listen, dear. i want you to turn yourback on me for three minutes. go and sit on the other side of the bed. don't go too nearthe window. and don't turn round till i tell you.'

winston gazed abstractedly through the muslincurtain. down in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between thewashtub and the line. she took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling: they sye that time 'eals all things,they sye you can always forget; but the smiles an' the tears acrorss the yearsthey twist my 'eart-strings yet! she knew the whole drivelling song by heart,it seemed. her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged witha sort of happy melancholy. one had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content,if the june evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remainthere for a thousand years, pegging out diapers

and singing rubbish. it struck him as a curiousfact that he had never heard a member of the party singing alone and spontaneously. itwould even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking tooneself. perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that theyhad anything to sing about. 'you can turn round now,' said julia. he turned round, and for a second almost failedto recognize her. what he had actually expected was to see her naked. but she was not naked.the transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. she had paintedher face. she must have slipped into some shop in theproletarian quarters and bought herself a

complete set of make-up materials. her lipswere deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of somethingunder the eyes to make them brighter. it was not very skilfully done, but winston's standardsin such matters were not high. he had never before seen or imagined a woman of the partywith cosmetics on her face. the improvement in her appearance was startling. with justa few dabs of colour in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but,above all, far more feminine. her short hair and boyish overalls merely added to the effect.as he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. he rememberedthe half-darkness of a basement kitchen, and a woman's cavernous mouth. it was the verysame scent that she had used; but at the moment

it did not seem to matter. 'scent too!' he said. 'yes, dear, scent too. and do you know whati'm going to do next? i'm going to get hold of a real woman's frock from somewhere andwear it instead of these bloody trousers. i'll wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes!in this room i'm going to be a woman, not a party comrade.' they flung their clothes off and climbed intothe huge mahogany bed. it was the first time that he had stripped himself naked in herpresence. until now he had been too much ashamed of his pale and meagre body, with the varicoseveins standing out on his calves and the discoloured

patch over his ankle. there were no sheets,but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness ofthe bed astonished both of them. 'it's sure to be full of bugs, but who cares?' said julia.one never saw a double bed nowadays, except in the homes of the proles. winston had occasionallyslept in one in his boyhood: julia had never been in one before, so far as she could remember. presently they fell asleep for a little while.when winston woke up the hands of the clock had crept round to nearly nine. he did notstir, because julia was sleeping with her head in the crook of his arm. most of hermake-up had transferred itself to his own face or the bolster, but a light stain ofrouge still brought out the beauty of her

cheekbone. a yellow ray from the sinking sunfell across the foot of the bed and lighted up the fireplace, where the water in the panwas boiling fast. down in the yard the woman had stopped singing, but the faint shoutsof children floated in from the street. he wondered vaguely whether in the abolishedpast it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summerevening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking ofwhat they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listeningto peaceful sounds outside. surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?julia woke up, rubbed her eyes, and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.

'half that water's boiled away,' she said.'i'll get up and make some coffee in another moment. we've got an hour. what time do theycut the lights off at your flats?' 'twenty-three thirty.' 'it's twenty-three at the hostel. but youhave to get in earlier than that, because — hi! get out, you filthy brute!' she suddenly twisted herself over in the bed,seized a shoe from the floor, and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerkof her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at goldstein, that morningduring the two minutes hate. 'what was it?' he said in surprise.

'a rat. i saw him stick his beastly nose outof the wainscoting. there's a hole down there. i gave him a good fright, anyway.' 'rats!' murmured winston. 'in this room!' 'they're all over the place,' said julia indifferentlyas she lay down again. 'we've even got them in the kitchen at the hostel. some parts oflondon are swarming with them. did you know they attack children? yes, they do. in someof these streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes. it's the great hugebrown ones that do it. and the nasty thing is that the brutes always—' 'don't go on!' said winston, with his eyestightly shut.

'dearest! you've gone quite pale. what's thematter? do they make you feel sick?' 'of all horrors in the world — a rat!' she pressed herself against him and woundher limbs round him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body. he did notreopen his eyes immediately. for several moments he had had the feeling of being back in anightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life. it was always verymuch the same. he was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other sideof it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. in the dream hisdeepest feeling was always one of self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behindthe wall of darkness. with a deadly effort,

like wrenching a piece out of his own brain,he could even have dragged the thing into the open. he always woke up without discoveringwhat it was: but somehow it was connected with what julia had been saying when he cuther short. 'i'm sorry,' he said, 'it's nothing. i don'tlike rats, that's all.' 'don't worry, dear, we're not going to havethe filthy brutes in here. i'll stuff the hole with a bit of sacking before we go. andnext time we come here i'll bring some plaster and bung it up properly.' already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten.feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the bedhead. julia got out of bed,pulled on her overalls, and made the coffee.

the smell that rose from the saucepan wasso powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody outside should noticeit and become inquisitive. what was even better than the taste of the coffee was the silkytexture given to it by the sugar, a thing winston had almost forgotten after years ofsaccharine. with one hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the other, juliawandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the bookcase, pointing out the best wayof repairing the gateleg table, plumping herself down in the ragged arm-chair to see if itwas comfortable, and examining the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerantamusement. she brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in abetter light. he took it out of her hand,

fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwateryappearance of the glass. 'what is it, do you think?' said julia. 'i don't think it's anything — i mean, idon't think it was ever put to any use. that's what i like about it. it's a little chunkof history that they've forgotten to alter. it's a message from a hundred years ago, ifone knew how to read it.' 'and that picture over there' — she noddedat the engraving on the opposite wall — 'would that be a hundred years old?' 'more. two hundred, i dare say. one can'ttell. it's impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.'

she went over to look at it. 'here's wherethat brute stuck his nose out,' she said, kicking the wainscoting immediately belowthe picture. 'what is this place? i've seen it before somewhere.' 'it's a church, or at least it used to be.st. clement's danes its name was.' the fragment of rhyme that mr. charrington had taught himcame back into his head, and he added half-nostalgically: "oranges and lemons," say the bells of st.clement's!' to his astonishment she capped the line: 'you owe me three farthings,' say the bellsof st. martin's, 'when will you pay me?' say the bells of oldbailey —

'i can't remember how it goes on after that.but anyway i remember it ends up, "here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes achopper to chop off your head!"' it was like the two halves of a countersign.but there must be another line after 'the bells of old bailey'. perhaps it could bedug out of mr. charrington's memory, if he were suitably prompted. 'who taught you that?' he said. 'my grandfather. he used to say it to me wheni was a little girl. he was vaporized when i was eight — at any rate, he disappeared.i wonder what a lemon was,' she added inconsequently. 'i've seen oranges. they're a kind of roundyellow fruit with a thick skin.'

'i can remember lemons,' said winston. 'theywere quite common in the fifties. they were so sour that it set your teeth on edge evento smell them.' 'i bet that picture's got bugs behind it,'said julia. 'i'll take it down and give it a good clean some day. i suppose it's almosttime we were leaving. i must start washing this paint off. what a bore! i'll get thelipstick off your face afterwards.' winston did not get up for a few minutes more.the room was darkening. he turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight.the inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior ofthe glass itself. there was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent asair. it was as though the surface of the glass

had been the arch of the sky, enclosing atiny world with its atmosphere complete. he had the feeling that he could get inside it,and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, andthe clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. the paperweight was theroom he was in, and the coral was julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternityat the heart of the crystal. chapter : 5 syme had vanished. a morning came, and hewas missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. on the next daynobody mentioned him. on the third day winston went into the vestibule of the records departmentto look at the notice-board. one of the notices

carried a printed list of the members of thechess committee, of whom syme had been one. it looked almost exactly as it had lookedbefore — nothing had been crossed out — but it was one name shorter. it was enough. symehad ceased to exist: he had never existed. the weather was baking hot. in the labyrinthineministry the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outsidethe pavements scorched one's feet and the stench of the tubes at the rush hours wasa horror. the preparations for hate week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the ministrieswere working overtime. processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays,film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected,effigies built, slogans coined, songs written,

rumours circulated, photographs faked. julia'sunit in the fiction department had been taken off the production of novels and was rushingout a series of atrocity pamphlets. winston, in addition to his regular work, spent longperiods every day in going through back files of the times and altering and embellishingnews items which were to be quoted in speeches. late at night, when crowds of rowdy prolesroamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. the rocket bombs crashed oftenerthan ever, and sometimes in the far distance there were enormous explosions which no onecould explain and about which there were wild rumours. the new tune which was to be the theme-songof hate week (the hate song, it was called)

had already been composed and was being endlesslyplugged on the telescreens. it had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly becalled music, but resembled the beating of a drum. roared out by hundreds of voices tothe tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. the proles had taken a fancy to it, and inthe midnight streets it competed with the still-popular 'it was only a hopeless fancy'.the parsons children played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comband a piece of toilet paper. winston's evenings were fuller than ever. squads of volunteers,organized by parsons, were preparing the street for hate week, stitching banners, paintingposters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across the streetfor the reception of streamers. parsons boasted

that victory mansions alone would displayfour hundred metres of bunting. he was in his native element and as happy as a lark.the heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting to shorts andan open shirt in the evenings. he was everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering,improvising, jollying everyone along with comradely exhortations and giving out fromevery fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat. a new poster had suddenly appeared all overlondon. it had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a eurasiansoldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless mongolian faceand enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed

from his hip. from whatever angle you lookedat the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointedstraight at you. the thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumberingthe portraits of big brother. the proles, normally apathetic about the war, were beinglashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. as though to harmonize withthe general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual.one fell on a crowded film theatre in stepney, burying several hundred victims among theruins. the whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral whichwent on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting. another bomb fell on a piece of wasteground which was used as a playground and

several dozen children were blown to pieces.there were further angry demonstrations, goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies ofthe poster of the eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and a numberof shops were looted in the turmoil; then a rumour flew round that spies were directingthe rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and an old couple who were suspected of beingof foreign extraction had their house set on fire and perished of suffocation. in the room over mr. charrington's shop, whenthey could get there, julia and winston lay side by side on a stripped bed under the openwindow, naked for the sake of coolness. the rat had never come back, but the bugs hadmultiplied hideously in the heat. it did not

seem to matter. dirty or clean, the room wasparadise. as soon as they arrived they would sprinkle everything with pepper bought onthe black market, tear off their clothes, and make love with sweating bodies, then fallasleep and wake to find that the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counter-attack. four, five, six — seven times they met duringthe month of june. winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. he seemedto have lost the need for it. he had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided, leavingonly a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing in the early morninghad stopped. the process of life had ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulseto make faces at the telescreen or shout curses

at the top of his voice. now that they hada secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could onlymeet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. what mattered was that the roomover the junk-shop should exist. to know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the sameas being in it. the room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.mr. charrington, thought winston, was another extinct animal. he usually stopped to talkwith mr. charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs. the old man seemed seldomor never to go out of doors, and on the other hand to have almost no customers. he led aghostlike existence between the tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen wherehe prepared his meals and which contained,

among other things, an unbelievably ancientgramophone with an enormous horn. he seemed glad of the opportunity to talk. wanderingabout among his worthless stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his bowedshoulders in the velvet jacket, he had always vaguely the air of being a collector ratherthan a tradesman. with a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or that— a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck locket containinga strand of some long-dead baby's hair — never asking that winston should buy it, merelythat he should admire it. to talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-outmusical-box. he had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgottenrhymes. there was one about four and twenty

blackbirds, and another about a cow with acrumpled horn, and another about the death of poor cock robin. 'it just occurred to meyou might be interested,' he would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produceda new fragment. but he could never recall more than a few lines of any one rhyme. both of them knew — in a way, it was neverout of their minds that what was now happening could not last long. there were times whenthe fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would clingtogether with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morselof pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. but there were also timeswhen they had the illusion not only of safety

but of permanence. so long as they were actuallyin this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. getting there was difficultand dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary. it was as when winston had gazed into theheart of the paperweight, with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside thatglassy world, and that once inside it time could be arrested. often they gave themselvesup to daydreams of escape. their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry ontheir intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives. or katharine woulddie, and by subtle manoeuvrings winston and julia would succeed in getting married. orthey would commit suicide together. or they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition,learn to speak with proletarian accents, get

jobs in a factory and live out their livesundetected in a back-street. it was all nonsense, as they both knew. in reality there was noescape. even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carryingout. to hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had nofuture, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the nextbreath so long as there is air available. sometimes, too, they talked of engaging inactive rebellion against the party, but with no notion of how to take the first step. evenif the fabulous brotherhood was a reality, there still remained the difficulty of findingone's way into it. he told her of the strange intimacy that existed, or seemed to exist,between himself and o'brien, and of the impulse

he sometimes felt, simply to walk into o'brien'spresence, announce that he was the enemy of the party, and demand his help. curiouslyenough, this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do. she was used to judgingpeople by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that winston should believe o'briento be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes. moreover she took it forgranted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the party and would break therules if he thought it safe to do so. but she refused to believe that widespread, organizedopposition existed or could exist. the tales about goldstein and his underground army,she said, were simply a lot of rubbish which the party had invented for its own purposesand which you had to pretend to believe in.

times beyond number, at party rallies andspontaneous demonstrations, she had shouted at the top of her voice for the executionof people whose names she had never heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not thefaintest belief. when public trials were happening she had taken her place in the detachmentsfrom the youth league who surrounded the courts from morning to night, chanting at intervals'death to the traitors!' during the two minutes hate she always excelled all others in shoutinginsults at goldstein. yet she had only the dimmest idea of who goldstein was and whatdoctrines he was supposed to represent. she had grown up since the revolution and wastoo young to remember the ideological battles of the fifties and sixties. such a thing asan independent political movement was outside

her imagination: and in any case the partywas invincible. it would always exist, and it would always be the same. you could onlyrebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence suchas killing somebody or blowing something up. in some ways she was far more acute than winston,and far less susceptible to party propaganda. once when he happened in some connexion tomention the war against eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinionthe war was not happening. the rocket bombs which fell daily on london were probably firedby the government of oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'. this was an ideathat had literally never occurred to him. she also stirred a sort of envy in him bytelling him that during the two minutes hate

her great difficulty was to avoid burstingout laughing. but she only questioned the teachings of the party when they in some waytouched upon her own life. often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply becausethe difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. she believed,for instance, having learnt it at school, that the party had invented aeroplanes. (inhis own schooldays, winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopterthat 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 claimingthe steam engine.) and when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before hewas born and long before the revolution, the

fact struck her as totally uninteresting.after all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? it was rather more of a shockto him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that oceania,four years ago, had been at war with eastasia and at peace with eurasia. it was true thatshe regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that thename of the enemy had changed. 'i thought we'd always been at war with eurasia,' shesaid vaguely. it frightened him a little. the invention of aeroplanes dated from longbefore her birth, but the switchover in the war had happened only four years ago, wellafter she was grown up. he argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour.in the end he succeeded in forcing her memory

back until she did dimly recall that at onetime eastasia and not eurasia had been the enemy. but the issue still struck her as unimportant.'who cares?' she said impatiently. 'it's always one bloody war after another, and one knowsthe news is all lies anyway.' sometimes he talked to her of the recordsdepartment and the impudent forgeries that he committed there. such things did not appearto horrify her. she did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought oflies becoming truths. he told her the story of jones, aaronson, and rutherford and themomentous slip of paper which he had once held between his fingers. it did not makemuch impression on her. at first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.

'were they friends of yours?' she said. 'no, i never knew them. they were inner partymembers. besides, they were far older men than i was. they belonged to the old days,before the revolution. i barely knew them by sight.' 'then what was there to worry about? peopleare being killed off all the time, aren't they?' he tried to make her understand. 'this wasan exceptional case. it wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. do you realize thatthe past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? if it survives anywhere,it's in a few solid objects with no words

attached to them, like that lump of glassthere. already we know almost literally nothing about the revolution and the years beforethe revolution. every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten,every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed,every date has been altered. and that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.history has stopped. nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is alwaysright. i know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possiblefor me to prove it, even when i did the falsification myself. after the thing is done, no evidenceever remains. the only evidence is inside my own mind, and i don't know with any certaintythat any other human being shares my memories.

just in that one instance, in my whole life,i did possess actual concrete evidence after the event — years after it.' 'and what good was that?' 'it was no good, because i threw it away afew minutes later. but if the same thing happened today, i should keep it.' 'well, i wouldn't!' said julia. 'i'm quiteready to take risks, but only for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper.what could you have done with it even if you had kept it?' 'not much, perhaps. but it was evidence. itmight have planted a few doubts here and there,

supposing that i'd dared to show it to anybody.i don't imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. but one can imagine littleknots of resistance springing up here and there — small groups of people banding themselvestogether, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that thenext generations can carry on where we leave off.' 'i'm not interested in the next generation,dear. i'm interested in us.' 'you're only a rebel from the waist downwards,'he told her. she thought this brilliantly witty and flungher arms round him in delight. in the ramifications of party doctrine shehad not the faintest interest. whenever he

began to talk of the principles of ingsoc,doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to usenewspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attentionto that kind of thing. one knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worriedby it? she knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. if he persistedin talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. she was one of thosepeople who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. talking to her, he realizedhow easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever ofwhat orthodoxy meant. in a way, the world-view of the party imposed itself most successfullyon people incapable of understanding it. they

could be made to accept the most flagrantviolations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demandedof them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.by lack of understanding they remained sane. they simply swallowed everything, and whatthey swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain ofcorn will pass undigested through the body of a bird. chapter: 6 it had happened at last. the expected messagehad come. all his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen.

he was walking down the long corridor at theministry and he was almost at the spot where julia had slipped the note into his hand whenhe became aware that someone larger than himself was walking just behind him. the person, whoeverit was, gave a small cough, evidently as a prelude to speaking. winston stopped abruptlyand turned. it was o'brien. at last they were face to face, and it seemedthat his only impulse was to run away. his heart bounded violently. he would have beenincapable of speaking. o'brien, however, had continued forward in the same movement, layinga friendly hand for a moment on winston's arm, so that the two of them were walkingside by side. he began speaking with the peculiar grave courtesy that differentiated him fromthe majority of inner party members.

'i had been hoping for an opportunity of talkingto you,' he said. 'i was reading one of your newspeak articles in the times the other day.you take a scholarly interest in newspeak, i believe?' winston had recovered part of his self-possession.'hardly scholarly,' he said. 'i'm only an amateur. it's not my subject. i have neverhad anything to do with the actual construction of the language.' 'but you write it very elegantly,' said o'brien.'that is not only my own opinion. i was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainlyan expert. his name has slipped my memory for the moment.'

again winston's heart stirred painfully. itwas inconceivable that this was anything other than a reference to syme. but syme was notonly dead, he was abolished, an unperson. any identifiable reference to him would havebeen mortally dangerous. o'brien's remark must obviously have been intended as a signal,a codeword. by sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices.they had continued to stroll slowly down the corridor, but now o'brien halted. with thecurious, disarming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the gesture he resettledhis spectacles on his nose. then he went on: 'what i had really intended to say was thatin your article i noticed you had used two words which have become obsolete. but theyhave only become so very recently. have you

seen the tenth edition of the newspeak dictionary?' 'no,' said winston. 'i didn't think it hadbeen issued yet. we are still using the ninth in the records department.' 'the tenth edition is not due to appear forsome months, i believe. but a few advance copies have been circulated. i have one myself.it might interest you to look at it, perhaps?' 'very much so,' said winston, immediatelyseeing where this tended. 'some of the new developments are most ingenious.the reduction in the number of verbs — that is the point that will appeal to you, i think.let me see, shall i send a messenger to you with the dictionary? but i am afraid i invariablyforget anything of that kind. perhaps you

could pick it up at my flat at some time thatsuited you? wait. let me give you my address.' they were standing in front of a telescreen.somewhat absentmindedly o'brien felt two of his pockets and then produced a small leather-coverednotebook and a gold ink-pencil. immediately beneath the telescreen, in such a positionthat anyone who was watching at the other end of the instrument could read what he waswriting, he scribbled an address, tore out the page and handed it to winston. 'i am usually at home in the evenings,' hesaid. 'if not, my servant will give you the dictionary.' he was gone, leaving winston holding the scrapof paper, which this time there was no need

to conceal. nevertheless he carefully memorizedwhat was written on it, and some hours later dropped it into the memory hole along witha mass of other papers. they had been talking to one another for acouple of minutes at the most. there was only one meaning that the episode could possiblyhave. it had been contrived as a way of letting winston know o'brien's address. this was necessary,because except by direct enquiry it was never possible to discover where anyone lived. therewere no directories of any kind. 'if you ever want to see me, this is where i can be found,'was what o'brien had been saying to him. perhaps there would even be a message concealed somewherein the dictionary. but at any rate, one thing was certain. the conspiracy that he had dreamedof did exist, and he had reached the outer

edges of it. he knew that sooner or later he would obeyo'brien's summons. perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay — he was not certain.what was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. thefirst step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening ofthe diary. he had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. the last stepwas something that would happen in the ministry of love. he had accepted it. the end was containedin the beginning. but it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a foretasteof death, like being a little less alive. even while he was speaking to o'brien, whenthe meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly

shuddering feeling had taken possession ofhis body. he had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was notmuch better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him. chapter : 7 winston had woken up with his eyes full oftears. julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been 'what'sthe matter?' 'i dreamt—' he began, and stopped short.it was too complex to be put into words. there was the dream itself, and there was a memoryconnected with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.

he lay back with his eyes shut, still soddenin the atmosphere of the dream. it was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemedto stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. it had alloccurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was the dome of thesky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in which one could seeinto interminable distances. the dream had also been comprehended by — indeed, in somesense it had consisted in — a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made againthirty years later by the jewish woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelterthe small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blew them both to pieces.

'do you know,' he said, 'that until this momenti believed i had murdered my mother?' 'why did you murder her?' said julia, almostasleep. 'i didn't murder her. not physically.' in the dream he had remembered his last glimpseof his mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surroundingit had all come back. it was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of hisconsciousness over many years. he was not certain of the date, but he could not havebeen less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened. his father had disappeared some time earlier,how much earlier he could not remember. he

remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstancesof the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in tube stations, the pilesof rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youthsin shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittentmachine-gun fire in the distance — above all, the fact that there was never enoughto eat. he remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scrounging round dustbinsand rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimeseven scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; andalso in waiting for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and wereknown to carry cattle feed, and which, when

they jolted over the bad patches in the road,sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake. when his father disappeared, his mother didnot show any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. she seemedto have become completely spiritless. it was evident even to winston that she was waitingfor something that she knew must happen. she did everything that was needed — cooked,washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece — always very slowlyand with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of itsown accord. her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. for hoursat 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. veryoccasionally she would take winston in her arms and press him against her for a longtime without saying anything. he was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness,that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen. he remembered the room where they lived, adark, close-smelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane.there was a gas ring in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landingoutside there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. he remembered hismother's statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something in a saucepan.above all he remembered his continuous hunger,

and the fierce sordid battles at mealtimes.he would ask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why there was not more food, hewould shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginningto break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would attempt asnivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his share. his mother was quiteready to give him more than his share. she took it for granted that he, 'the boy', shouldhave the biggest portion; but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more.at every meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his littlesister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. he would cry out with ragewhen she stopped ladling, he would try to

wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands,he would grab bits from his sister's plate. he knew that he was starving the other two,but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it. the clamorous hungerin his belly seemed to justify him. between meals, if his mother did not stand guard,he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf. one day a chocolate-ration was issued. therehad been no such issue for weeks or months past. he remembered quite clearly that preciouslittle morsel of chocolate. it was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in thosedays) between the three of them. it was obvious that it ought to be divided into three equalparts. suddenly, as though he were listening

to somebody else, winston heard himself demandingin a loud booming voice that he should be given the whole piece. his mother told himnot to be greedy. there was a long, nagging argument that went round and round, with shouts,whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings. his tiny sister, clinging to her mother withboth hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at him with large,mournful eyes. in the end his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gaveit to winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. the little girl took hold of itand looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was. winston stood watching her fora moment. then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate outof his sister's hand and was fleeing for the

door. 'winston, winston!' his mother called afterhim. 'come back! give your sister back her chocolate!' he stopped, but did not come back. his mother'sanxious eyes were fixed on his face. even now he was thinking about the thing, he didnot know what it was that was on the point of happening. his sister, conscious of havingbeen robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. his mother drew her arm round the childand pressed its face against her breast. something in the gesture told him that his sister wasdying. he turned and fled down the stairs. with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.

he never saw his mother again. after he haddevoured the chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets forseveral hours, until hunger drove him home. when he came back his mother had disappeared.this was already becoming normal at that time. nothing was gone from the room except hismother and his sister. they had not taken any clothes, not even his mother's overcoat.to this day he did not know with any certainty that his mother was dead. it was perfectlypossible that she had merely been sent to a forced-labour camp. as for his sister, shemight 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 leftsomewhere or other to die. the dream was still vivid in his mind, especiallythe enveloping protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained.his mind went back to another dream of two months ago. exactly as his mother had saton the dingy whitequilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she had sat in the sunkenship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at himthrough the darkening water. he told julia the story of his mother's disappearance.without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position. 'i expect you were a beastly little swinein those days,' she said indistinctly. 'all

children are swine.' 'yes. but the real point of the story—' from her breathing it was evident that shewas going off to sleep again. he would have liked to continue talking about his mother.he did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman,still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind ofpurity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. her feelingswere her own, and could not be altered from outside. it would not have occurred to herthat an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. if you loved someone,you loved him, and when you had nothing else

to give, you still gave him love. when thelast of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. it wasno use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child'sdeath or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. the refugee woman in the boathad also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bulletsthan a sheet of paper. the terrible thing that the party had done was to persuade youthat mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbingyou of all power over the material world. when once you were in the grip of the party,what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally nodifference. whatever happened you vanished,

and neither you nor your actions were everheard of again. you were lifted clean out of the stream of history. and yet to the peopleof only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they werenot attempting to alter history. they were governed by private loyalties which they didnot question. what mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture,an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. the proles,it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. they were notloyal to aparty or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. for the first time in hislife he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which wouldone day spring to life and regenerate the

world. the proles had stayed human. they hadnot become hardened inside. they had held on to the primitive emotions which he himselfhad to re-learn by conscious effort. and in thinking this he remembered, without apparentrelevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and hadkicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk. 'the proles are human beings,' he said aloud.'we are not human.' 'why not?' said julia, who had woken up again. he thought for a little while. 'has it everoccurred to you,' he said, 'that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walkout of here before it's too late, and never

see each other again?' 'yes, dear, it has occurred to me, severaltimes. but i'm not going to do it, all the same.' 'we've been lucky,' he said 'but it can'tlast much longer. you're young. you look normal and innocent. if you keep clear of peoplelike me, you might stay alive for another fifty years.' 'no. i've thought it all out. what you do,i'm going to do. and don't be too downhearted. i'm rather good at staying alive.' 'we may be together for another six months— a year — there's no knowing. at the

end we're certain to be apart. do you realizehow utterly alone we shall be? when once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literallynothing, that either of us can do for the other. if i confess, they'll shoot you, andif i refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the same. nothing that i can do or say,or stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as much as five minutes. neitherof us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. we shall be utterly withoutpower of any kind. the one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, althougheven that can't make the slightest difference.' 'if you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shalldo that, right enough. everybody always confesses. you can't help it. they torture you.'

'i don't mean confessing. confession is notbetrayal. what you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. if they could make mestop loving you — that would be the real betrayal.' she thought it over. 'they can't do that,'she said finally. 'it's the one thing they can't do. they can make you say anything — anything— but they can't make you believe it. they can't get inside you.' 'no,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no;that's quite true. they can't get inside you. if you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.'

he thought of the telescreen with its never-sleepingear. they could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could stilloutwit them. with all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding outwhat another human being was thinking. perhaps that was less true when you were actuallyin their hands. one did not know what happened inside the ministry of love, but it was possibleto guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradualwearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning. facts, at anyrate, could not be kept hidden. they could be tracked down by enquiry, they could besqueezed out of you by torture. but if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human,what difference did it ultimately make? they

could not alter your feelings: for that matteryou could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. they could lay bare in theutmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whoseworkings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable. chapter : 8 they had done it, they had done it at last! the room they were standing in was long-shapedand softly lit. the telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-bluecarpet gave one the impression of treading on velvet. at the far end of the room o'brienwas sitting at a table under a green-shaded

lamp, with a mass of papers on either sideof him. he had not bothered to look up when the servant showed julia and winston in. winston's heart was thumping so hard thathe doubted whether he would be able to speak. they had done it, they had done it at last,was all he could think. it had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly toarrive together; though it was true that they had come by different routes and only meton o'brien's doorstep. but merely to walk into such a place needed an effort of thenerve. it was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places ofthe inner party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. thewhole 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 liftssliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro — everything was intimidating.although he had a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at every step by thefear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers,and order him to get out. o'brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of them withoutdemur. he was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completelyexpressionless face which might have been that of a chinese. the passage down whichhe led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitelyclean. that too was intimidating. winston

could not remember ever to have seen a passagewaywhose walls were not grimy from the contact of human bodies. o'brien had a slip of paper between his fingersand seemed to be studying it intently. his heavy face, bent down so that one could seethe line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. for perhaps twenty secondshe sat without stirring. then he pulled the speakwrite towards him and rapped out a messagein the hybrid jargon of the ministries: 'items one comma five comma seven approvedfullwise stop suggestion contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancelstop unproceed constructionwise antegetting plusfull estimates machinery overheads stopend message.'

he rose deliberately from his chair and cametowards them across the soundless carpet. a little of the official atmosphere seemedto have fallen away from him with the newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer thanusual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. the terror that winston alreadyfelt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary embarrassment. it seemed to himquite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake. for what evidence had he in realitythat o'brien was any kind of political conspirator? nothing but a flash of the eyes and a singleequivocal remark: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a dream. hecould not even fall back on the pretence that he had come to borrow the dictionary, becausein that case julia's presence was impossible

to explain. as o'brien passed the telescreena thought seemed to strike him. he stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall.there was a sharp snap. the voice had stopped. julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeakof surprise. even in the midst of his panic, winston was too much taken aback to be ableto hold his tongue. 'you can turn it off!' he said. 'yes,' said o'brien, 'we can turn it off.we have that privilege.' he was opposite them now. his solid form toweredover the pair of them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. he waswaiting, somewhat sternly, for winston to speak, but about what? even now it was quiteconceivable that he was simply a busy man

wondering irritably why he had been interrupted.nobody spoke. after the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. the secondsmarched past, enormous. with difficulty winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on o'brien's.then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile.with his characteristic gesture o'brien resettled his spectacles on his nose. 'shall i say it, or will you?' he said. 'i will say it,' said winston promptly. 'thatthing is really turned off?' 'yes, everything is turned off. we are alone.' 'we have come here because—'

he paused, realizing for the first time thevagueness of his own motives. since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expectedfrom o'brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. he went on, conscious thatwhat he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious: 'we believe that there is some kind of conspiracy,some kind of secret organization working against the party, and that you are involved in it.we want to join it and work for it. we are enemies of the party. we disbelieve in theprinciples of ingsoc. we are thought-criminals. we are also adulterers. i tell you this becausewe want to put ourselves at your mercy. if you want us to incriminate ourselves in anyother way, we are ready.'

he stopped and glanced over his shoulder,with the feeling that the door had opened. sure enough, the little yellow-faced servanthad come in without knocking. winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanterand glasses. 'martin is one of us,' said o'brien impassively.'bring the drinks over here, martin. put them on the round table. have we enough chairs?then we may as well sit down and talk in comfort. bring a chair for yourself, martin. this isbusiness. you can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes.' the little man sat down, quite at his ease,and yet still with a servant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege. winstonregarded him out of the corner of his eye.

it struck him that the man's whole life wasplaying a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personalityeven for a moment. o'brien took the decanter by the neck and filled up the glasses witha dark-red liquid. it aroused in winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wallor a hoarding — a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move up anddown and pour its contents into a glass. seen from the top the stuff looked almost black,but in the decanter it gleamed like a ruby. it had a sour-sweet smell. he saw julia pickup her glass and sniff at it with frank curiosity. 'it is called wine,' said o'brien with a faintsmile. 'you will have read about it in books, no doubt. not much of it gets to the outerparty, i am afraid.' his face grew solemn

again, and he raised his glass: 'i think itis fitting that we should begin by drinking a health. to our leader: to emmanuel goldstein.' winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness.wine was a thing he had read and dreamed about. like the glass paperweight or mr. charrington'shalf-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time ashe liked to call it in his secret thoughts. for some reason he had always thought of wineas having an intensely sweet taste, like that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicatingeffect. actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing.the truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it. he set down theempty glass.

'then there is such a person as goldstein?'he said. 'yes, there is such a person, and he is alive.where, i do not know.' 'and the conspiracy — the organization?is it real? it is not simply an invention of the thought police?' 'no, it is real. the brotherhood, we callit. you will never learn much more about the brotherhood than that it exists and that youbelong to it. i will come back to that presently.' he looked at his wrist-watch. 'it is unwiseeven for members of the inner party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour.you ought not to have come here together, and you will have to leave separately. you,comrade' — he bowed his head to julia — 'will

leave first. we have about twenty minutesat our disposal. you will understand that i must start by asking you certain questions.in general terms, what are you prepared to do?' 'anything that we are capable of,' said winston. o'brien had turned himself a little in hischair so that he was facing winston. he almost ignored julia, seeming to take it for grantedthat winston could speak for her. for a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes. he beganasking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sortof catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.

'you are prepared to give your lives?' 'you are prepared to commit murder?' 'to commit acts of sabotage which may causethe death of hundreds of innocent people?' 'to betray your country to foreign powers?' '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 demoralizationand weaken the power of the party?' 'if, for example, it would somehow serve ourinterests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face — are you prepared to do that?'

'you are prepared to lose your identity andlive out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-worker?' 'you are prepared to commit suicide, if andwhen we order you to do so?' 'you are prepared, the two of you, to separateand never see one another again?' 'no!' broke in julia. it appeared to winston that a long time passedbefore he answered. for a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power ofspeech. his tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, thenof the other, over and over again. until he had said it, he did not know which word hewas going to say. 'no,' he said finally.

'you did well to tell me,' said o'brien. 'itis necessary for us to know everything.' he turned himself toward julia and added ina voice with somewhat more expression in it: 'do you understand that even if he survives,it may be as a different person? we may be obliged to give him a new identity. his face,his movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair — even his voice wouldbe different. and you yourself might have become a different person. our surgeons canalter people beyond recognition. sometimes it is necessary. sometimes we even amputatea limb.' winston could not help snatching another sidelongglance at martin's mongolian face. there were no scars that he could see. julia had turneda shade paler, so that her freckles were showing,

but she faced o'brien boldly. she murmuredsomething that seemed to be assent. 'good. then that is settled.' there was a silver box of cigarettes on thetable. with a rather absent-minded air o'brien pushed them towards the others, took one himself,then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as though he could think better standing.they were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkinessin the paper. o'brien looked at his wrist-watch again. 'you had better go back to your pantry, martin,'he said. 'i shall switch on in a quarter of an hour. take a good look at these comrades"faces before you go. you will be seeing them

again. i may not.' exactly as they had done at the front door,the little man's dark eyes flickered over their faces. there was not a trace of friendlinessin his manner. he was memorizing their appearance, but he felt no interest in them, or appearedto feel none. it occurred to winston that a synthetic face was perhaps incapable ofchanging its expression. without speaking or giving any kind of salutation, martin wentout, closing the door silently behind him. o'brien was strolling up and down, one handin the pocket of his black overalls, the other holding his cigarette. 'you understand,' he said, 'that you willbe fighting in the dark. you will always be

in the dark. you will receive orders and youwill obey them, without knowing why. later i shall send you a book from which you willlearn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategy by which we shall destroyit. when you have read the book, you will be full members of the brotherhood. but betweenthe general aims that we are fighting for and the immedi ate tasks of the moment, youwill never know anything. i tell you that the brotherhood exists, but i cannot tellyou whether it numbers a hundred members, or ten million. from your personal knowledgeyou will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen. you will have threeor four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as they disappear. as this wasyour first contact, it will be preserved.

when you receive orders, they will come fromme. if we find it necessary to communicate with you, it will be through martin. whenyou are finally caught, you will confess. that is unavoidable. but you will have verylittle to confess, other than your own actions. you will not be able to betray more than ahandful of unimportant people. probably you will not even betray me. by that time i maybe dead, or i shall have become a different person, with a different face.' he continued to move to and fro over the softcarpet. in spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements.it came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulateda cigarette. more even than of strength, he

gave an impression of confidence and of anunderstanding tinged by irony. however much in earnest he might be, he had nothing ofthe single-mindedness that belongs to a fanatic. when he spoke of murder, suicide, venerealdisease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of persiflage. 'thisis unavoidable,' his voice seemed to say; 'this is what we have got to do, unflinchingly.but this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth living again.' a wave of admiration,almost of worship, flowed out from winston towards o'brien. for the moment he had forgottenthe shadowy figure of goldstein. when you looked at o'brien's powerful shoulders andhis blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe thathe could be defeated. there was no stratagem

that he was not equal to, no danger that hecould not foresee. even julia seemed to be impressed. she had let her cigarette go outand was listening intently. o'brien went on: 'you will have heard rumours of the existenceof the brotherhood. no doubt you have formed your own picture of it. you have imagined,probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messageson walls, recognizing one another by codewords or by special movements of the hand. nothingof the kind exists. the members of the brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, andit is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others.goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the thought police, could not give thema complete list of members, or any information

that would lead them to a complete list. nosuch list exists. the brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organizationin the ordinary sense. nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. youwill never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. you will get no comradeship andno encouragement. when finally you are caught, you will get no help. we never help our members.at most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionallyable to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell. you will have to get used to livingwithout results and without hope. you will work for a while, you will be caught, youwill confess, and then you will die. those are the only results that you will ever see.there is no possibility that any perceptible

change will happen within our own lifetime.we are the dead. our only true life is in the future. we shall take part in it as handfulsof dust and splinters of bone. but how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.it might be a thousand years. at present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanitylittle by little. we cannot act collectively. we can only spread our knowledge outwardsfrom individual to individual, generation after generation. in the face of the thoughtpolice there is no other way.' he halted and looked for the third time athis wrist-watch. 'it is almost time for you to leave, comrade,'he said to julia. 'wait. the decanter is still half full.'

he filled the glasses and raised his own glassby the stem. 'what shall it be this time?' he said, stillwith the same faint suggestion of irony. 'to the confusion of the thought police? to thedeath of big brother? to humanity? to the future?' 'to the past,' said winston. 'the past is more important,' agreed o'briengravely. they emptied their glasses, and a moment laterjulia stood up to go. o'brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed hera flat white tablet which he told her to place on her tongue. it was important, he said,not to go out smelling of wine: the lift attendants

were very observant. as soon as the door hadshut behind her he appeared to forget her existence. he took another pace or two upand down, then stopped. 'there are details to be settled,' he said.'i assume that you have a hiding-place of some kind?' winston explained about the room over mr.charrington's shop. 'that will do for the moment. later we willarrange something else for you. it is important to change one's hiding-place frequently. meanwhilei shall send you a copy of the book' — even o'brien, winston noticed, seemed to pronouncethe words as though they were in italics — 'goldstein's book, you understand, as soon as possible.it may be some days before i can get hold

of one. there are not many in existence, asyou can imagine. the thought police hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as wecan produce them. it makes very little difference. the book is indestructible. if the last copywere gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word. do you carry a brief-case to workwith you?' he added. 'as a rule, yes.' 'what is it like?' 'black, very shabby. with two straps.' 'black, two straps, very shabby — good.one day in the fairly near future — i cannot give a date — one of the messages amongyour morning's work will contain a misprinted

word, and you will have to ask for a repeat.on the following day you will go to work without your brief-case. at some time during the day,in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say "i think you have dropped yourbrief-case." the one he gives you will contain a copy of goldstein's book. you will returnit within fourteen days.' they were silent for a moment. 'there are a couple of minutes before youneed go,' said o'brien. 'we shall meet again — if we do meet again—' winston looked up at him. 'in the place wherethere is no darkness?' he said hesitantly. o'brien nodded without appearance of surprise.'in the place where there is no darkness,'

he said, as though he had recognized the allusion.'and in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave? any message?any question?.' winston thought. there did not seem to beany further question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utterhigh-sounding generalities. instead of anything directly connected with o'brien or the brotherhood,there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the dark bedroom where his motherhad spent her last days, and the little room over mr. charrington's shop, and the glasspaperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood frame. almost at random he said: 'did you ever happen to hear an old rhymethat begins "'oranges and lemons,' say the

bells of st clement's"?' again o'brien nodded. with a sort of gravecourtesy he completed the stanza: 'oranges and lemons,' say the bells of st.clement's, 'when will you pay me?' say the bells of oldbailey, 'when i grow rich,' say the bells of shoreditch. 'you knew the last line!' said winston. 'yes, i knew the last line. and now, i amafraid, it is time for you to go. but wait. you had better let me give you one of thesetablets.' as winston stood up o'brien held out a hand.his powerful grip crushed the bones of winston's

palm. at the door winston looked back, buto'brien seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind. he was waiting withhis hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen. beyond him winston could see thewriting-table with its green-shaded lamp and the speakwrite and the wire baskets deep-ladenwith papers. the incident was closed. within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, o'brienwould be back at his interrupted and important work on behalf of the party. chapter : 9 winston was gelatinous with fatigue. gelatinouswas the right word. it had come into his head spontaneously. his body seemed to have notonly the weakness of a jelly, but its translucency.

he felt that if he held up his hand he wouldbe able to see the light through it. all the blood and lymph had been drained out of himby an enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin.all sensations seemed to be magnified. his overalls fretted his shoulders, the pavementtickled his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made his jointscreak. he had worked more than ninety hours in fivedays. so had everyone else in the ministry. now it was all over, and he had literallynothing to do, no party work of any description, until tomorrow morning. he could spend sixhours in the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. slowly, in mild afternoonsunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the

direction of mr. charrington's shop, keepingone eye open for the patrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was nodanger of anyone interfering with him. the heavy brief-case that he was carrying bumpedagainst his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his leg.inside it was the book, which he had now had in his possession for six days and had notyet opened, nor even looked at. on the sixth day of hate week, after the processions,the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks,the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding ofthe caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns — after sixdays of this, when the great orgasm was quivering

to its climax and the general hatred of eurasiahad boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings,they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces — at just this moment it had beenannounced that oceania was not after all at war with eurasia. oceania was at war witheastasia. eurasia was an ally. there was, of course, no admission that anychange had taken place. merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere atonce, that eastasia and not eurasia was the enemy. winston was taking part in a demonstrationin one of the central london squares at the moment when it happened. it was night, andthe white faces and the scarlet banners were

luridly floodlit. the square was packed withseveral thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in theuniform of the spies. on a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the inner party, a smalllean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lanklocks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. a little rumpelstiltskin figure, contortedwith hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous atthe end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. his voice, made metallic bythe amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings,rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions,broken treaties. it was almost impossible

to listen to him without being first convincedand then maddened. at every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voiceof the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousandsof throats. the most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. the speech had beenproceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform anda scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. he unrolled and read it without pausingin his speech. nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he wassaying, but suddenly the names were different. without words said, a wave of understandingrippled through the crowd. oceania was at war with eastasia! the next moment there wasa tremendous commotion. the banners and posters

with which the square was decorated were allwrong! quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. it was sabotage! the agents of goldsteinhad been at work! there was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls,banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. the spies performed prodigies of activityin clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys.but within two or three minutes it was all over. the orator, still gripping the neckof the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gonestraight on with his speech. one minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again burstingfrom the crowd. the hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had beenchanged.

the thing that impressed winston in lookingback was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence,not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. but at the moment hehad other things to preoccupy him. it was during the moment of disorder while the posterswere being torn down that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulderand said, 'excuse me, i think you've dropped your brief-case.' he took the brief-case abstractedly,without speaking. he knew that it would be days before he had an opportunity to lookinside it. the instant that the demonstration was over he went straight to the ministryof truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. the entire staff of the ministry haddone likewise. the orders already issuing

from the telescreen, recalling them to theirposts, were hardly necessary. oceania was at war with eastasia: oceaniahad always been at war with eastasia. a large part of the political literature of five yearswas now completely obsolete. reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets,films, sound-tracks, photographs — all had to be rectified at lightning speed. althoughno directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the department intendedthat within one week no reference to the war with eurasia, or the alliance with eastasia,should remain in existence anywhere. the work was overwhelming, all the more so becausethe processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. everyone in therecords department worked eighteen hours in

the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatchesof sleep. mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors:meals consisted of sandwiches and victory coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendantsfrom the canteen. each time that winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he triedto leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed andaching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk likea snowdrift, halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the firstjob was always to stack them into a neat enough pile to give him room to work. what was worstof all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. often it was enough merely tosubstitute one name for another, but any detailed

report of events demanded care and imagination.even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of theworld to another was considerable. by the third day his eyes ached unbearablyand his spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. it was like struggling with somecrushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one wasnevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. in so far as he had time to remember it, hewas not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every strokeof his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. he was as anxious as anyone else in the departmentthat the forgery should be perfect. on the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cylindersslowed down. for as much as half an hour nothing

came out of the tube; then one more cylinder,then nothing. everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off. a deep and asit were secret sigh went through the department. a mighty deed, which could never be mentioned,had been achieved. it was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidencethat the war with eurasia had ever happened. at twelve hundred it was unexpectedly announcedthat all workers in the ministry were free till tomorrow morning. winston, still carryingthe brief-case containing the book, which had remained between his feet while he workedand under his body while he slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep inhis bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.

with a sort of voluptuous creaking in hisjoints he climbed the stair above mr. charrington's shop. he was tired, but not sleepy any longer.he opened the window, lit the dirty little oilstove and put on a pan of water for coffee.julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book. he sat down in the sluttisharmchair and undid the straps of the brief-case. a heavy black volume, amateurishly bound,with no name or title on the cover. the print also looked slightly irregular. the pageswere worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the book had passed through manyhands. the inscription on the title-page ran: the theory and practice ofoligarchical collectivism byemmanuel goldstein

winston began reading: chapter i. ignorance is strength. throughout recorded time, and probably sincethe 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 differentnames, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, havevaried from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. evenafter enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserteditself, just as a gyroscope will always return

to equilibrium, however far it is pushed oneway or the other. the aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable... winston stopped reading, chiefly in orderto appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. he was alone: no telescreen,no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the pagewith his hand. the sweet summer air played against his cheek. from somewhere far awaythere floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound exceptthe insect voice of the clock. he settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feetup on the fender. it was bliss, it was etemity. suddenly, as one sometimes does with a bookof which one knows that one will ultimately

read and re-read every word, he opened itat 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 greatsuper-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of thetwentieth century. with the absorption of europe by russia and of the british empireby the united states, two of the three existing powers, eurasia and oceania, were alreadyeffectively in being. the third, eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after anotherdecade of confused fighting. the frontiers

between the three super-states are in someplaces arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in generalthey follow geographical lines. eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the europeanand asiatic land-mass, from portugal to the bering strait. oceania comprises the americas,the atlantic islands including the british isles, australasia, and the southern portionof africa. eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier,comprises china and the countries to the south of it, the japanese islands and a large butfluctuating portion of manchuria, mongolia, and tibet. in one combination or another, these threesuper-states are permanently at war, and have

been so for the past twenty-five years. war,however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decadesof the twentieth century. it is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who areunable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided byany genuine ideological difference this is not to say that either the conduct of war,or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous.on the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such actsas raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery,and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are lookedupon as normal, and, when they are committed

by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.but in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trainedspecialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. the fighting, when there is any,takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or roundthe floating fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. in the centres ofcivilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasionalcrash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. war has in fact changedits character. more exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their orderof importance. motives which were already present to some small extent in the greatwars of the early twentieth centuury have

now become dominant and are consciously recognizedand acted upon. to understand the nature of the present war— for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war— one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. noneof the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination.they are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable. eurasia is protectedby its vast land spaces, oceania by the width of the atlantic and the pacific, eastasiaby the fecundity and indus triousness of its inhabitants. secondly, there is no longer,in a material sense, anything to fight about. with the establishment of self-contained economies,in which production and consumption are geared

to one another, the scramble for markets whichwas a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materialsis no longer a matter of life and death. in any case each of the three super-states isso vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries.in so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. betweenthe 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, andhong kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth. it is forthe possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, thatthe three powers are constantly struggling.

in practice no one power ever controls thewhole of the disputed area. portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is thechance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictatesthe endless changes of alignment. all of the disputed territories contain valuableminerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which incolder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. but aboveall they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. whichever power controls equatorialafrica, or the countries of the middle east, or southern india, or the indonesian archipelago,disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.the inhabitants of these areas, reduced more

or less openly to the status of slaves, passcontinually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in therace to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power,to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. it shouldbe noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. thefrontiers of eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the congo and the northern shoreof the mediterranean; the islands of the indian ocean and the pacific are constantly beingcaptured and recaptured by oceania or by eastasia; in mongolia the dividing line between eurasiaand eastasia is never stable; round the pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territorieswhich in fact are largely unihabited and unexplored:

but the balance of power always remains roughlyeven, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate.moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the equator is not really necessaryto the world's economy. they add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever theyproduce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be ina better position in which to wage another war. by their labour the slave populationsallow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. but if they did not exist, thestructure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not beessentially different. the primary aim of modern warfare (in accordancewith the principles of doublethink, this aim

is simultaneously recognized and not recognizedby the directing brains of the inner party) is to use up the products of the machine withoutraising the general standard of living. ever since the end of the nineteenth century, theproblem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrialsociety. at present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviouslynot urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destructionhad been at work. the world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared withthe world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary futureto which the people of that period looked forward. in the early twentieth century, thevision of a future society unbelievably rich,

leisured, orderly, and efficient — a glitteringantiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete — was part of the consciousnessof nearly every literate person. science and technology were developing at a prodigiousspeed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. this failed tohappen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions,partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought,which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. as a whole the world is more primitivetoday than it was fifty years ago. certain backward areas have advanced, and variousdevices, 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 warof the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. nevertheless the dangers inherentin the machine are still there. from the moment when the machine first made its appearanceit was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore toa great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. if the machine were used deliberately forthat end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a fewgenerations. and in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automaticprocess — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — themachine did raise the living standards of the average humand being very greatly overa period of about fifty years at the end of

the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentiethcenturies. but it was also clear that an all-round increasein wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of ahierarchical society. in a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough toeat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-caror even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequalitywould already have disappeared. if it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.it was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personalpossessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the handsof a small privileged caste. but in practice

such a society could not long remain stable.for if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beingswho are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think forthemselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that theprivileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. in the long run, a hierarchicalsociety was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. to return to the agriculturalpast, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing,was not a practicable solution. it conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization whichhad become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any countrywhich remained industrially backward was helpless

in a military sense and was bound to be dominated,directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals. nor was it a satisfactory solution to keepthe masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. this happened to a great extentduring the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. the economy of manycountries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment wasnot added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept halfalive by state charity. but this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privationsit inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. the problem washow to keep the wheels of industry turning

without increasing the real wealth of theworld. goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. and in practice the onlyway of achieving this was by continuous warfare. the essential act of war is destruction, notnecessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. war is a way of shatteringto pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materialswhich might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in thelong run, too intelligent. even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufactureis still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that canbe consumed. a floating fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that wouldbuild several hundred cargo-ships. ultimately

it is scrapped as obsolete, never having broughtany material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another floatingfortress is built. in principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplusthat might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. in practice the needs ofthe population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortageof half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. it is deliberatepolicy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a generalstate of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies thedistinction between one group and another. by the standards of the early twentieth century,even a member of the inner party lives an

austere, laborious kind of life. nevertheless,the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture ofhis 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 ofthe outer party, and the members of the outer party have a similar advantage in comparisonwith the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'. the social atmosphere is that ofa besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference betweenwealth and poverty. and at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and thereforein danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidablecondition of survival.

war, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessarydestruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. in principle it would be quitesimple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, bydigging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goodsand then setting fire to them. but this would provide only the economic and not the emotionalbasis for a hierarchical society. what is concerned here is not the morale of masses,whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the moraleof the party itself. even the humblest party member is expected to be competent, industrious,and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should bea credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing

moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastictriumph. in other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate toa state of war. it does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, sinceno decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly.all that is needed is that a state of war should exist. the splitting of the intelligencewhich the party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphereof war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked itbecomes. it is precisely in the inner party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemyare strongest. in his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of theinner party to know that this or that item

of war news is untruthful, and he may oftenbe aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being wagedfor purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralizedby the technique of doublethink. meanwhile no inner party member wavers for an instantin his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously,with oceania the undisputed master of the entire world. all members of the inner party believe inthis coming conquest as an article of faith. it is to be achieved either by gradually acquiringmore and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, orby the discovery of some new and unanswerable

weapon. the search for new weapons continuesunceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculativetype of mind can find any outlet. in oceania at the present day, science, in the old sense,has almost ceased to exist. in newspeak there is no word for 'science'. the empirical methodof thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to themost fundamental principles of ingsoc. and even technological progress only happens whenits products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. in all the usefularts the world is either standing still or going backwards. the fields are cultivatedwith horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. but in matters of vital importance— meaning, in effect, war and police espionage

— the empirical approach is still encouraged,or at least tolerated. the two aims of the party are to conquer the whole surface ofthe earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. thereare therefore two great problems which the party is concerned to solve. one is how todiscover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how tokill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.in so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. the scientistof today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinaryminuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testingthe truth-producing effects of drugs, shock

therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; orhe is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subjectas are relevant to the taking of life. in the vast laboratories of the ministry of peace,and in the experimental stations hidden in the brazilian forests, or in the australiandesert, or on lost islands of the antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably atwork. some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others deviselarger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrablearmour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capableof 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 toproduce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under thewater, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore evenremoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousandsof kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves bytapping the heat at the earth's centre. but none of these projects ever comes anywherenear realization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on the others.what is more remarkable is that all three powers already possess, in the atomic bomb,a weapon far more powerful than any that their present researches are likely to discover.although the party, according to its habit,

claims the invention for itself, atomic bombsfirst appeared as early as the nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale aboutten years later. at that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centres,chiefly in european russia, western europe, and north america. the effect was to convincethe ruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end oforganized society, and hence of their own power. thereafter, although no formal agreementwas ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. all three powers merely continueto produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity which theyall believe will come sooner or later. and meanwhile the art of war has remained almoststationary for thirty or forty years. helicopters

are more used than they were formerly, bombingplanes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable battleshiphas given way to the almost unsinkable floating fortress; but otherwise there has been littledevelopment. the tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle andthe hand grenade are still in use. and in spite of the endless slaughters reported inthe press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundredsof thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have never beenrepeated. none of the three super-states ever attemptsany manoeuvre which involves the risk of serious defeat. when any large operation is undertaken,it is usually a surprise attack against an

ally. the strategy that all three powers arefollowing, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is the same. the plan is, bya combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquirea ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival states, and then tosign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many yearsas to lull suspicion to sleep. during this time rockets loaded with atomic bombs canbe assembled at all the strategic spots; finally they will all be fired simultaneously, witheffects so devastating as to make retaliation impossible. it will then be time to sign apact of friendship with the remaining world-power, in preparation for another attack. this scheme,it is hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream,

impossible of realization. moreover, no fightingever occurs except in the disputed areas round the equator and the pole: no invasion of enemyterritory is ever undertaken. this explains the fact that in some places the frontiersbetween the superstates are arbitrary. eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the britishisles, which are geographically part of europe, or on the other hand it would be possiblefor oceania to push its frontiers to the rhine or even to the vistula. but this would violatethe principle, followed on all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. ifoceania were to conquer the areas that used once to be known as france and germany, itwould 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 developmentgoes, are roughly on the oceanic level. the problem is the same for all three super-states.it is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners,except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves. even the official allyof the moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. war prisoners apart, theaverage citizen of oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either eurasia or eastasia,and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. if he were allowed contact withforeigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that mostof what he has been told about them is lies. the sealed world in which he lives would bebroken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness

on which his morale depends might evaporate.it is therefore realized on all sides that however often persia, or egypt, or java, orceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs. under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud,but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-statesare very much the same. in oceania the prevailing philosophy is called ingsoc, in eurasia itis called neo-bolshevism, and in eastasia it is called by a chinese name usually translatedas death-worship, but perhaps better rendered as obliteration of the self. the citizen ofoceania 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. actuallythe three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they supportare not distinguishable at all. everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, thesame worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.it follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer one another, but wouldgain no advantage by doing so. on the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they propone another up, like three sheaves of corn. and, as usual, the ruling groups of all threepowers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. their lives are dedicatedto world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the war should continueeverlastingly and without victory. meanwhile

the fact that there is no danger of conquestmakes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of ingsoc and its rivalsystems of thought. here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that bybecoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character. in past ages, a war, almost by definition,was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory ordefeat. in the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societieswere kept in touch with physical reality. all rulers in all ages have tried to imposea false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage anyillusion that tended to impair military efficiency.

so long as defeat meant the loss of independence,or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeathad to be serious. physical facts could not be ignored. in philosophy, or religion, orethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun oran aeroplane they had to make four. inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later,and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. moreover, to be efficient itwas necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurateidea of what had happened in the past. newspapers and history books were, of course, alwayscoloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised today would havebeen impossible. war was a sure safeguard

of sanity, and so far as the ruling classeswere concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. while wars could be wonor lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible. but when war becomes literally continuous,it also ceases to be dangerous. when war is continuous there is no such thing as militarynecessity. technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded.as we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out forthe purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure toshow results is not important. efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed.nothing is efficient in oceania except the

thought police. since each of the three super-statesis unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversionof thought can be safely practised. reality only exerts its pressure through the needsof everyday life — the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowingpoison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like. between life and death, andbetween physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that isall. cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of oceaniais like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up andwhich is down. the rulers of such a state are absolute, as the pharaohs or the caesarscould not be. they are obliged to prevent

their followers from starving to death innumbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same lowlevel of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they cantwist reality into whatever shape they choose. the war, therefore, if we judge it by thestandards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. it is like the battles between certain ruminantanimals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another.but though it is unreal it is not meaningless. it eats up the surplus of consumable goods,and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.war, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. in the past, the ruling groups ofall countries, although they might recognize

their common interest and therefore limitthe destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plunderedthe vanquished. in our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. the waris waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war isnot to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.the very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. it would probably be accurateto say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. the peculiar pressure thatit exerted on human beings between the neolithic age and the early twentieth century has disappearedand been replaced by something quite different. the effect would be much the same if the threesuper-states, instead of fighting one another,

should agree to live in perpetual peace, eachinviolate within its own boundaries. for in that case each would still be a self-containeduniverse, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. a peace thatwas truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. this — although the vastmajority of party members understand it only in a shallower sense — is the inner meaningof the party slogan: war is peace. winston stopped reading for a moment. somewherein remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. the blissful feeling of being alone with theforbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. solitude and safety werephysical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness ofthe chair, the touch of the faint breeze from

the window that played upon his cheek. thebook fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. in a sense it told him nothing that wasnew, but that was part of the attraction. it said what he would have said, if it hadbeen possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. it was the product of amind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden.the best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. he had justturned back to chapter i when he heard julia's footstep on the stair and started out of hischair to meet her. she dumped her brown tool-bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms.it was more than a week since they had seen one another.

'i've got the book,' he said as they disentangledthemselves. 'oh, you've got it? good,' she said withoutmuch interest, and almost immediately knelt down beside the oil stove to make the coffee. they did not return to the subject until theyhad been in bed for half an hour. the evening was just cool enough to make it worth whileto pull up the counterpane. from below came the familiar sound of singing and the scrapeof boots on the flagstones. the brawny red-armed woman whom winston had seen there on his firstvisit was almost a fixture in the yard. there seemed to be no hour of daylight when shewas not marching to and fro between the washtub and the line, alternately gagging herselfwith clothes pegs and breaking forth into

lusty song. julia had settled down on herside and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. he reached out for thebook, which was lying on the floor, and sat up against the bedhead. 'we must read it,' he said. 'you too. allmembers of the brotherhood have to read it.' 'you read it,' she said with her eyes shut.'read it aloud. that's the best way. then you can explain it to me as you go.' the clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen.they had three or four hours ahead of them. he propped the book against his knees andbegan reading: to equilibnum, however far it is pushed oneway or the other

'julia, are you awake?' said winston. 'yes, my love, i'm listening. go on. it'smarvellous.' he continued reading: the aims of these three groups are entirelyirreconcilable. the aim of the high is to remain where they are. the aim of the middleis to change places with the high. the aim of the low, when they have an aim — forit is an abiding characteristic of the low that they are too much crushed by drudgeryto be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives — isto abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. thus throughouthistory a struggle which is the same in its

main outlines recurs over and over again.for long periods the high seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there alwayscomes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity togovern efficiently, or both. they are then overthrown by the middle, who enlist the lowon their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. as soonas they have reached their objective, the middle thrust the low back into their oldposition of servitude, and themselves become the high. presently a new middle group splitsoff from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins overagain. of the three groups, only the low are never even temporarily successful in achievingtheir aims. it would be an exaggeration to

say that throughout history there has beenno progress of a material kind. even today, in a period of decline, the average humanbeing is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. but no advance in wealth,no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetrenearer. from the point of view of the low, no historic change has ever meant much morethan a change in the name of their masters. by the late nineteenth century the recurrenceof this pattern had become obvious to many observers. there then rose schools of thinkerswho interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that inequality was theunalterable law of human life. this doctrine, of course, had always had its adherents, butin the manner in which it was now put forward

there was a significant change. in the pastthe need for a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of thehigh. it had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the likewho were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of compensationin an imaginary world beyond the grave. the middle, so long as it was struggling for power,had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. now, however, theconcept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not yet in positions ofcommand, but merely hoped to be so before long. in the past the middle had made revolutionsunder the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as theold one was overthrown. the new middle groups

in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand.socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the lastlink in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, wasstill deeply infected by the utopianism of past ages. but in each variant of socialismthat appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality wasmore and more openly abandoned. the new movements which appeared in the middle years of thecentury, ingsoc in oceania, neo-bolshevism in eurasia, death-worship, as it is commonlycalled, in eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality.these new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their namesand pay lip-service to their ideology. but

the purpose of all of them was to arrest progressand freeze history at a chosen moment. the familiar pendulum swing was to happen oncemore, and then stop. as usual, the high were to be turned out by the middle, who wouldthen become the high; but this time, by conscious strategy, the high would be able to maintaintheir position permanently. the new doctrines arose partly because ofthe accumulation of historical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, whichhad hardly existed before the nineteenth century. the cyclical movement of history was now intelligible,or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was alterable. but the principal,underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, humanequality had become technically possible.

it was still true that men were not equalin their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favouredsome individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctionsor for large differences of wealth. in earlier ages, class distinctions had been not onlyinevitable but desirable. inequality was the price of civilization. with the developmentof machine production, however, the case was altered. even if it was still necessary forhuman beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to liveat different social or economic levels. therefore, from the point of view of the new groups whowere on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be strivenafter, but a danger to be averted. in more

primitive ages, when a just and peaceful societywas in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. the idea of an earthlyparadise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws andwithout brute labour, had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. and thisvision had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually profited by each historicalchange. the heirs of the french, english, and american revolutions had partly believedin their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law,and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent.but by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of politicalthought were authoritarian. the earthly paradise

had been discredited at exactly the momentwhen it became realizable. every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself,led back to hierarchy and regimentation. and in the general hardening of outlook that setin round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundredsof years — imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions,torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations— not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people whoconsidered themselves enlightened and progressive. it was only after a decade of national wars,civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that ingsoc andits rivals emerged as fully worked-out political

theories. but they had been foreshadowed bythe various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century,and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had longbeen obvious. what kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. the newaristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-unionorganizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.these people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the workingclass, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry andcentralized government. as compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were lessavaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier

for pure power, and, above all, more consciousof what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. this last differencewas cardinal. by comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past werehalf-hearted and inefficient. the ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberalideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act andto be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. even the catholic church ofthe middle ages was tolerant by modern standards. part of the reason for this was that in thepast no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. theinvention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the filmand the radio carried the process further.

with the development of television, and thetechnical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on thesame instrument, private life came to an end. every citizen, or at least every citizen importantenough to be worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour hours a day under the eyesof the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communicationclosed. the possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the state,but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time. after the revolutionary period of the fiftiesand sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into high, middle, and low. but thenew high group, unlike all its forerunners,

did not act upon instinct but knew what wasneeded to safeguard its position. it had long been realized that the only secure basis foroligarchy is collectivism. wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessedjointly. the so-called 'abolition of private property' which took place in the middle yearsof the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before:but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals.individually, no member of the party owns anything, except petty personal belongings.collectively, the party owns everything in oceania, because it controls everything, anddisposes of the products as it thinks fit. in the years following the revolution it wasable to step into this commanding position

almost unopposed, because the whole processwas represented as an act of collectivization. it had always been assumed that if the capitalistclass were expropriated, socialism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had beenexpropriated. factories, mines, land, houses, transport — everything had been taken awayfrom them: and since these things were no longer private property, it followed thatthey must be public property. ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier socialist movementand inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the socialistprogramme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has beenmade permanent. but the problems of perpetuating a hierarchicalsociety go deeper than this. there are only

four ways in which a ruling group can fallfrom power. either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the massesare stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented middle group to come intobeing, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. these causes donot operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. a rulingclass which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. ultimatelythe determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself. after the middle of the present century, thefirst danger had in reality disappeared. each of the three powers which now divide the worldis in fact unconquerable, and could only become

conquerable through slow demographic changeswhich a government with wide powers can easily avert. the second danger, also, is only atheoretical one. the masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merelybecause they are oppressed. indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standardsof comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. the recurrent economiccrises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen, but otherand equally large dislocations can and do happen without having political results, becausethere is no way in which discontent can become articulate. as for the problem of over-production,which has been latent in our society since the development of machine technique, it issolved by the device of continuous warfare

(see chapter iii), which is also useful inkeying up public morale to the necessary pitch. from the point of view of our present rulers,therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed,power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. the problem,that is to say, is educational. it is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousnessboth of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately belowit. the consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way. given this background, one could infer, ifone did not know it already, the general structure of oceanic society. at the apex of the pyramidcomes big brother. big brother is infallible

and all-powerful. every success, every achievement,every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness,all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. nobody hasever seen big brother. he is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. we maybe reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertaintyas to when he was born. big brother is the guise in which the party chooses to exhibititself to the world. his function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence,emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization.below big brother comes the inner party. its numbers limited to six millions, or somethingless than 2 per cent of the population of

oceania. below the inner party comes the outerparty, which, if the inner party is described as the brain of the state, may be justly likenedto the hands. below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the proles',numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population. in the terms of our earlier classification,the proles are the low: for the slave population of the equatorial lands who pass constantlyfrom conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure. in principle, membership of these three groupsis not hereditary. the child of inner party parents is in theory not born into the innerparty. admission to either branch of the party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen.nor is there any racial discrimination, or

any marked domination of one province by another.jews, negroes, south americans of pure indian blood are to be found in the highest ranksof the party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitantsof that area. in no part of oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they area colonial population ruled from a distant capital. oceania has no capital, and its titularhead is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. except that english is its chief linguafranca and newspeak its official language, it is not centralized in any way. its rulersare not held together by blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. it is truethat our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appearto be hereditary lines. there is far less

to-and-fro movement between the differentgroups than happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrial age. between the twobranches of the party there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensurethat weaklings are excluded from the inner party and that ambitious members of the outerparty are made harmless by allowing them to rise. proletarians, in practice, are not allowedto graduate into the party. the most gifted among them, who might possibly become nucleiof discontent, are simply marked down by the thought police and eliminated. but this stateof affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. the party isnot a class in the old sense of the word. it does not aim at transmitting power to itsown children, as such; and if there were no

other way of keeping the ablest people atthe top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from theranks of the proletariat. in the crucial years, the fact that the party was not a hereditarybody did a great deal to neutralize opposition. the older kind of socialist, who had beentrained to fight against something called 'class privilege' assumed that what is nothereditary cannot be permanent. he did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy neednot be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have alwaysbeen shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the catholic church have sometimeslasted for hundreds or thousands of years. the essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-soninheritance, but the persistence of a certain

world-view and a certain way of life, imposedby the dead upon the living. a ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominateits successors. the party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuatingitself. who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remainsalways the same. all the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions,mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystiqueof the party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived.physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible.from the proletarians nothing is to be feared. left to themselves, they will continue fromgeneration to generation and from century

to century, working, breeding, and dying,not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the worldcould be other than it is. they could only become dangerous if the advance of industrialtechnique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercialrivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining.what opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference.they can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. in a party member,on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subjectcan be tolerated. a party member lives from birth to death underthe eye of the thought police. even when he

is alone he can never be sure that he is alone.wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he canbe inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. nothing that hedoes is indifferent. his friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wifeand children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep,even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. not only anyactual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervousmannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected.he has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever. on the other hand his actions arenot regulated by law or by any clearly formulated

code of behaviour. in oceania there is nolaw. thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden,and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflictedas punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-outof persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. a party memberis required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. many of the beliefsand attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without layingbare the contradictions inherent in ingsoc. if he is a person naturally orthodox (in newspeaka goodthinker), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is thetrue belief or the desirable emotion. but

in any case an elaborate mental training,undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite,and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever. a party member is expected to have no privateemotions and no respites from enthusiasm. he is supposed to live in a continuous frenzyof hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasementbefore the power and wisdom of the party. the discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfyinglife are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the two minuteshate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitudeare killed in advance by his early acquired

inner discipline. the first and simplest stagein the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in newspeak,crimestop. crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, atthe threshold of any dangerous thought. it includes the power of not grasping analogies,of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments ifthey are inimical to ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thoughtwhich is capable of leading in a heretical direction. crimestop, in short, means protectivestupidity. but stupidity is not enough. on the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sensedemands a control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist overhis body. oceanic society rests ultimately

on the belief that big brother is omnipotentand that the party is infallible. but since in reality big brother is not omnipotent andthe party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibilityin the treatment of facts. the keyword here is blackwhite. like so many newspeak words,this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. applied to an opponent, it means the habitof impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. appliedto a party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when party disciplinedemands this. but it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more,to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. thisdemands a continuous alteration of the past,

made possible by the system of thought whichreally embraces all the rest, and which is known in newspeak as doublethink. the alteration of the past is necessary fortwo reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. the subsidiaryreason is that the party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditionspartly because he has no standards of comparison. he must be cut off from the past, just ashe must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believethat he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfortis constantly rising. but by far the more important reason for the readjustment of thepast is the need to safeguard the infallibility

of the party. it is not merely that speeches,statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in orderto show that the predictions of the party were in all cases right. it is also that nochange in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. for to change one'smind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness. if, for example, eurasia or eastasia(whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been theenemy. and if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered. thus history iscontinuously rewritten. this day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the ministry oftruth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionagecarried out by the ministry of love.

the mutability of the past is the centraltenet of ingsoc. past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive onlyin written records and in human memories. the past is whatever the records and the memoriesagree upon. and since the party is in full control of all records and in equally fullcontrol of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the party choosesto make it. it also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been alteredin any specific instance. for when it has been recreated in whatever shape is neededat the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever haveexisted. this holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to be alteredout of recognition several times in the course

of a year. at all times the party is in possessionof absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what itis now. it will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the trainingof memory. to make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment ismerely a mechanical act. but it is also necessary to remember that events happened in the desiredmanner. and if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written records,then it is necessary to forget that one has done so. the trick of doing this can be learnedlike any other mental technique. it is learned by the majority of party members, and certainlyby all who are intelligent as well as orthodox. in oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 'realitycontrol'. in newspeak it is called doublethink,

though doublethink comprises much else aswell. doublethink means the power of holding twocontradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. the party intellectualknows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he isplaying tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself thatreality is not violated. the process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried outwith sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring withit a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. doublethink lies at the very heart of ingsoc,since the essential act of the party is to use conscious deception while retaining thefirmness of purpose that goes with complete

honesty. to tell deliberate lies while genuinelybelieving in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when itbecomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed,to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the realitywhich one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. even in using the word doublethinkit is necessary to exercise doublethink. for by using the word one admits that one is tamperingwith reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely,with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. ultimately it is by means of doublethinkthat the party has been able — and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousandsof years — to arrest the course of history.

all past oligarchies have fallen from powereither because they ossified or because they grew soft. either they became stupid and arrogant,failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became liberaland cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again were overthrown.they fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness.it is the achievement of the party to have produced a system of thought in which bothconditions can exist simultaneously. and upon no other intellectual basis could the dominionof the party be made permanent. if one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one mustbe able to dislocate the sense of reality. for the secret of rulership is to combinea belief in one's own infallibility with the

power to learn from past mistakes. it need hardly be said that the subtlest practitionersof doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mentalcheating. in our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are alsothose who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. in general, the greater the understanding,the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane. one clear illustration of thisis the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale.those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples ofthe disputed territories. to these people the war is simply a continuous calamity whichsweeps to and fro over their bodies like a

tidal wave. which side is winning is a matterof complete indifference to them. they are aware that a change of overlordship meanssimply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them inthe same manner as the old ones. the slightly more favoured workers whom we call 'the proles'are only intermittently conscious of the war. when it is necessary they can be prodded intofrenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgettingfor long periods that the war is happening. it is in the ranks of the party, and aboveall of the inner party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. world-conquest is believedin most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. this peculiar linking-togetherof opposites — knowledge with ignorance,

cynicism with fanaticism — is one of thechief distinguishing marks of oceanic society. the official ideology abounds with contradictionseven when there is no practical reason for them. thus, the party rejects and vilifiesevery principle for which the socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do thisin the name of socialism. it preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuriespast, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workersand was adopted for that reason. it systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, andit calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty.even the names of the four ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudencein their deliberate reversal of the facts.

the ministry of peace concerns itself withwar, the ministry of truth with lies, the ministry of love with torture and the ministryof plenty with starvation. these contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result fromordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. for it is only by reconcilingcontradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. in no other way could the ancientcycle be broken. if human equality is to be for ever averted — if the high, as we havecalled them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition mustbe controlled insanity. but there is one question which until thismoment we have almost ignored. it is; why should human equality be averted? supposingthat the mechanics of the process have been

rightly described, what is the motive forthis huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time? here we reach the central secret. as we haveseen. the mystique of the party, and above all of the inner party, depends upon doublethink.but deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first ledto the seizure of power and brought doublethink, the thought police, continuous warfare, andall the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. this motive really consists... winston became aware of silence, as one becomesaware of a new sound. it seemed to him that julia had been very still for some time past.she was lying on her side, naked from the

waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed onher hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes. her breast rose and fell slowlyand regularly. 'julia.' no answer. 'julia, are you awake?' no answer. she was asleep. he shut the book,put it carefully on the floor, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them. he had still, he reflected, not learned theultimate secret. he understood how; he did not understand why. chapter i, like chapteriii, had not actually told him anything that

he did not know, it had merely systematizedthe knowledge that he possessed already. but after reading it he knew better than beforethat he was not mad. being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.there was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against thewhole world, you were not mad. a yellow beam from the sinking sun slanted in through thewindow and fell across the pillow. he shut his eyes. the sun on his face and the girl'ssmooth body touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. he was safe, everythingwas all right. he fell asleep murmuring 'sanity is not statistical,' with the feeling thatthis remark contained in it a profound wisdom. chapter : 10

when he woke it was with the sensation ofhaving slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that itwas only twenty-thirty. he lay dozing for a while; then the usual deep-lunged singingstruck up from the yard below: it was only an 'opeless fancy,it passed like an ipril dye, the driveling song seemed to have kept itspopularity. you still heard it all over the place. it had outlived the hate song. juliawoke at the sound, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of bed. 'i'm hungry,' she said. 'let's make some morecoffee. damn! the stove's gone out and the water's cold.' she picked the stove up andshook it. 'there's no oil in it.'

'we can get some from old charrington, i expect.' 'the funny thing is i made sure it was full.i'm going to put my clothes on,' she added. 'it seems to have got colder.' winston also got up and dressed himself. theindefatigable voice sang on: as he fastened the belt of his overalls hestrolled across to the window. the sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was notshining into the yard any longer. the flagstones were wet as though they had just been washed,and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the bluebetween the chimney-pots. tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorkingherself, singing and falling silent, and pegging

out more diapers, and more and yet more. hewondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty orthirty grandchildren. julia had come across to his side; together they gazed down witha sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. as he looked at the woman in her characteristicattitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded,it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. it had never before occurredto him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing,then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip,could be beautiful. but it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? the solid, contourlessbody, like a block of granite, and the rasping

red skin, bore the same relation to the bodyof a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower? 'she's beautiful,' he murmured. 'she's a metre across the hips, easily,' saidjulia. 'that is her style of beauty,' said winston. he held julia's supple waist easily encircledby his arm. from the hip to the knee her flank was against his. out of their bodies no childwould ever come. that was the one thing they could never do. only by word of mouth, frommind to mind, could they pass on the secret. the woman down there had no mind, she hadonly strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile

belly. he wondered how many children she hadgiven birth to. it might easily be fifteen. she had had her momentary flowering, a year,perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruitand grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning,cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren,over thirty unbroken years. at the end of it she was still singing. the mystical reverencethat he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky,stretching away behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance. it was curious to thinkthat the sky was the same for everybody, in eurasia or eastasia as well as here. and thepeople under the sky were also very much the

same — everywhere, all over the world, hundredsof thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence,held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same — people whohad never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and musclesthe power that would one day overturn the world. if there was hope, it lay in the proles!without having read to the end of the book, he knew that that must be goldstein's finalmessage. the future belonged to the proles. and could he be sure that when their timecame the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, winston smith, asthe world of the party? yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity. wherethere is equality there can be sanity. sooner

or later it would happen, strength would changeinto consciousness. the proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked atthat valiant figure in the yard. in the end their awakening would come. and until thathappened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds,like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the party did not share andcould not kill. 'do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush thatsang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?' 'he wasn't singing to us,' said julia. 'hewas singing to please himself. not even that. he was just singing.'

the birds sang, the proles sang. the partydid not sing. all round the world, in london and new york, in africa and brazil, and inthe mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of paris and berlin,in the villages of the endless russian plain, in the bazaars of china and japan — everywherestood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toilingfrom birth to death and still singing. out of those mighty loins a race of consciousbeings must one day come. you were the dead, theirs was the future. but you could sharein that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed onthe secret doctrine that two plus two make four.

'we are the dead,' echoed julia dutifully. 'you are the dead,' said an iron voice behindthem. they sprang apart. winston's entrails seemedto have turned into ice. he could see the white all round the irises of julia's eyes.her face had turned a milky yellow. the smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbonestood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath. 'you are the dead,' repeated the iron voice. 'it was behind the picture,' breathed julia. 'it was behind the picture,' said the voice.'remain exactly where you are. make no movement

until you are ordered.' it was starting, it was starting at last!they could do nothing except stand gazing into one another's eyes. to run for life,to get out of the house before it was too late — no such thought occurred to them.unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall. there was a snap as though a catchhad been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. the picture had fallen to the flooruncovering the telescreen behind it. 'now they can see us,' said julia. 'now we can see you,' said the voice. 'standout in the middle of the room. stand back to back. clasp your hands behind your heads.do not touch one another.'

they were not touching, but it seemed to himthat he could feel julia's body shaking. or perhaps it was merely the shaking of his own.he could just stop his teeth from chattering, but his knees were beyond his control. therewas a sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and outside. the yard seemed tobe full of men. something was being dragged across the stones. the woman's singing hadstopped abruptly. there was a long, rolling clang, as though the washtub had been flungacross the yard, and then a confusion of angry shouts which ended in a yell of pain. 'the house is surrounded,' said winston. 'the house is surrounded,' said the voice.

he heard julia snap her teeth together. 'isuppose we may as well say good-bye,' she said. 'you may as well say good-bye,' said the voice.and then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which winston had theimpression of having heard before, struck in; 'and by the way, while we are on the subject,here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!' something crashed on to the bed behind winston'sback. the head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame.someone was climbing through the window. there was a stampede of boots up the stairs. theroom was full of solid men in black uniforms,

with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheonsin their hands. winston was not trembling any longer. evenhis eyes he barely moved. one thing alone mattered; to keep still, to keep still andnot give them an excuse to hit you! a man with a smooth prize-fighter's jowl in whichthe mouth was only a slit paused opposite him balancing his truncheon meditatively betweenthumb and forefinger. winston met his eyes. the feeling of nakedness, with one's handsbehind one's head and one's face and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. the manprotruded the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been,and then passed on. there was another crash. someone had picked up the glass paperweightfrom the table and smashed it to pieces on

the hearth-stone. the fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pinklike a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. how small, thought winston, how smallit always was! there was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received a violent kickon the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. one of the men had smashed his fistinto julia's solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler. she was thrashing abouton the floor, fighting for breath. winston dared not turn his head even by a millimetre,but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within the angle of his vision. even in histerror it was as though he could feel the pain in his own body, the deadly pain whichnevertheless was less urgent than the struggle

to get back her breath. he knew what it waslike; the terrible, agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not be sufferedyet, because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe. then two of the menhoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the room like a sack. winstonhad a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the eyes shut, and stillwith a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that was the last he saw of her. he stood dead still. no one had hit him yet.thoughts which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flitthrough his mind. he wondered whether they had got mr. charrington. he wondered whatthey had done to the woman in the yard. he

noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, andfelt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago. he noticedthat the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one. but the light seemed toostrong. would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an august evening? he wondered whetherafter all he and julia had mistaken the time — had slept the clock round and thoughtit was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning. buthe did not pursue the thought further. it was not interesting. there ws another, lighter step in the passage.mr. charrington came into the room. the demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly becamemore subdued. something had also changed in

mr. charrington's appearance. his eye fellon the fragments of the glass paperweight. 'pick up those pieces,' he said sharply. a man stooped to obey. the cockney accenthad disappeared; winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard a fewmoments ago on the telescreen. mr. charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, buthis hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. also he was not wearing hisspectacles. he gave winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his identity,and then paid no more attention to him. he was still recognizable, but he was not thesame person any longer. his body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. his facehad undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless

worked a complete transformation. the blackeyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed tohave altered; even the nose seemed shorter. it was the alert, cold face of a man of aboutfive-and-thirty. it occurred to winston that for the first time in his life he was looking,with knowledge, at a member of the thought police.

Author : indra

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