It was even possible,at moments,to switch one's hatred this way or that by a voluntary act.Suddenly,by the sort of violent ef-fort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare,Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him.Vivid,beauti-ful hallucinations flashed through his mind.He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon.He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian.He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.Better than before, moreover,he realized why it was that he hated her.He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so,because round her sweet supple waist,which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax.The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat,and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep.Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing,huge and terrible,his subma-chine gun roaring and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen,so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats.But in the same moment,drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody,the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother,black-haired,black-mustachio'd,full of power and mysterious calm,and so vast that it almost filled up the screen.No-body heard what Big Brother was saying.It was merely a few words of encouragement,the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle,not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.Then the face of Big Brother faded away a-gain,and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several sec-onds on the screen,as though the impact that it had made on every-one's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately.The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her.With a tremulous murmur that sounded like"My Savior!"she extended her arms toward the screen.Then she buried her face in her hands.It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,rhythmical chant of"B-B!...B-B!...B-B!"over and over again, very slowly,with a long pause between the first"B"and the sec-ond—a heavy,murmurous sound,somehow curiously savage,in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms.For perhaps as much as thirty sec onds they kept it up.It was a refrain that was often heard in mo-ments of overwhelming emotion.Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and maj esty of Big Brother,but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis,a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold.In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium,but this subhuman chanting of"B-B!...B-B!"always filled him with horror.Of course he chanted with the rest:it was impossible to do otherwise.To dissemble your feelings,to control your face,to do what everyone else was doing,was an instinctive reaction.But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression in his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him.And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened—if,indeed,it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye.O'Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture.But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met,and for as long as it took to hap-pen Winston knew—yes,he knew! —that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself.An unmistakable message had passed.It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes."I am with you,"O'Brien seemed to be saying to him."I know precisely what you are feeling.I know all about your contempt,your hatred,your disgust.But don't worry,I am on your side!"And then the flash of intelligence was gone,and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as eve-rybody else's.
That was all,and he was already uncertain whether it had hap-pened.Such incidents never had any sequel.All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief,or hope,that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party.Perhaps the rumours of vast under-ground conspiracies were true after all—perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible,in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions,to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth.Some days he believed in it,some days not.There was no evidence,only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing:snatches of overheard conversation,faint scribbles on lavatory walls—once,even,when two strangers met,a small move-ment of the hands which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition.It was all guesswork:very likely he had imagined everything.He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O' Brien again.The idea of following up their momentary contact hard-ly crossed his mind.It would have been inconceivably dangerous e-ven if he had known how to set about doing it.For a second,two seconds,they had exchanged an equivocal glance,and that was the end of the story.But even that was a memorable event,in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter.He let out a belch.The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes refocused on the page.He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing,as though by automatic action.And it was no longer the same cramped awkward handwrit-ing as before.His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals—
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again,filling half a page.
he could not help feeling a twinge of panic.It was absurd,since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary,but for a moment he was temp-ted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise alto-gether.
But he did not do so,however,because he knew that it was useless.Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it,made no difference.Whether he went on with the diary,or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference.The Thought Police would get him just the same.He had committed—would still have committed,even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself.Thoughtcrime,they called it.Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.You might dodge successful-ly for a while,even for years,but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened at night.The sudden j erk out of sleep,the rough hand shaking your shoulder,the lights glaring in your eyes,the ring of hard faces round the bed.In the vast majority of cases there was no trial,no re-port of the arrest.People simply disappeared,always during the night.Your name was removed from the registers,every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out,your one-time exist-ence was denied and then forgotten.You were abolished,annihila-ted:vaporized was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria.He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care downwith big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother—
He sat back in his chair,slightly ashamed of himself,and laid down his pen.The next moment he started violently.There was a knocking at his door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse,in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt.But no,the knocking was repeated.The worst thing of all would be to delay.His heart was thumping like a drum,but his face,from long habit,was probably expressionless.He got up and moved heavily toward the door.
Chapter 2
A s he put his hand to the doorknob Winston saw that hehad left the diary open on the table.DOWN WITH BIGBROTHER was written all over it,in letters almost bigenough to be legible across the room.It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done.But,he realized,even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door.Instantly a warm wave of relief flowed through him.A colorless,crushed-looking woman,with wispy hair and a lined face,was standing outside.
"Oh,comrade,"she began in a dreary,whining sort of voice,"I thought I heard you come in.Do you think you could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It's got blocked up and—"
It was Mrs.Parsons,the wife of a neighbor on the same floor. ("Mrs."was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party—you were supposed to call everyone"comrade"—but with some women one used it instinctively.) She was a woman of about thirty,but looking much older.One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face.Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation.Victory Mansions were old flats,built in 1930 or thereabouts,and were fall-ing to pieces.The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost,the roof leaked whenever there was snow,the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs,except what you could do for yourself,had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the men-ding of a window pane for two years.
"Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,"said Mrs.Par-sons vaguely.
The Parsonses's flat was bigger than Winston's,and dingy in a different way.Everything had a battered,trampled-on look,as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Games impedimenta—hockey sticks,boxing gloves,a burst foot-ball,a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out—lay all over the floor,and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise books.On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies,and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell,common to the whole building,but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which—one knew this at the first sniff,though it was hard to say how—was the sweat of some person not present at the moment.In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing from the telescreen.
"It's the children,"said Mrs.Parsons,casting a half-appre-hensive glance at the door."They haven't been out today.And of course—"
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle.The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe.He hated using his hands,and he hated bending down,which was always liable to start him coug-hing.Mrs.Parsons looked on helplessly.
"Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,"she said."He loves anything like that.He's ever so good with his hands,Tom is."
Parsons was Winston's fellow employee at the Ministry of Truth.He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity,a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestion-ing,devoted drudges on whom,more even than on the Thought Po-lice,the stability of the Party depended.At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League,and before gradua-ting into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age.At the Ministry he was em-ployed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not re-quired,but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing com-munity hikes,spontaneous demonstrations,savings campaigns,and voluntary activities generally.He would inform you with quiet pride,between whiffs of his pipe,that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years.An overpowering smell of sweat,a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life,followed him about wherever he went,and even remained behind him after he had gone.
"Have you got a spanner?"said Winston,fiddling with the nut on the angle-j oint.
"A spanner,"said Mrs.Parsons,immediately becoming inver-tebrate."I don't know,I'm sure.Perhaps the children—"
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the children charged into the living-room.Mrs.Parsons brought the spanner.Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe.He cleaned his fin-gers as best he could in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.
"Up with your hands!"yelled a savage voice.
A handsome,tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister,about two years younger,made the same ges-ture with a fragment of wood.Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts,grey shirts,and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies.Winston raised his hands above his head,but with an un-easy feeling,so vicious was the boy's demeanor,that it was not al-together a game.
"You're a traitor!"yelled the boy."You're a thought-crimi-nal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you,I'll vaporize you,I'll send you to the salt mines!"
Suddenly they were both leaping around him,shouting"Tra-i tor!"and"Thought-criminal!"the little girl imitating her brother in every movement.It was somehow slightly frightening,like the gamboling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye,a quite evi-dent desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding,Winston thought.
Mrs.Parsons'eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the chil-dren,and back again.In the better light of the living room he no-ticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.
"They do get so noisy,"she said."They're disappointed be-cause they couldn't go to see the hanging,that's what it is.I'm too busy to take them.and Tom won't be back from work in time."
"Why can't we go and see the hanging?"roared the boy in his huge voice.
"Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!"chanted the little girl,still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners,guilty of war crimes,were to be hanged in the Park that evening,Winston remembered.This hap-pened about once a month,and was a popular spectacle.Children al-ways clamored to be taken to see it.He took his leave of Mrs Par-sons and made for the door.But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow.It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him.He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
"Goldstein!"bellowed the boy as the door closed on him.But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman's grayish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the table again,still rubbing his neck.The music from the telescreen had stopped.Instead,a clipped military voice was reading out,with a sort of brutal relish,a deion of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
With those children,he thought,that wretched woman must lead a life of terror.Another year,two years,and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy.Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematical-ly turned into ungovernable little savages,and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party.On the contrary,they adored the Party and everything con-nected with it.The songs,the processions,the banners,the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles,the yelling of slogans,the worship of Big Brother—it was all a sort of glorious game to them.All their ferocity was turned outwards,against the enemies of the State,a-gainst foreigners,traitors,saboteurs,thought-criminals.It was al-most normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.And with good reason,for hardly a week passed in which"The times"did not carry a paragraph describing how some eaves-dropping little sneak—"child hero"was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its par-ents to the Thought Police.
The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off.He picked up his pen half-heartedly,wondering whether he could find something more to write in the diary.Suddenly he began thinking of O'Brien again.
Years ago—how long was it? Seven years it must be—he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room.And some-one sitting to one side of him had said as he passed:"We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness."It was said very quietly, almost casually—a statement,not a command.He had walked on without pausing.What was curious was that at the time,in the dream,the words had not made much impression on him.It was on-ly later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance.He could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that he had seen O'Brien for the first time,nor could he remember when he had first identified the voice as O'Brien's.But at any rate the identification existed.It was O'Brien who had spo-ken to him out of the dark.
Winston had never been able to feel sure—even after this morning's flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure—whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy.Nor did it even seem to matter greatly.There was a link of understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship."We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,"he had said.Winston did not know what it meant,only that in some way or another it would come true.
The voice from the telescreen paused.A trumpet call,clear and beautiful,floated into the stagnant air.The voice continued raspingly:
"Attention! Your attention,please! A newsflash has this mo-ment arrived from the Malabar front.Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory.I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end.Here is the newsflash—"
Bad news coming,thought Winston.And sure enough,follow-ing on a gory deion of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners,came the announce-ment that,as from next week,the chocolate ration would be re-duced from thirty gram to twenty.
Winston belched again.The gin was wearing off,leaving a de-flated feeling.The telescreen—perhaps to celebrate the victory,per-haps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate—crashed into"O-ceania,'tis for thee".You were supposed to stand to attention.However,in his present position he was invisible.
"Oceania,'tis for thee"gave way to lighter music.Winston walked over to the window,keeping his back to the telescreen.The day was still cold and clear.Somewhere far away a rocket bomb ex-ploded with a dull,reverberating roar.About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present.
Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished.Ingsoc.The sacred principles of Ingsoc.Newspeak,doublethink,the mutability of the past.He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom,lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster.He was alone.The past was dead,the future was unimagin-able.What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side?And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure forever? Like an answer,the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
He took a twenty-five-cent piece out of his pocket.There,too,in tiny clear lettering,the same slogans were inscribed,and on the oth-er face of the coin the head of Big Brother.Even from the coin the eyes pursued you.On coins,on stamps,on the covers of books,on banners,on posters,and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet—eve-rywhere.Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you.Asleep or awake,working or eating,indoors or out of doors,in the bath or in bed—no escape.Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
The sun had shifted round,and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth,with the light no longer shining on them,looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress.His heart quailed before the e-normous pyramidal shape.It was too strong, it could not be stormed.A thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down.He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary.For the future, for the past—for an age that might be imaginary.And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation.The diary would be re-duced to ashes and himself tovapour.Only the Thought Police would read what he had written,before they wiped it out of exist-ence and out of memory.How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you,not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper,could physically survive?
The telescreen struck fourteen.He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously,the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him.He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.But so long as he uttered it,in some obscure way the continuity was not broken.It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.He went back to the table,dipped his pen,and wrote:
To the future or to the past,to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity,from the age of solitude,from the age of Big Brother,from the age of doublethink—greetings!
He was already dead,he reflected.It seemed to him that it was only now,when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step.The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death:thoughtcrime IS death.
Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained.It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you.Some nosing zealot in the Ministry(a woman,probably;someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval,why he had used an old-fashioned pen,what he had been writing—and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter.He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer.It was quite useless to think of hiding it,but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered.A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious.With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved.
Chapter 3
W inston was dreaming of his mother.
He must,he thought,have been ten or eleven yearsold when his mother had disappeared.She was a tall, statuesque,rather silent woman with slow movements and magnifi-cent fair hair.His father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin,dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered es-pecially the very thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing spec-tacles.The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the Fifties.