No More Learning

It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph.
The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant:
the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Gold-
stein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every
moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat
upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I
have played out with you during seven years will be played
out over and over again generation after generation, always
in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our
mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible — and
in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to
our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are pre-
paring, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph
after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing,
pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can
see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end
you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, wel-
come it, become part of it. '

Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak.
'You can't! ' he said weakly.

'What do you mean by that remark, Winston? '

'You could not create such a world as you have just de-
scribed. It is a dream. It is impossible. '

'Why? '

'It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred
and cruelty. It would never endure. '

'Why not? '

338 1984



'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would
commit suicide. '

'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is
more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were,
what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose
to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the
tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what
difference would it make? Can you not understand that the
death of the individual is not death? The party is immor-
tal. '

As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helpless-
ness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his
disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again. And yet
he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with
nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of
what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.

'I don't know — I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Some-
thing will defeat you. Life will defeat you. '

'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imag-
ining that there is something called human nature which
will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But
we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or
perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the prole-
tarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out
of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity
is the Party. The others are outside — irrelevant. '

'I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later
they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear
you to pieces. '



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'Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any
reason why it should? '

'No. I believe it. I KNOW that you will fail. There is
something in the universe — I don't know, some spirit, some
principle — that you will never overcome. '

'Do you believe in God, Winston? '

'No. '

'Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us? '

'I don't know. The spirit of Man. '

'And do you consider yourself a man? '

'Yes. '

'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your
kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand
that you are ALONE? You are outside history, you are non-
existent. ' His manner changed and he said more harshly:
And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our
lies and our cruelty? '

'Yes, I consider myself superior. '

O'Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking.
After a moment Winston recognized one of them as his
own. It was a sound-track of the conversation he had had
with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled himself in
the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal,
to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prosti-
tution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol
in a child's face. O'Brien made a small impatient gesture,
as though to say that the demonstration was hardly worth
making. Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped.

'Get up from that bed,' he said.



1984



The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered
himself to the floor and stood up unsteadily.

'You are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the guard-
ian of the human spirit. You shall see yourself as you are.
Take off your clothes. '

Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls to-
gether. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of
them. He could not remember whether at any time since his
arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath
the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags,
just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he
slid them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided
mirror at the far end of the room. He approached it, then
stopped short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.

'Go on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand between the wings of the
mirror. You shall see the side view as well'

He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed,
grey- coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards
him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely
the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to
the glass. The creature's face seemed to be protruded, be-
cause of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird's face with a
nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked
nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his
eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the
mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face,
but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had
changed inside. The emotions it registered would be differ-
ent from the ones he felt. He had gone partially bald. For the



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first moment he had thought that he had gone grey as well,
but it was only the scalp that was grey. Except for his hands
and a circle of his face, his body was grey all over with an-
cient, ingrained dirt. Here and there under the dirt there
were the red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the vari-
cose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling
off it. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of
his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a
skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker
than the thighs. He saw now what O'Brien had meant about
seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine was aston-
ishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to
make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be
bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he
would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suf-
fering from some malignant disease.

'You have thought sometimes,' said O'Brien, 'that my
face — the face of a member of the Inner Party — looks old
and worn. What do you think of your own face? '

He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so
that he was facing him.

'Look at the condition you are in! ' he said. 'Look at this
filthy grime all over your body. Look at the dirt between
your toes. Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg.
Do you know that you stink like a goat? Probably you have
ceased to notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see? I
can make my thumb and forefinger meet round your bicep.
I could snap your neck like a carrot. Do you know that you
have lost twenty-five kilograms since you have been in our



1984



hands? Even your hair is coming out in handfuls. Look! ' He
plucked at Winston's head and brought away a tuft of hair.
'Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How many
had you when you came to us? And the few you have left are
dropping out of your head. Look here! '

He seized one of Winston's remaining front teeth be-
tween his powerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain
shot through Winston's jaw. O'Brien had wrenched the
loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it across the cell.

'You are rotting away' he said; 'you are falling to pieces.
What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look
into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you?
That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity.
Now put your clothes on again. '

Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff move-
ments. Until now he had not seemed to notice how thin and
weak he was. Only one thought stirred in his mind: that he
must have been in this place longer than he had imagined.
Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round himself
a feeling of pity for his ruined body overcame him. Before
he knew what he was doing he had collapsed on to a small
stool that stood beside the bed and burst into tears. He was
aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of bones in
filthy underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh white light:
but he could not stop himself. O'Brien laid a hand on his
shoulder, almost kindly.

'It will not last for ever,' he said. 'You can escape from it
whenever you choose. Everything depends on yourself

'You did it! ' sobbed Winston. 'You reduced me to this



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state.

'No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you
accepted when you set yourself up against the Party. It was
all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that
you did not foresee. '

He paused, and then went on:

'We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up.
You have seen what your body is like. Your mind is in the
same state. I do not think there can be much pride left in
you. You have been kicked and flogged and insulted, you
have screamed with pain, you have rolled on the floor in
your own blood and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy,
you have betrayed everybody and everything. Can you think
of a single degradation that has not happened to you? '

Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were
still oozing out of his eyes. He looked up at O'Brien.

'I have not betrayed Julia,' he said.

O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. 'No,' he said;
'no; that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia. '

The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing
seemed able to destroy, flooded Winston's heart again. How
intelligent, he thought, how intelligent! Never did O'Brien
fail to understand what was said to him. Anyone else on
earth would have answered promptly that he HAD be-
trayed Julia. For what was there that they had not screwed
out of him under the torture? He had told them everything
he knew about her, her habits, her character, her past life;
he had confessed in the most trivial detail everything that
had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to her



1984



and she to him, their black-market meals, their adulteries,
their vague plottings against the Party — everything. And
yet, in the sense in which he intended the word, he had not
betrayed her. He had not stopped loving her; his feelings to-
wards her had remained the same. O'Brien had seen what
he meant without the need for explanation.

'Tell me,' he said, 'how soon will they shoot me? '
'It might be a long time,' said O'Brien. 'You are a difficult
case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or
later. In the end we shall shoot you. '



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Chapter 4



He was much better.
He was growing fatter and stronger every day, if it was proper to speak of days.

The white light and the humming sound were the same
as ever, but the cell was a little more comfortable than the
others he had been in. There was a pillow and a mattress on
the plank bed, and a stool to sit on. They had given him a
bath, and they allowed him to wash himself fairly frequent-
ly in a tin basin. They even gave him warm water to wash
with. They had given him new underclothes and a clean suit
of overalls. They had dressed his varicose ulcer with sooth-
ing ointment. They had pulled out the remnants of his teeth
and given him a new set of dentures.

Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been
possible now to keep count of the passage of time, if he had
felt any interest in doing so, since he was being fed at what
appeared to be regular intervals. He was getting, he judged,
three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he won-
dered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day.
The food was surprisingly good, with meat at every third
meal. Once there was even a packet of cigarettes. He had
no matches, but the never-speaking guard who brought his
food would give him a light. The first time he tried to smoke
it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out
for a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal.

346 1984



They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil
tied to the corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when
he was awake he was completely torpid. Often he would lie
from one meal to the next almost without stirring, some-
times asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries in which
it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He had long grown
used to sleeping with a strong light on his face. It seemed
to make no difference, except that one's dreams were more
coherent. He dreamed a great deal all through this time,
and they were always happy dreams. He was in the Golden
Country, or he was sitting among enormous glorious, sunlit
ruins, with his mother, with Julia, with O'Brien — not do-
ing anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful
things. Such thoughts as he had when he was awake were
mostly about his dreams. He seemed to have lost the power
of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been
removed. He was not bored, he had no desire for conversa-
tion or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or
questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over,
was completely satisfying.

By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still
felt no impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was to lie
quiet and feel the strength gathering in his body. He would
finger himself here and there, trying to make sure that it
was not an illusion that his muscles were growing round-
er and his skin tauter. Finally it was established beyond a
doubt that he was growing fatter; his thighs were now defi-
nitely thicker than his knees. After that, reluctantly at first,
he began exercising himself regularly. In a little while he



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could walk three kilometres, measured by pacing the cell,
and his bowed shoulders were growing straighter. He at-
tempted more elaborate exercises, and was astonished and
humiliated to find what things he could not do. He could
not move out of a walk, he could not hold his stool out at
arm's length, he could not stand on one leg without falling
over. He squatted down on his heels, and found that with
agonizing pains in thigh and calf he could just lift himself
to a standing position. He lay flat on his belly and tried to
lift his weight by his hands. It was hopeless, he could not
raise himself a centimetre. But after a few more days — a few
more mealtimes — even that feat was accomplished. A time
came when he could do it six times running. He began to
grow actually proud of his body, and to cherish an inter-
mittent belief that his face also was growing back to normal.
Only when he chanced to put his hand on his bald scalp did
he remember the seamed, ruined face that had looked back
at him out of the mirror.

His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank
bed, his back against the wall and the slate on his knees,
and set to work deliberately at the task of re-educating him-
self.

He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw
now, he had been ready to capitulate long before he had
taken the decision. From the moment when he was inside
the Ministry of Love — and yes, even during those minutes
when he and Julia had stood helpless while the iron voice
from the telescreen told them what to do — he had grasped
the frivolity, the shallowness of his attempt to set himself

348 1984



up against the power of the Party. He knew now that for
seven years the Thought Police had watched him like a bee-
tle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no
word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of
thought that they had not been able to infer. Even the speck
of whitish dust on the cover of his diary they had careful-
ly replaced. They had played sound-tracks to him, shown
him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia
and himself. Yes, even. . . He could not fight against the Party
any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be
so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken?
By what external standard could you check its judgements?
Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning

to think as they thought. Only !

The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He be-
gan to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He
wrote first in large clumsy capitals:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:

TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE

But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though
shying away from something, seemed unable to concen-
trate. He knew that he knew what came next, but for the
moment he could not recall it. When he did recall it, it was
only by consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not

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come of its own accord. He wrote:
GOD IS POWER

He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past
never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia.
Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aar-
onson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were
charged with. He had never seen the photograph that dis-
proved their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it.
He remembered remembering contrary things, but those
were false memories, products of self-deception. How easy it
all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was
like swimming against a current that swept you backwards
however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to
turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it.
Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predes-
tined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he
had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except !

Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Na-
ture were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I
wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like
a soap bubble. ' Winston worked it out. 'If he THINKS he
floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously THINK I see
him do it, then the thing happens. ' Suddenly, like a lump
of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the
thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We
imagine it. It is hallucination. ' He pushed the thought un-
der instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that



1984



somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world
where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a
world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through
our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever
happens in all minds, truly happens.

He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he
was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized, never-
theless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The
mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous
thought presented itself. The process should be automatic,
instinctive. CRIMESTOP, they called it in Newspeak.

He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He pre-
sented himself with propositions — 'the Party says the earth
is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water' — and
trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the ar-
guments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed
great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arith-
metical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement
as 'two and two make five' were beyond his intellectual
grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability
at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and
at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors.
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult
to attain.

All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered
how soon they would shoot him. 'Everything depends on
yourself,' O'Brien had said; but he knew that there was no
conscious act by which he could bring it nearer. It might
be ten minutes hence, or ten years. They might keep him



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for years in solitary confinement, they might send him to
a labour-camp, they might release him for a while, as they
sometimes did. It was perfectly possible that before he was
shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation would
be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that
death never came at an expected moment. The tradition —
the unspoken tradition: somehow you knew it, though you
never heard it said — was that they shot you from behind;
always in the back of the head, without warning, as you
walked down a corridor from cell to cell.

One day — but 'one day' was not the right expression; just
as probably it was in the middle of the night: once — he fell
into a strange, blissful reverie. He was walking down the
corridor, waiting for the bullet. He knew that it was com-
ing in another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed
out, reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more argu-
ments, no more pain, no more fear. His body was healthy
and strong. He walked easily, with a joy of movement and
with a feeling of walking in sunlight. He was not any longer
in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love, he
was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down
which he had seemed to walk in the delirium induced by
drugs. He was in the Golden Country, following the foot-
track across the old rabbit- cropped pasture. He could feel
the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sun-
shine on his face. At the edge of the field were the elm trees,
faintly stirring, and somewhere beyond that was the stream
where the dace lay in the green pools under the willows.

Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The



1984



sweat broke out on his backbone. He had heard himself cry
aloud:

'Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia! '

For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucina-
tion of her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with
him, but inside him. It was as though she had got into the
texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far
more than he had ever done when they were together and
free. Also he knew that somewhere or other she was still
alive and needed his help.

He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself.
What had he done? How many years had he added to his
servitude by that moment of weakness?

In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots
outside. They could not let such an outburst go unpunished.
They would know now, if they had not known before, that
he was breaking the agreement he had made with them. He
obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old
days he had hidden a heretical mind beneath an appear-
ance of conformity. Now he had retreated a step further:
in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep
the inner heart inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong,
but he preferred to be in the wrong. They would understand
that — O'Brien would understand it. It was all confessed in
that single foolish cry.

He would have to start all over again. It might take years.
He ran a hand over his face, trying to familiarize himself
with the new shape. There were deep furrows in the cheeks,
the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose flattened. Besides, since



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last seeing himself in the glass he had been given a complete
new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve inscrutabili-
ty when you did not know what your face looked like. In
any case, mere control of the features was not enough. For
the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret
you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the
while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let
it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could
be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think
right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he
must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of
matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with
the rest of him, a kind of cyst.

One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not
tell when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand
it should be possible to guess. It was always from behind,
walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In
that time the world inside him could turn over. And then
suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his
step, without the changing of a line in his face — suddenly
the camouflage would be down and bang! would go the bat-
teries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an enormous
roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would
go the bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown
his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it. The hereti-
cal thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their
reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in their own
perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.

He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting



1984



an intellectual discipline. It was a question of degrading
himself, mutilating himself. He had got to plunge into the
filthiest of filth. What was the most horrible, sickening thing
of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous face (be-
cause of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought
of it as being a metre wide), with its heavy black moustache
and the eyes that followed you to and fro, seemed to float
into his mind of its own accord. What were his true feelings
towards Big Brother?

There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The
steel door swung open with a clang. O'Brien walked into
the cell. Behind him were the waxen-faced officer and the
black-uniformed guards.

'Get up,' said O'Brien. 'Come here. '

Winston stood opposite him. O'Brien took Winston's
shoulders between his strong hands and looked at him
closely.

'You have had thoughts of deceiving me,' he said. "That
was stupid. Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.