No More Learning

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. '

He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:

'You are improving. Intellectually there is very little
wrong with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed
to make progress. Tell me, Winston — and remember, no
lies: you know that I am always able to detect a lie — tell me,
what are your true feelings towards Big Brother? '

T hate him. '

'You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you
to take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not
enough to obey him: you must love him. '



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He released Winston with a little push towards the
guards.

'Room 101,' he said.



356 1984



Chapter 5



At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or
seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the window-
less building. Possibly there were slight differences in the air
pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him were
below ground level. The room where he had been interro-
gated by O'Brien was high up near the roof. This place was
many metres underground, as deep down as it was possible
to go.

It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But
he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that
there were two small tables straight in front of him, each
covered with green baize. One was only a metre or two
from him, the other was further away, near the door. He
was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could
move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his
head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of
him.

For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and
O'Brien came in.

'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room
101. 1 told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone
knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing
in the world. '

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying some-



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thing made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set
it down on the further table. Because of the position in
which O'Brien was standing. Winston could not see what
the thing was.

"The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from
individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by
fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths.
There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even
fatal'

He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a
better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire
cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the
front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask,
with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or
four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was
divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there
was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.

'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world
happens to be rats. '

A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain
what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his
first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of
the mask- like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into
him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.

'You can't do that! ' he cried out in a high cracked voice.
'You couldn't, you couldn't! It's impossible. '

'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of pan-
ic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of
blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears.

358 1984



There was something terrible on the other side of the wall.
You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag
it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side
of the wall'

'O'Brien! ' said Winston, making an effort to control his
voice. 'You know this is not necessary. What is it that you
want me to do? '

O'Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was
in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected.
He looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were
addressing an audience somewhere behind Winston's back.

'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always enough. There
are occasions when a human being will stand out against
pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is
something unendurable — something that cannot be con-
templated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you
are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a
rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not coward-
ly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which
cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you,
they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you
cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what
is required of you. '

'But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don't know
what it is? '

O'Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the
nearer table. He set it down carefully on the baize cloth.
Winston could hear the blood singing in his ears. He had the
feeling of sitting in utter loneliness. He was in the middle

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of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with sunlight,
across which all sounds came to him out of immense dis-
tances. Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres away
from him. They were enormous rats. They were at the age
when a rat's muzzle grows blunt and fierce and his fur brown
instead of grey.

'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audi-
ence, 'although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of
that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the
poor quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare
not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five minutes.
The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time
they will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dy-
ing people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing
when a human being is helpless. '

There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed
to reach Winston from far away. The rats were fighting; they
were trying to get at each other through the partition. He
heard also a deep groan of despair. That, too, seemed to
come from outside himself.

O'Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed
something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made
a frantic effort to tear himself loose from the chair. It was
hopeless; every part of him, even his head, was held im-
movably. O'Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a
metre from Winston's face.

T have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You under-
stand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over
your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever,

360 1984



the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will
shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap
through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore
straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Some-
times they burrow through the cheeks and devour the
tongue. '

The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a
succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in
the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his
panic. To think, to think, even with a split second left — to
think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odour of
the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convul-
sion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness.
Everything had gone black.