No More Learning

Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would
carry on their intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of
their natural lives. Or Katharine would die, and by subtle
manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would succeed in get-
ting married. Or they 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 lives undetected in a back-street. It was
all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality there was no es-
cape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they
had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to
day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had
no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's
lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is
air available.

Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebel-
lion against the Party, but with no notion of how to take
the first step. Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a real-
ity, there still remained the difficulty of finding one's way
into it. He told her of the strange intimacy that existed, or



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seemed to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the
impulse he sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's
presence, announce that he was the enemy of the Party, and
demand his help. Curiously enough, this did not strike her
as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judg-
ing people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that
Winston should believe O'Brien to be trustworthy on the
strength of a single flash of the eyes. Moreover she took it
for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated
the Party and would break the rules if he thought it safe to
do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized
opposition 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 purposes
and which you had to pretend to believe in. Times beyond
number, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations,
she had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of
people whose names she had never heard and in whose sup-
posed crimes she had not the faintest belief. When public
trials were happening she had taken her place in the detach-
ments from 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 shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she had only
the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what doctrines
he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since the
Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological
battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an indepen-
dent political movement was outside her imagination: and



1984



in any case the Party was invincible. It would always ex-
ist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel
against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts
of violence such as 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 to mention the war against
Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opin-
ion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell
daily on London were probably fired by the Government
of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'. This was
an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also
stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the
Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting
out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the
Party when they in some way touched upon her own life.
Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply
because the 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.
(In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late
fifties, it was only the helicopter that 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 claiming the steam engine. ) And when he
told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was
born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as
totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had



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invented aeroplanes? It was rather more of a shock to 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 that she
regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had
not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed.
'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she said
vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of aero-
planes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover
in the war had happened only four years ago, well after 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 one time
Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue
still struck her as unimportant. 'Who cares? ' she said im-
patiently. 'It's always one bloody war after another, and one
knows the news is all lies anyway'

Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department
and the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such
things did not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the
abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becom-
ing truths. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had
once held between his fingers. It did not make much im-
pression 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 Party members.
Besides, they were far older men than I was. They belonged



1984



to the old days, before the Revolution. I barely knew them
by sight. '

"Then what was there to worry about? People are being
killed off all the time, aren't they? '

He tried to make her understand. "This was an excep-
tional case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being
killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yester-
day, 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 glass there. Already we know almost lit-
erally nothing about the Revolution and the years before
the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsi-
fied, 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 always right. I know, of course, that the past is
falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it,
even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is
done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside
my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any
other human being shares my memories. Just in that one
instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evi-
dence after the event — years after it. '

And what good was that? '

'It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes lat-
er. But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it. '

'Well, I wouldn't! ' said Julia. 'I'm quite ready to take



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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. It might 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 lit-
tle knots of resistance springing up here and there — small
groups of people banding themselves together, and gradu-
ally growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that
the next generations can carry on where we leave off. '

'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm inter-
ested in US. '

'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told
her.

She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms
round him in delight.

In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the
faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the princi-
ples of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and
the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words,
she became bored and confused and said that she never paid
any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all
rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when
to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he
persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting
habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can
go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her,
he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of or-

196 1984



thodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy
meant. In a way, the world- view of the Party imposed itself
most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.
They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations
of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity
of what was demanded of 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 what they swallowed did them
no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of
corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.



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Chapter 6



It had happened at last. The expected message had come.
All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this
to happen.

He was walking down the long corridor at the Minis-
try and he was almost at the spot where Julia had slipped
the note into his hand when he became aware that some-
one larger than himself was walking just behind him. The
person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a
prelude to speaking. Winston stopped abruptly and turned.
It was O'Brien.

At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only
impulse was to run away. His heart bounded violently. He
would have been incapable of speaking. O'Brien, however,
had continued forward in the same movement, laying a
friendly hand for a moment on Winston's arm, so that the
two of them were walking side by side. He began speak-
ing with the peculiar grave courtesy that differentiated him
from the majority of Inner Party members.

'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to 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



1984



subject. I have never had 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 certainly an expert. His name has slipped my
memory for the moment. '

Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was incon-
ceivable that this was anything other than a reference to
Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an
unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have
been 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 the curious, dis-
arming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the
gesture he resettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went
on:

'What I had really intended to say was that in your article
I noticed you had used two words which have become obso-
lete. But they have only become so very recently. Have you
seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary? '

'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued yet.
We are still using the ninth in the Records Department. '

'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months,
I believe. But a few advance copies have been circulated.
I have one myself. It might interest you to look at it, per-
haps? '

'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where



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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 invariably for-
get anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick it up at
my flat at some time that suited 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-covered notebook and a gold
ink-pencil. Immediately beneath the telescreen, in such a
position that anyone who was watching at the other end of
the instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbled
an address, tore out the page and handed it to Winston.

'I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said. 'If not, my
servant will give you the dictionary'

He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper,
which this time there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless
he carefully memorized what was written on it, and some
hours later dropped it into the memory hole along with a
mass of other papers.

They had been talking to one another for a couple of
minutes at the most. There was only one meaning that the
episode could possibly have. It had been contrived as a way
of letting Winston know O'Brien's address. This was neces-
sary, because except by direct enquiry it was never possible
to discover where anyone lived. There were no directories
of any kind. 'If you ever want to see me, this is where I can



1984



be found,' was what O'Brien had been saying to him. Per-
haps there would even be a message concealed somewhere
in the dictionary. But at any rate, one thing was certain. The
conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had
reached the outer edges of it.

He knew that sooner or later he would obey O'Brien's
summons. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long de-
lay — he was not certain. What was happening was only the
working-out of a process that had started years ago. The
first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the sec-
ond had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from
thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last
step was something that would happen in the Ministry of
Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the be-
ginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like
a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. Even while
he was speaking to O'Brien, when the meaning of the words
had sunk in, a chilly shuddering feeling had taken posses-
sion of his body. He had the sensation of stepping into the
dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because
he had always known that the grave was there and waiting
for him.



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Chapter 7



Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Ju-
lia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something
that might have been 'What's the matter? '

'I dreamt — ' he began, and stopped short. It was too com-
plex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and
there was a memory connected with it that had swum into
his mind in the few seconds after waking.

He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmo-
sphere of the dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which
his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a land-
scape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred
inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass
was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything
was flooded with clear soft light in which one could see into
interminable distances. The dream had also been compre-
hended by — indeed, in some sense it had consisted in — a
gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again
thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the
news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets,
before the helicopter blew them both to pieces.

'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed
I had murdered my mother? '

'Why did you murder her? ' said Julia, almost asleep.

'I didn't murder her. Not physically'



1984



In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his
mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster
of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a
memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his
consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the
date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, pos-
sibly 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 circumstances of the time: the periodical
panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations,
the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proc-
lamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in
shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside
the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the dis-
tance — above all, the fact that there was never enough to
eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys
in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking
out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes
even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully
scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the pass-
ing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were
known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted
over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few frag-
ments of oil-cake.

When his father disappeared, his mother did not show
any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came
over her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless.
It was evident even to Winston that she was waiting for



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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 slowly
and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an art-
ist's lay- figure moving of its own accord. Her large shapely
body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours
at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nurs-
ing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two
or three, with a face made simian by thinness. Very occa-
sionally she would take Winston in her arms and press him
against her for a long time 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, a dark, 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 landing outside there was
a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He
remembered his mother'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, he would
shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of
his voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and
sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would attempt
a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his
share. His mother was quite ready to give him more than



1984



his share. She took it for granted that he, 'the boy', should
have the biggest portion; but however much she gave him
he invariably demanded more. At every meal she would be-
seech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little
sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He
would cry out with rage when 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 hunger in his bel-
ly 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. There had been
no such issue for weeks or months past. He remembered
quite clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate. It was a
two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days)
between the three of them. It was obvious that it ought to
be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he
were listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself
demanding in a loud booming voice that he should be giv-
en the whole piece. His mother told him not to be greedy.
There was a long, nagging argument that went round and
round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargain-
ings. His tiny sister, clinging to her mother with both 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 gave it to Winston,
giving the other quarter to his sister. The little girl took hold

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of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was.
Winston stood watching her for a moment. Then with a
sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate
out of his sister's hand and was fleeing for the door.

'Winston, Winston! ' his mother called after him. 'Come
back! Give your sister back her chocolate! '

He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anx-
ious eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking
about the thing, he did not know what it was that was on
the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having been
robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother
drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against
her breast. Something in the gesture told him that his sis-
ter was dying. He turned and fled down the stairs, with the
chocolate growing sticky in his hand.

He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured
the chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and
hung about in the streets for several hours, until hunger
drove him home. When he came back his mother had dis-
appeared. This was already becoming normal at that time.
Nothing was gone from the room except his mother 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 perfectly possible that she
had merely been sent to a forced-labour camp. As for his
sister, she might 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



1984



camp along with his mother, or simply left somewhere or
other to die.

The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the en-
veloping 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 sat on the dingy whitequilted bed, with the child cling-
ing to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath
him, and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking
up at him through 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 swine in those days,' she
said indistinctly. 'All children are swine. '

'Yes. But the real point of the story '

From her breathing it was evident that she was 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 of purity, simply because the standards that
she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own,
and could not be altered from outside. It would not have
occurred to her that 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 the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother
had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed



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nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert
the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to
do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the
little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the
bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Par-
ty had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere
feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing
you 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 no dif-
ference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you
nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted
clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people
of only two generations ago this would not have seemed
all-important, because they were not attempting to alter
history. They were governed by private loyalties which they
did not question. What mattered were individual relation-
ships, 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 not loyal to a party or a country or
an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in
his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely
as an inert force which would one day spring to life and re-
generate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had
not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primi-
tive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious
effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without appar-
ent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed



1984



hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gut-
ter 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 ever occurred to you,'
he said, 'that the best thing for us to do would be simply to
walk out of here before it's too late, and never see each other
again? '

'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm
not going to do it, all the same. '

'We've been lucky' he said 'but it can't last much longer.
You're young. You look normal and innocent. If you keep
clear of people like 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 realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they
get hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that
either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot
you, and if 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. Neither of us
will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall
be utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that
matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although



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even that can't make the slightest difference. '

'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that, right
enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They
torture you. '

'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal.
What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If
they could make me stop loving you — that would be the
real betrayal. '

She thought it over. 'They can't do that,' she said final-
ly '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 hu-
man is worth while, even when it can't have any result
whatever, you've beaten them. '

He thought of the telescreen with its never- sleeping ear.
They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your
head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness
they had never mastered the secret of finding out what an-
other human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true
when you were actually in their hands. One did not know
what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was pos-
sible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that
registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing- down
by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning.
Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be
tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you
by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay



1984



human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could
not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter
them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in
the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or
thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysteri-
ous even to yourself, remained impregnable.



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Chapter 8



They had done it, they had done it at last!
The room they were standing in was long-shaped and
softly lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the
richness of the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of
treading on velvet. At the far end of the room O'Brien was
sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of
papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up
when the servant showed Julia and Winston in.

Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he 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 to arrive together;
though it was true that they had come by different routes
and only met on O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into
such a place needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on
very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-plac-
es of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter
of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the
huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of every-
thing, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco,
the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the
white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro — everything
was intimidating. Although he had a good pretext for com-
ing here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that a



1984



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
without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white
jacket, with a diamond- shaped, completely expressionless
face which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage
down which he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-
papered walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean.
That too was intimidating. Winston could not remember
ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not grimy
from the contact of human bodies.

O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and
seemed to be studying it intently. His heavy face, bent down
so that one could see the line of the nose, looked both for-
midable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat
without stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite towards
him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the
Ministries:

'Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise
stop suggestion contained item six doubleplus ridiculous
verging crimethink cancel stop unproceed construction-wise
antegetting plusfull estimates machinery overheads stop end
message. '

He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards
them across the soundless carpet. A little of the official at-
mosphere seemed to have fallen away from him with the
Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer than

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 213



usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The
terror that Winston already felt was suddenly shot through
by a streak of ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him
quite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake.
For what evidence had he in reality that O'Brien was any
kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes
and a single equivocal remark: beyond that, only his own
secret imaginings, founded on a dream. He could not even
fall back on the pretence that he had come to borrow the
dictionary, because in that case Julia's presence was impos-
sible to explain. As O'Brien passed the telescreen a 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 squeak of surprise.
Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken
aback to be able to hold his tongue.

'You can turn it off! ' he said.

'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that privi-
lege. '

He was opposite them now. His solid form towered
over the pair of them, and the expression on his face was
still indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for
Winston to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite
conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering ir-
ritably why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After
the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly si-
lent. The seconds marched past, enormous. With difficulty
Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O'Brien's. Then



1984



suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have
been the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic ges-
ture O'Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose.

'Shall I say it, or will you? ' he said.

'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing is really
turned off? '

'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone. '

'We have come here because '

He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of
his own motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind
of help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why
he had come here. He went on, conscious that what 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.