No More Learning

They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin
flavoured with cloves which was the speciality of the cafe.
Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most
impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous
caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame
popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even
now, at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in The
Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner,
and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always they were
a rehashing of the ancient themes — slum tenements, starv-

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ing children, street battles, capitalists in top hats — even on
the barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to their
top hats an endless, hopeless effort to get back into the past.
He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair,
his face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At
one time he must have been immensely strong; now his
great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in
every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one's
eyes, like a mountain crumbling.

It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not
now remember how he had come to be in the cafe at such
a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny music was
trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat in their
corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded,
the waiter brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chess-
board on the table beside them, with the pieces set out but
no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute in all,
something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they
were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed
too. There came into it — but it was something hard to de-
scribe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in
his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice
from the telescreen was singing:

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.



1984



The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced
again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes
were full of tears. And for the first time he noticed, with a
kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing AT WHAT
he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had bro-
ken noses.

A little later all three were re- arrested. It appeared that
they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very mo-
ment of their release. At their second trial they confessed to
all their old crimes over again, with a whole string of new
ones. They were executed, and their fate was recorded in
the Party histories, a warning to posterity. About five years
after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of docu-
ments which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on
to his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which
had evidently been slipped in among the others and then
forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its sig-
nificance. It was a half-page torn out of 'The Times' of about
ten years earlier — the top half of the page, so that it included
the date — and it contained a photograph of the delegates at
some Party function in New York. Prominent in the middle
of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There
was no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the
caption at the bottom.

The point was that at both trials all three men had con-
fessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They
had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous
somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of
the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed im-

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portant military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's
memory because it chanced to be midsummer day; but the
whole story must be on record in countless other places as
well. There was only one possible conclusion: the confes-
sions were lies.

Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that
time Winston had not imagined that the people who were
wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes
that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence;
it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone
which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geo-
logical theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if
in some way it could have been published to the world and
its significance made known.

He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what
the photograph was, and what it meant, he had covered it
up with another sheet of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled
it, it had been upside-down from the point of view of the
telescreen.

He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back
his chair so as to get as far away from the telescreen as pos-
sible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and
even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort:
but you could not control the beating of your heart, and
the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He
let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all
the while by the fear that some accident — a sudden draught
blowing across his desk, for instance — would betray him.
Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the photo-



1984



graph into the memory hole, along with some other waste
papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have
crumbled into ashes.

That was ten — eleven years ago. Today, probably, he
would have kept that photograph. It was curious that the
fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make
a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well
as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party's
hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece
of evidence which existed no longer HAD ONCE existed?

But today, supposing that it could be somehow resur-
rected from its ashes, the photograph might not even be
evidence. Already, at the time when he made his discov-
ery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must
have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men
had betrayed their country. Since then there had been oth-
er changes — two, three, he could not remember how many.
Very likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten
until the original facts and dates no longer had the small-
est significance. The past not only changed, but changed
continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of
nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why
the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advan-
tages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate
motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and
wrote:

/ understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.



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He wondered, as he had many times wondered before,
whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was
simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of
madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today,
to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be ALONE
in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the
thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the
horror was that he might also be wrong.

He picked up the children's history book and looked at
the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece.
The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though
some huge force were pressing down upon you — something
that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your
brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you,
almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the
Party would announce that two and two made five, and you
would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should
make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position
demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the
very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their
philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And
what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for
thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after
all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that
the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchange-
able? If both the past and the external world exist only in
the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?

But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its
own accord. The face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvi-



1984



ous association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with
more certainty than before, that O'Brien was on his side.
He was writing the diary for O'Brien — TO O'Brien: it was
like an interminable letter which no one would ever read,
but which was addressed to a particular person and took its
colour from that fact.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and
ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart
sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against
him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would over-
throw him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would
not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he
was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The
obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Tru-
isms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws
do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsup-
ported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that
he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting
forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If
that is granted, all else follows.



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Chapter 8



From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of
roasting coffee — real coffee, not Victory Coffee — came
floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily.
For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten
world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut
off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.

He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and
his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time
in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Com-
munity Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that
the number of your attendances at the Centre was care-
fully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare
time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed
that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would
be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do
anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a
walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was
a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, mean-
ing individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he
came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had
tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it
that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Cen-
tre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking
camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On im-



1984



pulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered
off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then
north again, losing himself among unknown streets and
hardly bothering in which direction he was going.

'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in
the proles. ' The words kept coming back to him, statement
of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was some-
where in the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and
east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was
walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with
battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement
and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes.
There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the
cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow
alley- ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed
in astonishing numbers — girls in full bloom, with crude-
ly lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and
swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls
would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures shuf-
fling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children
who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells
from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in
the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people
paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of
guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red
forearms folded across their aprons were talking outside a
doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he ap-
proached.

"Yes,' I says to 'er, 'that's all very well,' I says. 'But if you'd



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of been in my place you'd of done the same as what I done.
It's easy to criticize,' I says, 'but you ain't got the same prob-
lems as what I got. "

'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where it is. '

The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women stud-
ied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not
hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary
stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The
blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in
a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such
places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols
might stop you if you happened to run into them. 'May I see
your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time
did you leave work? Is this your usual way home? ' — and so
on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking
home by an unusual route: but it was enough to draw atten-
tion to you if the Thought Police heard about it.

Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There
were yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting
into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out
of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny
child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and
leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a
man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from
a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing excitedly to the
sky.

'Steamer! ' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead!
Lay down quick! '

'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the



1984



proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung
himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right
when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed
to possess some kind of instinct which told them several
seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although
the rockets supposedly travelled faster than sound. Win-
ston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar
that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light
objects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found
that he was covered with fragments of glass from the near-
est window.

He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of
houses 200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke
hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which
a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a
little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and
in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he
got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the
wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so com-
pletely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.

He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid
the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. With-
in three or four minutes he was out of the area which the
bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the
streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It
was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the
proles frequented (pubs', they called them) were choked
with customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly
opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine,



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sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting
house-front three men were standing very close togeth-
er, the middle one of them holding a folded- up newspaper
which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even
before he was near enough to make out the expression on
their faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of
their bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news
that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them
when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were
in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on
the point of blows.

'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you
no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen
months! '

'Yes, it 'as, then! '

'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for over
two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down
reg'lar as the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in
seven '

'Yes, a seven 'AS won! I could pretty near tell you the
bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in Feb-
ruary — second week in February'

'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black
and white. An' I tell you, no number '

'Oh, pack it in! ' said the third man.

They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked
back when he had gone thirty metres. They were still ar-
guing, with vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its
weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event



1984



to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable
that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lot-
tery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining
alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their
intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned,
even people who could barely read and write seemed capa-
ble of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.
There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by
selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had
nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was
managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (in-
deed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were
largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out,
the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In
the absence of any real intercommunication between one
part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to ar-
range.

But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling
on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable:
it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on
the pavement that it became an act of faith. The street into
which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he
had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was
a main thoroughfare not far away.
From somewhere ahead
there came a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp
turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into
a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers were selling tired-
looking vegetables. At this moment Winston remembered
where he was. The alley led out into the main street, and



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down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the junk-
shop where he had bought the blank book which was now
his diary. And in a small stationer's shop not far away he
had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.

He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the
opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose
windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were
merely coated with dust. A very old man, bent but active,
with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a
prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Win-
ston stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man,
who must be eighty at the least, had already been middle-
aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others
like him were the last links that now existed with the van-
ished world of capitalism. In the Party itself there were not
many people left whose ideas had been formed before the
Revolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out
in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who
survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellec-
tual surrender. If there was any one still alive who could
give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part
of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenly the pas-
sage from the history book that he had copied into his diary
came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took
hold of him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape ac-
quaintance with that old man and question him. He would
say to him: 'Tell me about your life when you were a boy.
What was it like in those days? Were things better than they
are now, or were they worse? '



1984



Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened,
he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It
was madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule
against talking to proles and frequenting their pubs, but it
was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the pa-
trols appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it
was not likely that they would believe him. He pushed open
the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in
the face. As he entered the din of voices dropped to about
half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyone eye-
ing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at
the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as
much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed
was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation
with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man
with enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round
with glasses in their hands, were watching the scene.

'I arst you civil enough, didn't I? ' said the old man,
straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me
you ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer? '

And what in hell's name IS a pint? ' said the barman, lean-
ing forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.

"Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what
a pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four
quarts to the gallon. Ave to teach you the A, B, C next. '

'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and
half litre — that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf
in front of you. '

'I likes a pint,' persisted the old man. 'You could 'a drawed

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me off a pint easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding li-
tres when I was a young man. '

'When you were a young man we were all living in the
treetops,' said the barman, with a glance at the other cus-
tomers.

There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused
by Winston's entry seemed to disappear. The old man's whit-
estubbled face had flushed pink. He turned away, muttering
to himself, and bumped into Winston. Winston caught him
gently by the arm.

'May I offer you a drink? ' he said.

'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening his shoul-
ders again. He appeared not to have noticed Winston's blue
overalls. 'Pint! ' he added aggressively to the barman. 'Pint
of wallop. '

The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer
into thick glasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under
the counter. Beer was the only drink you could get in prole
pubs. The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in
practice they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of
darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar
had begun talking about lottery tickets. Winston's presence
was forgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under
the window where he and the old man could talk without
fear of being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but at
any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had
made sure of as soon as he came in.

"E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man
as he settled down behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It



1984



don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It starts my bladder
running. Let alone the price. '

'You must have seen great changes since you were a young
man,' said Winston tentatively.

The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board
to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as
though it were in the bar-room that he expected the chang-
es to have occurred.

"The beer was better,' he said finally. 'And cheaper! When
I was a young man, mild beer — wallop we used to call it —
was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course. '

'Which war was that? ' said Winston.

'It's all wars,' said the old man vaguely. He took up his
glass, and his shoulders straightened again. "Ere's wishing
you the very best of 'ealth! '

In his lean throat the sharp -pointed Adam's apple made
a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer
vanished. Winston went to the bar and came back with two
more half-litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten
his prejudice against drinking a full litre.

'You are very much older than I am,' said Winston. 'You
must have been a grown man before I was born. You can
remember what it was like in the old days, before the Revo-
lution. People of my age don't really know anything about
those times. We can only read about them in books, and
what it says in the books may not be true. I should like your
opinion on that. The history books say that life before the
Revolution was completely different from what it is now.
There was the most terrible oppression, injustice, poverty

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worse than anything we can imagine. Here in London, the
great mass of the people never had enough to eat from birth
to death. Half of them hadn't even boots on their feet. They
worked twelve hours a day, they left school at nine, they
slept ten in a room. And at the same time there were a very
few people, only a few thousands — the capitalists, they were
called — who were rich and powerful. They owned every-
thing that there was to own. They lived in great gorgeous
houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor-cars
and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore
top hats '

The old man brightened suddenly.

'Top 'ats! ' he said. 'Funny you should mention 'em. The
same thing come into my 'ead only yesterday, I dono why. I
was jest thinking, I ain't seen a top 'at in years. Gorn right
out, they 'ave. The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-
law's funeral. And that was — well, I couldn't give you the
date, but it must 'a been fifty years ago. Of course it was only
'ired for the occasion, you understand. '

'It isn't very important about the top hats,' said Winston
patiently. 'The point is, these capitalists — they and a few
lawyers and priests and so forth who lived on them — were
the lords of the earth. Everything existed for their benefit.
You — the ordinary people, the workers — were their slaves.
They could do what they liked with you. They could ship
you off to Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your
daughters if they chose. They could order you to be flogged
with something called a cat-o'-nine tails. You had to take
your cap off when you passed them. Every capitalist went



1984



about with a gang of lackeys who '

The old man brightened again.

'Lackeys! ' he said. 'Now there's a word I ain't 'eard since
ever so long. Lackeys! That reg'lar takes me back, that does.
I recollect oh, donkey's years ago — I used to sometimes go
to 'Yde Park of a Sunday afternoon to 'ear the blokes making
speeches. Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews, Indi-
ans — all sorts there was. And there was one bloke — well, I
couldn't give you 'is name, but a real powerful speaker 'e
was. 'E didn't 'alf give it 'em! 'Lackeys! ' 'e says, 'lackeys of
the bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class! ' Parasites —
that was another of them. And 'yenas — 'e definitely called
'em 'yenas. Of course 'e was referring to the Labour Party,
you understand. '

Winston had the feeling that they were talking at cross-
purposes.

'What I really wanted to know was this,' he said. 'Do you
feel that you have more freedom now than you had in those
days? Are you treated more like a human being? In the old
days, the rich people, the people at the top '

'The 'Ouse of Lords,' put in the old man reminiscently

'The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is,
were these people able to treat you as an inferior, simply
because they were rich and you were poor? Is it a fact, for
instance, that you had to call them 'Sir' and take off your
cap when you passed them? '

The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off
about a quarter of his beer before answering.

'Yes,' he said. "They liked you to touch your cap to 'em.



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It showed respect, like. I didn't agree with it, myself, but I
done it often enough. Had to, as you might say'

'And was it usual — I'm only quoting what I've read in his-
tory books — was it usual for these people and their servants
to push you off the pavement into the gutter? '

'One of 'em pushed me once,' said the old man. 'I recol-
lect it as if it was yesterday. It was Boat Race night — terribly
rowdy they used to get on Boat Race night — and I bumps
into a young bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue. Quite a gent,
'e was — dress shirt, top 'at, black overcoat. 'E was kind of
zig-zagging across the pavement, and I bumps into 'im acci-
dental-like. 'E says, 'Why can't you look where you're going? '
'e says. I say, 'Ju think you've bought the bleeding pavement? '
'E says, 'I'll twist your bloody 'ead off if you get fresh with
me. ' I says, 'You're drunk. I'll give you in charge in 'alf a
minute,' I says. An' if you'll believe me, 'e puts 'is 'and on my
chest and gives me a shove as pretty near sent me under the
wheels of a bus. Well, I was young in them days, and I was
going to 'ave fetched 'im one, only '

A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old
man's memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details.
One could question him all day without getting any real
information. The party histories might still be true, after a
fashion: they might even be completely true. He made a last
attempt.

'Perhaps I have not made myself clear,' he said. 'What I'm
trying to say is this. You have been alive a very long time;
you lived half your life before the Revolution. In 1925, for
instance, you were already grown up. Would you say from



1984



what you can remember, that life in 1925 was better than it
is now, or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to
live then or now? '

The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He
finished up his beer, more slowly than before. When he
spoke it was with a tolerant philosophical air, as though the
beer had mellowed him.

'I know what you expect me to say' he said. 'You expect
me to say as I'd sooner be young again. Most people'd say
they'd sooner be young, if you arst' 'em. You got your 'ealth
and strength when you're young. When you get to my time
of life you ain't never well. I suffer something wicked from
my feet, and my bladder's jest terrible. Six and seven times
a night it 'as me out of bed. On the other 'and, there's great
advantages in being a old man. You ain't got the same wor-
ries. No truck with women, and that's a great thing. I ain't
'ad a woman for near on thirty year, if you'd credit it. Nor
wanted to, what's more. '

Winston sat back against the window-sill. It was no use
going on. He was about to buy some more beer when the old
man suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly into the stink-
ing urinal at the side of the room. The extra half-litre was
already working on him. Winston sat for a minute or two
gazing at his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet
carried him out into the street again. Within twenty years
at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question,
'Was life better before the Revolution than it is now? ' would
have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect
it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered sur-

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vivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing
one age with another. They remembered a million useless
things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicy-
cle pump, the expression on a long- dead sister's face, the
swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but
all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision.
They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not
large ones. And when memory failed and written records
were falsified — when that happened, the claim of the Party
to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be
accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could
exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly.
He halted and looked up. He was in a narrow street, with a
few dark little shops, interspersed among dwelling-houses.