No More Learning

Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen
and sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck. The
music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped
military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish,
a description of the armaments of the new Floating For-
tress which had just been anchored between Iceland and
the Faroe Islands.

With those children, he thought, that wretched wom-
an must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and
they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of
unorthodoxy Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.
What was worst of all was that by means of such organi-
zations as the Spies they were systematically turned into
ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them
no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the
Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and every-
thing connected with it. The songs, the processions, the
banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the
yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother — it was all a
sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned
outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreign-
ers, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost
normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own
children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed
in which 'The Times' did not carry a paragraph describing
how some eavesdropping little sneak — 'child hero' was the



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



phrase generally used — had overheard some compromising
remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.

The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked
up his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find
something more to write in the diary. Suddenly he began
thinking of O'Brien again.

Years ago — how long was it? Seven years it must be — he
had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark
room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as
he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where there is no
darkness. ' It was said very quietly, almost casually — a state-
ment, not a command. He had walked on without pausing.
What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, the
words had not made much impression on him. It was only
later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on signifi-
cance. He could not now remember whether it was before
or after having the dream that he had seen O'Brien for the
first time, nor could he remember when he had first identi-
fied the voice as O'Brien's. But at any rate the identification
existed. It was O'Brien who had spoken to him out of the
dark.

Winston had never been able to feel sure — even after this
morning's flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure
whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even
seem to matter greatly. There was a link of understanding
between them, more important than affection or partisan-
ship. 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,'
he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that
in some way or another it would come true.



1984



The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call,
clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice
continued raspingly:

'Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this
moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South
India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say
that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war
within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash —



Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough,
following on a gory description of the annihilation of a
Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and pris-
oners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the
chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to
twenty.

Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving
a deflated feeling. The telescreen — perhaps to celebrate the
victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate —
crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thee'. You were supposed to
stand to attention. However, in his present position he was
invisible.

'Oceania, 'tis for thee' gave way to lighter music. Win-
ston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the
telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far
away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating
roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on
London at present.

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 33



Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to
and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and van-
ished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak,
doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though
he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in
a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He
was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
What certainty had he that a single human creature now
living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the
dominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER? Like
an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Minis-
try of Truth came back to him:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There,
too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed,
and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Broth-
er. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on
stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and
on the wrappings of a cigarette packet — everywhere. Al-
ways the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you.
Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors,
in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own ex-
cept the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of
the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on



1984



them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart
quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too
strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs
would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom he
was writing the diary. For the future, for the past — for an
age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay
not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced
to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police
would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of
existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal
to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anony-
mous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically
survive?

The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten min-
utes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty

Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put
new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth
that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it,
in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was
not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you
carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table,
dipped his pen, and wrote:

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is
free, when men are different from one another and do not
live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done
cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the
age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of
doublethink — greetings!

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 35



He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that
it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate
his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The conse-
quences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became
important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his
right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail
that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry
(a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Depart-
ment) might start wondering why he had been writing
during the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fash-
ioned pen, WHAT he had been writing — and then drop a
hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom
and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-
brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was
therefore well adapted for this purpose.

He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless
to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether
or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across
the page- ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he
picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and depos-
ited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be
shaken off if the book was moved.



36 1984



Chapter 3



Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He must, he thought, have been ten or elev-
en years old when his mother had disappeared. She was
a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow move-
ments and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered
more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark
clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles
of his father's shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of
them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the
first great purges of the fifties.

At this moment his mother was sitting in some place
deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms.
He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble
baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them
were looking up at him. They were down in some subter-
ranean place — the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very
deep grave — but it was a place which, already far below him,
was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of
a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening
water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see
him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down,
down into the green waters which in another moment must
hide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and
air while they were being sucked down to death, and they



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



were down there because he was up here. He knew it and
they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces.
There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts,
only the knowledge that they must die in order that he
might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoid-
able order of things.

He could not remember what had happened, but he knew
in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and
his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those
dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream
scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and
in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still
seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that
now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death,
nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a
way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, be-
longed to the ancient time, to a time when there was still
privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a
family stood by one another without needing to know the
reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she
had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish
to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not re-
member how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of
loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he
saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred,
and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex
sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his
mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green
water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.

38 1984



Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a
summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded
the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred
so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain
whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his wak-
ing thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old,
rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it
and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the
opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were
swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring
in dense masses like women's hair. Somewhere near at hand,
though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream
where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow
trees.

The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across
the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off
her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body
was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, in-
deed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that
instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had
thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness
it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system
of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the
Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a sin-
gle splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture
belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the
word 'Shakespeare' on his lips.

The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle
which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 39



was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers.
Winston wrenched his body out of bed — naked, for a mem-
ber of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons
annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600 — and seized a din-
gy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair.
The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next
moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which
nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied
his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing
again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps.
His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the
varicose ulcer had started itching.

'Thirty to forty group! ' yapped a piercing female voice.
'Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to
forties! '

Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen,
upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but
muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already ap-
peared.

'Arms bending and stretching! ' she rapped out. 'Take
your time by me. ONE, two, three, four! ONE, two, three,
four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! ONE, two,
three four! ONE two, three, four! . . . '

The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of
Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the
rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat.
As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing
on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was consid-
ered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling



1984



to think his way backward into the dim period of his early
childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late
fifties everything faded. When there were no external re-
cords that you could refer to, even the outline of your own
life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which
had quite probably not happened, you remembered the
detail of incidents without being able to recapture their at-
mosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you
could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.
Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map,
had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been
so called in those days: it had been called England or Brit-
ain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been
called London.

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his
country had not been at war, but it was evident that there
had been a fairly long interval of peace during his child-
hood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid
which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was
the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester.
He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember
his father's hand clutching his own as they hurried down,
down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and
round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which
finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and
they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy
way, was following a long way behind them. She was car-
rying his baby sister — or perhaps it was only a bundle of
blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into
a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube
station.

There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor,
and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on
metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother
and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near
them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by
side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and
a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his
face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He
reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place
of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling
from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he
was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and
unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some
terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and
could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed
to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old
man loved — a little granddaughter, perhaps — had been
killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:

'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I?
That's what comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We
didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers'

But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted
Winston could not now remember.

Since about that time, war had been literally continu-



1984



ous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the
same war. For several months during his childhood there
had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of
which he remembered vividly But to trace out the history
of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any
given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since
no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention
of any other alignment than the existing one. At this mo-
ment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at
war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no pub-
lic or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three
powers had at any time been grouped along different lines.
Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since
Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with
Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge
which he happened to possess because his memory was not
satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of part-
ners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia:
therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The
enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and
it followed that any past or future agreement with him was
impossible.

The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thou-
sandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward
(with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from
the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the
back muscles) — the frightening thing was that it might all
be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and
say of this or that event, IT NEVER HAPPENED— that,



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had
been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years
ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own
consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed —
if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into
history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the
Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past. ' And yet the past, though of its nature al-
terable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was
true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All
that was needed was an unending series of victories over
your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in New-
speak, 'doublethink'.

'Stand easy! ' barked the instructress, a little more genial-

iy-

Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled
his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrin-
thine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to
be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling care-
fully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions
which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory
and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic,
to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe
that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the
guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary
to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the



1984



moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget
it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the pro-
cess itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to
induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become
unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the
use of doublethink.

The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And
now let's see which of us can touch our toes! ' she said en-
thusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades.
ONE-two! ONE-two! . . . '

Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains
all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by
bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant qual-
ity went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had
not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For
how could you establish even the most obvious fact when
there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried
to remember in what year he had first heard mention of
Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in
the sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party
histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and
guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His
exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until
already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties
and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylin-
drical hats still rode through the streets of London in great
gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides.
There was no knowing how much of this legend was true

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 45



and how much invented. Winston could not even remem-
ber at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He
did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before
1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form — 'Eng-
lish Socialism', that is to say — it had been current earlier.
Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could
put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example,
as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party
had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since
his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There
was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had
held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the
falsification of an historical fact. And on that occasion

'Smith! ' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen.
'6079 Smith W. ! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do
better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! THAT'S
better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and
watch me. '

A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's
body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Nev-
er show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker
of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while
the instructress raised her arms above her head and — one
could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and
efficiency — bent over and tucked the first joint of her fin-
gers under her toes.

'THERE, comrades! THAT'S how I want to see you do-
ing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four
children. Now look. ' She bent over again. 'You see MY

46 1984



knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she add-
ed as she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty- five
is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't all have
the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can
all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And
the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what THEY
have to put up with. Now try again. That's better, comrade,
that's MUCH better,' she added encouragingly as Winston,
with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with
knees unbent, for the first time in several years.



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



Chapter 4



With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the
nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from
uttering when his day's work started, Winston pulled the
speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece,
and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped
together four small cylinders of paper which had already
flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side
of his desk.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To
the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for writ-
ten messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in
the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large
oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the
disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or
tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in ev-
ery room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some
reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one
knew that any document was due for destruction, or even
when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an
automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole
and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a
current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were
hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had



1984



unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines,
in the abbreviated jargon — not actually Newspeak, but con-
sisting largely of Newspeak words — which was used in the
Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:

times 17. 3. 84 bb speech malreported africa rectify

times 19. 12. 83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify

current issue

times 14. 2. 84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

times 3. 12. 83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the
fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job
and had better be dealt with last. The other three were rou-
tine matters, though the second one would probably mean
some tedious wading through lists of figures.

Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and
called for the appropriate issues of 'The Times', which slid
out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay.
The messages he had received referred to articles or news
items which for one reason or another it was thought neces-
sary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For
example, it appeared from 'The Times' of the seventeenth
of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous
day, had predicted that the South Indian front would re-
main quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 49



launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian
Higher Command had launched its offensive in South In-
dia and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary
to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a
way as to make him predict the thing that had actually hap-
pened. Or again, "The Times' of the nineteenth of December
had published the official forecasts of the output of various
classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983,
which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year
Plan. Today's issue contained a statement of the actual out-
put, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every
instance grossly wrong. Winston's job was to rectify the
original figures by making them agree with the later ones.
As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error
which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a
time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a
promise (a 'categorical pledge' were the official words) that
there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during
1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration
was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end
of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute
for the original promise a warning that it would probably
be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages,
he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate
copy of "The Times' and pushed them into the pneumatic
tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possi-
ble unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and
any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into



1984



the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the
pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did
know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which
happened to be necessary in any particular number of 'The
Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would
be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected
copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of con-
tinuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but
to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films,
sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of lit-
erature or documentation which might conceivably hold
any political or ideological significance. Day by day and
almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.
In this way every prediction made by the Party could be
shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor
was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which
conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to
remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped
clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In
no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done,
to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest
section of the Records Department, far larger than the one
on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons
whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of
books, newspapers, and other documents which had been
superseded and were due for destruction. A number of 'The
Times' which might, because of changes in political align-
ment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing
its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it.
Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again,
and were invariably reissued without any admission that
any alteration had been made. Even the written instruc-
tions which Winston received, and which he invariably got
rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or
implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always
the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquota-
tions which it was necessary to put right in the interests of
accuracy.

But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry
of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the
substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of
the material that you were dealing with had no connexion
with anything in the real world, not even the kind of con-
nexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just
as much a fantasy in their original version as in their recti-
fied version. A great deal of the time you were expected to
make them up out of your head. For example, the Minis-
try of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots
for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was
given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting
the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions,
so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been
overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no near-
er the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions.
Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still,
nobody knew how many had been produced, much less



1984



cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical
numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps
half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was
with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything
faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the
date of the year had become uncertain.

Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding
cubicle on the other side a small, precise-looking, dark-
chinned man named Tillotson was working steadily away,
with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very
close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He had the air of
trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself
and the telescreen. He looked up, and his spectacles darted
a hostile flash in Winston's direction.

Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what
work he was employed on. People in the Records Depart-
ment did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long,
windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its end-
less rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into
speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Win-
ston did not even know by name, though he daily saw them
hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the
Two Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next to him
the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, sim-
ply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names
of people who had been vaporized and were therefore con-
sidered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in
this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple
of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffec-



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



tual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy
ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and
metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions — defin-
itive texts, they were called — of poems which had become
ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another
were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with
its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a
single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records
Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms
of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.
There were the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors,
their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped
studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-
programmes section with its engineers, its producers, and
its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitat-
ing voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose
job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals
which were due for recall. There were the vast repositories
where the corrected documents were stored, and the hid-
den furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And
somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the di-
recting brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid
down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this
fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified,
and the other rubbed out of existence.

And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a
single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job
was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens
of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen



1984



programmes, plays, novels — with every conceivable kind of
information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to
a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from
a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the
Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of
the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower
level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole
chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian lit-
erature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here
were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost
nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational
five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimen-
tal songs which were composed entirely by mechanical
means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a ver-
sificator. There was even a whole sub-section — Pornosec, it
was called in Newspeak — engaged in producing the lowest
kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets
and which no Party member, other than those who worked
on it, was permitted to look at.

Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while
Winston was working, but they were simple matters, and
he had disposed of them before the Two Minutes Hate in-
terrupted him. When the Hate was over he returned to
his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf,
pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles,
and settled down to his main job of the morning.

Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most
of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also
jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



them as in the depths of a mathematical problem — delicate
pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you
except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your
estimate of what the Party wanted you to say Winston was
good at this kind of thing. On occasion he had even been
entrusted with the rectification of "The Times' leading arti-
cles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled
the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:

times 3. 12. 83 reportingbb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be ren-
dered:

The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in 'The Times'
of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes
references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and
submit your draft to higher authority before filing.

Winston read through the offending article. Big Broth-
er's Order for the Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted
to praising the work of an organization known as FFCC,
which supplied cigarettes and other comforts to the sailors
in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a
prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out
for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of
Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.

Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved



1984



with no reasons given. One could assume that Withers and
his associates were now in disgrace, but there had been no
report of the matter in the Press or on the telescreen. That
was to be expected, since it was unusual for political offend-
ers to be put on trial or even publicly denounced. The great
purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of
traitors and thought- criminals who made abject confession
of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special
show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of
years. More commonly, people who had incurred the dis-
pleasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never
heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what
had happened to them. In some cases they might not even
be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally known to Win-
ston, not counting his parents, had disappeared at one time
or another.

Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip. In the
cubicle across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouch-
ing secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his head for
a moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston won-
dered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged on the same
job as himself. It was perfectly possible. So tricky a piece of
work would never be entrusted to a single person: on the
other hand, to turn it over to a committee would be to ad-
mit openly that an act of fabrication was taking place. Very
likely as many as a dozen people were now working away
on rival versions of what Big Brother had actually said. And
presently some master brain in the Inner Party would se-
lect this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be
required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the per-
manent records and become truth.

Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced.
Perhaps it was for corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big
Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordi-
nate. Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had been
suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps — what was
likeliest of all — the thing had simply happened because
purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the me-
chanics of government. The only real clue lay in the words
'refs unpersons', which indicated that Withers was already
dead. You could not invariably assume this to be the case
when people were arrested.