It would have been
inconceivably
dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it.
Orwell - 1984
It was partly the unusual ge-
ography of the room that had suggested to him the thing
that he was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had
1984
just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful
book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was
of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least for-
ty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was
much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of
a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town
(just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been
stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess
it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary
shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the
rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things,
such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible
to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance
up and down the street and then had slipped inside and
bought the book for two dollars fifty At the time he was not
conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had
carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing
written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary.
This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no
longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain
that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-
five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into
the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen
was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures,
and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty,
simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper
deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being
scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to
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writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usu-
al to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of
course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the
pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A trem-
or had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the
decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had de-
scended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any
certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that
date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine,
and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within
a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he
writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind
hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page,
and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak
word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of
what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you
communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossi-
ble. Either the future would resemble the present, in which
case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from
it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The
telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It
was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the pow-
1984
er of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it
was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past
he had been making ready for this moment, and it had nev-
er crossed his mind that anything would be needed except
courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to
do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless mono-
logue that had been running inside his head, literally for
years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had
dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching
unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it
always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He
was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page
in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the
blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the
gin-
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imper-
fectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but
childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shed-
ding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One
very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed
somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused
by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with
a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along
in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the
helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea
round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though
the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 11
when he sank, then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a
helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman
might have been a Jewess sitting up in the bow with a little
boy about three years old in her arms, little boy screaming
with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he
was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting
her arms round him and comforting him although she was
blue with fright herself all the time covering him up as much
as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets
off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among
them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood, then
there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up
right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose
must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from
the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the
house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they
didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it
aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned
her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her
nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffer-
ing from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour
out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that
while he was doing so a totally different memory had clar-
ified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt
equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because
of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come
1984
home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if any-
thing so nebulous could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records De-
partment, where Winston worked, they were dragging the
chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the cen-
tre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place
in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew
by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into
the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in
the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that
she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably — since
he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a
spanner — she had some mechanical job on one of the nov-
el-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about
twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift,
athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the
Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round
the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the
shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the
very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was
because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths
and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which
she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all
women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was al-
ways the women, and above all the young ones, who were
the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers
of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unortho-
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doxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of
being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed
in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which
seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled
him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind
that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it
was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a pe-
culiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as
hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member
of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important
and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature.
A momentary hush passed over the group of people round
the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party
member approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with
a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of
his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of man-
ner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose
which was curiously disarming — in some indefinable way,
curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had
still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eigh-
teenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston
had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many
years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because
he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane
manner and his prize-fighter's physique. Much more it was
because of a secretly held belief— or perhaps not even a be-
lief, merely a hope — that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was
not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly.
1984
And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was
written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate
he had the appearance of being a person that you could
talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get
him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to
verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At
this moment O'Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it
was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in
the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was
over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple
of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked
in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl
with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some
monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the
big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set
one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's
neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of
the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses
here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired
woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Gold-
stein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of
the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big
Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolu-
tionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had
mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of
the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was
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none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He
was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's pu-
rity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries,
acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out
of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and
hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the
sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps
even — so it was occasionally rumoured — in some hiding-
place in Oceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never
see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emo-
tions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of
white hair and a small goatee beard — a clever face, and yet
somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile sil-
liness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair
of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep,
and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was
delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines
of the Party — an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a
child should have been able to see through it, and yet just
plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that
other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken
in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing
the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the imme-
diate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating
freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of as-
sembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that
the revolution had been betrayed — and all this in rapid
polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the ha-
1984
bitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained
Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any
Party member would normally use in real life. And all the
while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which
Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the
Eurasian army — row after row of solid-looking men with
expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface
of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exact-
ly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots
formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncon-
trollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half
the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on
the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army
behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or
even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger au-
tomatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than
either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war
with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the
other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein
was hated and despised by everybody, although every day
and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen,
in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed,
ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rub-
bish that they were — in spite of all this, his influence never
seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting
to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and
saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked
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by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast
shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators
dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood,
its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered
stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies,
of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated
clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title.
People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one
knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither
the Brotherhood nor THE BOOK was a subject that any or-
dinary Party member would mention if there was a way of
avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People
were leaping up and down in their places and shouting
at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the mad-
dening bleating voice that came from the screen. The
little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and
her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed
fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting
very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a
wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun cry-
ing out 'Swine! Swine! Swine! ' and suddenly she picked up
a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It
struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice contin-
ued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he
was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violent-
ly against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about
the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act
18 1984
a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid
joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always
unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness,
a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-
hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people
like an electric current, turning one even against one's will
into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that
one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could
be switched from one object to another like the flame of a
blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not
turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such
moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic
on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world
of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the
people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed
to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of
Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed
to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like
a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite
of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung
about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchant-
er, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the
structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's ha-
tred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the
sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head
away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to
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the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucina-
tions flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death
with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake
and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would
ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Bet-
ter than before, moreover, he realized WHY it was that he
hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty
and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and
would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist,
which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there
was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chas-
tity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had
become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face
changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep -face melted into
the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing,
huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seem-
ing to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some
of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards
in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh
of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the
face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full
of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost
filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was
saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the
sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distin-
guishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact
of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away
again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out
1984
in bold capitals:
WARE PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for sever-
al seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had
made on everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off im-
mediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself
forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a
tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour! ' she ex-
tended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her
face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a
prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a
deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-BL. B-B! ' — over and over
again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B'
and the second — a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow
curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed
to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-
toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it
up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of
overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the
wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was
an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of conscious-
ness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston's entrails seemed
to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help
sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chant-
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 21
ing of 'B-BL. B-B! ' always filled him with horror. Of course
he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise.
To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what
everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But
there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the
expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him.
And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing
happened — if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood
up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of
resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture.
But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met,
and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew — yes, he
KNEW! — that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as him-
self. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though
their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing
from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am with you,'
O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what
you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your ha-
tred, your disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side! ' And
then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face
was as inscrutable as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had
happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they
did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that oth-
ers besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps
the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true
after all — perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was
impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions
1984
and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not
simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not.
There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might
mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conver-
sation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls — once, even, when
two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which
had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It
was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything.
He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O'Brien
again. The idea of following up their momentary contact
hardly crossed his mind.
It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it.
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivo-
cal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that
was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which
one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out
a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that
while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as
though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same
cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid
voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat
capitals— DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH
BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN
WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was ab-
surd, since the writing of those particular words was not
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 23
more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary,
but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled
pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was
useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER,
or whether he refrained from writing it, made no differ-
ence. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did
not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police
would get him just the same. He had committed — would
still have committed, even if he had never set pen to pa-
per — the essential crime that contained all others in itself.
Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing
that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge success-
fully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they
were bound to get you.
It was always at night — the arrests invariably happened
at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shak-
ing your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of
hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there
was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disap-
peared, always during the night. Your name was removed
from the registers, every record of everything you had ever
done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied
and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VA-
PORIZED was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He be-
gan writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the
24 1984
neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you
in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and
laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently.
There was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that
whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no,
the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be
to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face,
from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and
moved heavily towards the door.
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Chapter 2
As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that
he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH
BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big
enough to be legible across the room. It was an inconceiv-
ably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his
panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by
shutting the book while the ink was wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly
a warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colourless,
crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face,
was standing outside.
'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of
voice, 'I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you
could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It's
got blocked up and '
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same
floor. ('Mrs' was a word somewhat discountenanced by the
Party — you were supposed to call everyone 'comrade' —
but with some women one used it instinctively. ) She was
a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had
the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face.
Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur re-
pair jobs were an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansions
were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling
1984
to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and
walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked
whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually
running at half steam when it was not closed down alto-
gether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you
could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote com-
mittees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a
window-pane for two years.
'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs
Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy
in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on
look, as though the place had just been visited by some large
violent animal. Games impedimenta — hockey-sticks, box-
ing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned
inside out — lay all over the floor, and on the table there was
a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books. On
the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the
Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the
usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building,
but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which —
one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say
how — was the sweat of some person not present at the mo-
ment. In another room someone with a comb and a piece of
toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music
which was still issuing from the telescreen.
'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-ap-
prehensive glance at the door. 'They haven't been out today.
And of course '
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She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the mid-
dle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy
greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.
Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the
pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down,
which was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons
looked on helplessly.
'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a mo-
ment,' she said. 'He loves anything like that. He's ever so
good with his hands, Tom is. '
Parsons was Winston's fellow- employee at the Minis-
try of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing
stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms — one of those
completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom,
more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the
Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwilling-
ly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating
into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the
Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry
he was employed in some subordinate post for which in-
telligence was not required, but on the other hand he was
a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other
committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spon-
taneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary
activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride,
between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance
at the Community Centre every evening for the past four
years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of uncon-
scious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed
1984
him about wherever he went, and even remained behind
him after he had gone.
'Have you got a spanner? ' said Winston, fiddling with the
nut on the angle-joint.
'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming
invertebrate. 'I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children —
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the
comb as the children charged into the living-room. Mrs
Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the water
and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had
blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could
in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other
room.
'Up with your hands! ' yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up
from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy
automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years
younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts,
and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies.
Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an un-
easy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it was
not altogether a game.
'You're a traitor! ' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought- crimi-
nal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you,
I'll send you to the salt mines! '
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting
'Traitor! ' and 'Thought- criminal! ' the little girl imitating
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 29
her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly
frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will
soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculat-
ing ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or
kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big
enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he
was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the
children, and back again. In the better light of the living-
room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust
in the creases of her face.
"They do get so noisy' she said. 'They're disappointed
because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it
is. I'm too busy to take them, and Tom won't be back from
work in time. '
'Why can't we go and see the hanging? ' roared the boy in
his huge voice.
'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging! '
chanted the little girl, still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to
be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered.
This happened about once a month, and was a popular spec-
tacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He
took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he
had not gone six steps down the passage when something
hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was
as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun
round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back
into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
1984
'Goldstein! ' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him.
But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless
fright on the woman's greyish face.
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
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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?
ography of the room that had suggested to him the thing
that he was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had
1984
just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful
book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was
of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least for-
ty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was
much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of
a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town
(just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been
stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess
it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary
shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the
rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things,
such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible
to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance
up and down the street and then had slipped inside and
bought the book for two dollars fifty At the time he was not
conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had
carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing
written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary.
This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no
longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain
that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-
five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into
the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen
was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures,
and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty,
simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper
deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being
scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to
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writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usu-
al to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of
course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the
pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A trem-
or had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the
decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had de-
scended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any
certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that
date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine,
and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within
a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he
writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind
hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page,
and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak
word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of
what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you
communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossi-
ble. Either the future would resemble the present, in which
case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from
it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The
telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It
was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the pow-
1984
er of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it
was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past
he had been making ready for this moment, and it had nev-
er crossed his mind that anything would be needed except
courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to
do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless mono-
logue that had been running inside his head, literally for
years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had
dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching
unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it
always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He
was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page
in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the
blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the
gin-
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imper-
fectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but
childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shed-
ding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One
very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed
somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused
by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with
a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along
in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the
helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea
round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though
the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 11
when he sank, then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a
helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman
might have been a Jewess sitting up in the bow with a little
boy about three years old in her arms, little boy screaming
with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he
was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting
her arms round him and comforting him although she was
blue with fright herself all the time covering him up as much
as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets
off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among
them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood, then
there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up
right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose
must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from
the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the
house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they
didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it
aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned
her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her
nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffer-
ing from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour
out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that
while he was doing so a totally different memory had clar-
ified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt
equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because
of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come
1984
home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if any-
thing so nebulous could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records De-
partment, where Winston worked, they were dragging the
chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the cen-
tre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place
in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew
by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into
the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in
the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that
she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably — since
he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a
spanner — she had some mechanical job on one of the nov-
el-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about
twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift,
athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the
Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round
the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the
shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the
very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was
because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths
and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which
she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all
women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was al-
ways the women, and above all the young ones, who were
the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers
of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unortho-
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doxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of
being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed
in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which
seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled
him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind
that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it
was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a pe-
culiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as
hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member
of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important
and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature.
A momentary hush passed over the group of people round
the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party
member approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with
a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of
his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of man-
ner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose
which was curiously disarming — in some indefinable way,
curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had
still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eigh-
teenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston
had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many
years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because
he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane
manner and his prize-fighter's physique. Much more it was
because of a secretly held belief— or perhaps not even a be-
lief, merely a hope — that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was
not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly.
1984
And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was
written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate
he had the appearance of being a person that you could
talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get
him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to
verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At
this moment O'Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it
was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in
the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was
over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple
of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked
in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl
with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some
monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the
big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set
one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's
neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of
the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses
here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired
woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Gold-
stein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of
the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big
Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolu-
tionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had
mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of
the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was
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none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He
was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's pu-
rity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries,
acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out
of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and
hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the
sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps
even — so it was occasionally rumoured — in some hiding-
place in Oceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never
see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emo-
tions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of
white hair and a small goatee beard — a clever face, and yet
somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile sil-
liness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair
of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep,
and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was
delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines
of the Party — an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a
child should have been able to see through it, and yet just
plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that
other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken
in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing
the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the imme-
diate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating
freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of as-
sembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that
the revolution had been betrayed — and all this in rapid
polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the ha-
1984
bitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained
Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any
Party member would normally use in real life. And all the
while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which
Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the
Eurasian army — row after row of solid-looking men with
expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface
of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exact-
ly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots
formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncon-
trollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half
the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on
the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army
behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or
even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger au-
tomatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than
either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war
with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the
other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein
was hated and despised by everybody, although every day
and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen,
in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed,
ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rub-
bish that they were — in spite of all this, his influence never
seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting
to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and
saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked
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by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast
shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators
dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood,
its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered
stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies,
of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated
clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title.
People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one
knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither
the Brotherhood nor THE BOOK was a subject that any or-
dinary Party member would mention if there was a way of
avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People
were leaping up and down in their places and shouting
at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the mad-
dening bleating voice that came from the screen. The
little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and
her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed
fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting
very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a
wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun cry-
ing out 'Swine! Swine! Swine! ' and suddenly she picked up
a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It
struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice contin-
ued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he
was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violent-
ly against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about
the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act
18 1984
a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid
joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always
unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness,
a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-
hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people
like an electric current, turning one even against one's will
into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that
one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could
be switched from one object to another like the flame of a
blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not
turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such
moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic
on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world
of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the
people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed
to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of
Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed
to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like
a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite
of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung
about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchant-
er, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the
structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's ha-
tred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the
sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head
away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to
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the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucina-
tions flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death
with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake
and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would
ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Bet-
ter than before, moreover, he realized WHY it was that he
hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty
and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and
would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist,
which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there
was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chas-
tity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had
become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face
changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep -face melted into
the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing,
huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seem-
ing to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some
of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards
in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh
of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the
face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full
of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost
filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was
saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the
sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distin-
guishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact
of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away
again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out
1984
in bold capitals:
WARE PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for sever-
al seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had
made on everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off im-
mediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself
forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a
tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour! ' she ex-
tended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her
face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a
prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a
deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-BL. B-B! ' — over and over
again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B'
and the second — a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow
curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed
to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-
toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it
up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of
overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the
wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was
an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of conscious-
ness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston's entrails seemed
to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help
sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chant-
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 21
ing of 'B-BL. B-B! ' always filled him with horror. Of course
he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise.
To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what
everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But
there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the
expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him.
And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing
happened — if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood
up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of
resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture.
But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met,
and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew — yes, he
KNEW! — that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as him-
self. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though
their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing
from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am with you,'
O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what
you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your ha-
tred, your disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side! ' And
then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face
was as inscrutable as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had
happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they
did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that oth-
ers besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps
the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true
after all — perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was
impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions
1984
and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not
simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not.
There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might
mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conver-
sation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls — once, even, when
two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which
had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It
was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything.
He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O'Brien
again. The idea of following up their momentary contact
hardly crossed his mind.
It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it.
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivo-
cal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that
was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which
one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out
a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that
while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as
though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same
cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid
voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat
capitals— DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH
BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN
WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was ab-
surd, since the writing of those particular words was not
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 23
more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary,
but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled
pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was
useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER,
or whether he refrained from writing it, made no differ-
ence. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did
not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police
would get him just the same. He had committed — would
still have committed, even if he had never set pen to pa-
per — the essential crime that contained all others in itself.
Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing
that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge success-
fully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they
were bound to get you.
It was always at night — the arrests invariably happened
at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shak-
ing your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of
hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there
was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disap-
peared, always during the night. Your name was removed
from the registers, every record of everything you had ever
done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied
and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VA-
PORIZED was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He be-
gan writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the
24 1984
neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you
in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and
laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently.
There was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that
whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no,
the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be
to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face,
from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and
moved heavily towards the door.
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Chapter 2
As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that
he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH
BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big
enough to be legible across the room. It was an inconceiv-
ably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his
panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by
shutting the book while the ink was wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly
a warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colourless,
crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face,
was standing outside.
'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of
voice, 'I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you
could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It's
got blocked up and '
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same
floor. ('Mrs' was a word somewhat discountenanced by the
Party — you were supposed to call everyone 'comrade' —
but with some women one used it instinctively. ) She was
a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had
the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face.
Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur re-
pair jobs were an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansions
were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling
1984
to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and
walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked
whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually
running at half steam when it was not closed down alto-
gether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you
could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote com-
mittees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a
window-pane for two years.
'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs
Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy
in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on
look, as though the place had just been visited by some large
violent animal. Games impedimenta — hockey-sticks, box-
ing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned
inside out — lay all over the floor, and on the table there was
a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books. On
the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the
Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the
usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building,
but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which —
one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say
how — was the sweat of some person not present at the mo-
ment. In another room someone with a comb and a piece of
toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music
which was still issuing from the telescreen.
'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-ap-
prehensive glance at the door. 'They haven't been out today.
And of course '
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She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the mid-
dle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy
greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.
Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the
pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down,
which was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons
looked on helplessly.
'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a mo-
ment,' she said. 'He loves anything like that. He's ever so
good with his hands, Tom is. '
Parsons was Winston's fellow- employee at the Minis-
try of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing
stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms — one of those
completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom,
more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the
Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwilling-
ly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating
into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the
Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry
he was employed in some subordinate post for which in-
telligence was not required, but on the other hand he was
a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other
committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spon-
taneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary
activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride,
between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance
at the Community Centre every evening for the past four
years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of uncon-
scious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed
1984
him about wherever he went, and even remained behind
him after he had gone.
'Have you got a spanner? ' said Winston, fiddling with the
nut on the angle-joint.
'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming
invertebrate. 'I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children —
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the
comb as the children charged into the living-room. Mrs
Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the water
and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had
blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could
in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other
room.
'Up with your hands! ' yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up
from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy
automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years
younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts,
and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies.
Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an un-
easy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it was
not altogether a game.
'You're a traitor! ' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought- crimi-
nal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you,
I'll send you to the salt mines! '
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting
'Traitor! ' and 'Thought- criminal! ' the little girl imitating
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 29
her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly
frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will
soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculat-
ing ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or
kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big
enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he
was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the
children, and back again. In the better light of the living-
room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust
in the creases of her face.
"They do get so noisy' she said. 'They're disappointed
because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it
is. I'm too busy to take them, and Tom won't be back from
work in time. '
'Why can't we go and see the hanging? ' roared the boy in
his huge voice.
'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging! '
chanted the little girl, still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to
be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered.
This happened about once a month, and was a popular spec-
tacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He
took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he
had not gone six steps down the passage when something
hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was
as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun
round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back
into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
1984
'Goldstein! ' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him.
But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless
fright on the woman's greyish face.
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
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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?
