No More Learning

For when it has
been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment,
then this new version IS the past, and no different past can
ever have existed. This holds good even when, as often hap-
pens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition
several times in the course of a year. At all times the Party
is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute
can never have been different from what it is now. It will
be seen that the control of the past depends above all on
the training of memory. To make sure that all written re-
cords agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely
a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to REMEMBER
that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is
necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with
written records, then it is necessary to FORGET that one

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has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any
other mental technique. It is learned by the majority of Par-
ty members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well
as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 'reality
control'. In Newspeak it is called DOUBLETHINK, though
DOUBLETHINK comprises much else as well.

DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two
contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and ac-
cepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which
direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows
that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of
DOUBLETHINK he also satisfies himself that reality is not
violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not
be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be
unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and
hence of guilt. DOUBLETHINK lies at the very heart of In-
gsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious
deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes
with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genu-
inely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become
inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again,
to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed,
to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while
to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is
indispensably necessary. Even in using the word DOUBLE-
THINK it is necessary to exercise DOUBLETHINK. For
by using the word one admits that one is tampering with
reality; by a fresh act of DOUBLETHINK one erases this
knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one



1984



leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of DOU-
BLETHINK that the Party has been able — and may, for all
we know, continue to be able for thousands of years — to ar-
rest the course of history.

All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because
they ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became
stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to chang-
ing circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became
liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should
have used force, and once again were overthrown. They fell,
that is to say, either through consciousness or through un-
consciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have
produced a system of thought in which both conditions can
exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis
could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one
is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dis-
locate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to
combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the Power to
learn from past mistakes.

It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of
DOUBLETHINK are those who invented DOUBLETHINK
and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In
our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is
happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the
world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the
greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane. One
clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increas-
es in intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose
attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the sub-



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ject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the
war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and
fro over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is win-
ning is a matter of complete indifference to them. They are
aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they
will be doing the same work as before for new masters who
treat them in the same manner as the old ones. The slightly
more favoured workers whom we call 'the proles' are only
intermittently conscious of the war. When it is necessary
they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but
when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for
long periods that the war is happening. It is in the ranks of
the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war
enthusiasm is found. World- conquest is believed in most
firmly by those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar
linking-together of opposites — knowledge with ignorance,
cynicism with fanaticism — is one of the chief distinguish-
ing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds
with contradictions even when there is no practical reason
for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle
for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it
chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a
contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries
past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at
one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for
that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of
the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct
appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of
the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort



1984



of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The
Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of
Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the
Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions
are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypoc-
risy; they are deliberate exercises in DOUBLETHINK. For
it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be
retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cy-
cle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted — if
the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places
permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must
be controlled insanity.

But there is one question which until this moment we
have almost ignored. It is; WHY should human equality be
averted? Supposing that the mechanics of the process have
been rightly described, what is the motive for this huge,
accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular
moment of time?

Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen, the
mystique of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, de-
pends upon DOUBLETHINK But deeper than this lies the
original motive, the never- questioned instinct that first led
to the seizure of power and brought DOUBLETHINK, the
Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other nec-
essary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive
really consists. . .

Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware
of a new sound. It seemed to him that Julia had been very
still for some time past. She was lying on her side, na-



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ked from the waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed on
her hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Her
breast rose and fell slowly and regularly.

'Julia. '

No answer.

'Julia, are you awake? '

No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it care-
fully on the floor, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over
both of them.

He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret.
He understood HOW; he did not understand WHY. Chap-
ter I, like Chapter III, had not actually told him anything
that he did not know, it had merely systematized the knowl-
edge that he possessed already. But after reading it he knew
better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority,
even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was
truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth
even against the whole world, you were not mad. A yellow
beam from the sinking sun slanted in through the window
and fell across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his
face and the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him
a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything
was all right. He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not sta-
tistical,' with the feeling that this remark contained in it a
profound wisdom.

When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept
for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told
him that it was only twenty-thirty He lay dozing for a while;



1984



then the usual deep-lunged singing struck up from the yard
below:

'It was only an 'opeless fancy,

It passed like an Ipril dye,

But a look an a word an the dreams they stirred

They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye! '

The driveling song seemed to have kept its popularity.
You still heard it all over the place. It had outlived the Hate
Song. Julia woke at the sound, stretched herself luxuriously,
and got out of bed.

'I'm hungry' she said. 'Let's make some more coffee.
Damn! The stove's gone out and the water's cold. ' She picked
the stove up and shook it. 'There's no oil in it. '

'We can get some from old Charrington, I expect. '

'The funny thing is I made sure it was full. I'm going to
put my clothes on,' she added. 'It seems to have got colder. '

Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefati-
gable voice sang on:

"Ihey sye that time 'eals all things,

They sye you can always forget;

But the smiles an the tears acrorss the years

They twist my 'eart-strings yet! '

As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across
to the window. The sun must have gone down behind the
houses; it was not shining into the yard any longer. The flag-

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stones were wet as though they had just been washed, and
he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh
and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots. Tireless-
ly the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking
herself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more di-
apers, and more and yet more. He wondered whether she
took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twen-
ty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across to his side;
together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the
sturdy figure below. As he looked at the woman in her char-
acteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line,
her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him
for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before
occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up
to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened,
roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an
over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after
all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a
block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same re-
lation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why
should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

'She's beautiful,' he murmured.

'She's a metre across the hips, easily' said Julia.

'That is her style of beauty' said Winston.

He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm.
From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out of
their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one
thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from
mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman

276 1984



down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm
heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children
she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had
had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose
beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized
fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life
had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweep-
ing, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for
children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken
years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical
reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with
the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind
the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was curi-
ous to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in
Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under
the sky were also very much the same — everywhere, all over
the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just
like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held
apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the
same — people who had never learned to think but who were
storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power
that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope,
it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of THE
BOOK, he knew that that must be Goldstein's final message.
The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that
when their time came the world they constructed would not
be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the
Party? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity.
Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later



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it would happen, strength would change into consciousness.
The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you
looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their
awakening would come. And until that happened, though it
might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all
the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vital-
ity which the Party did not share and could not kill.

'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us,
that first day, at the edge of the wood? '

'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to
please himself. Not even that. He was just singing. '

The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing.
All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa
and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond
the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villag-
es of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and
Japan — everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable
figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling
from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty
loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You
were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in
that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the
body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two
make four.

'We are the dead,' he said.

'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.

'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.

They sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to have
turned into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of

278 1984



Julia's eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear
of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply,
almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.

'You are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.

'It was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.

'It was behind the picture,' said the voice. 'Remain exactly
where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered. '

It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do noth-
ing except stand gazing into one another's eyes. To run for
life, to get out of the house before it was too late — no such
thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron
voice from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had
been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture
had fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it.

'Now they can see us,' said Julia.

'Now we can see you,' said the voice. 'Stand out in the
middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands
behind your heads. Do not touch one another. '

They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he
could feel Julia's body shaking. Or perhaps it was merely
the shaking of his own. He could just stop his teeth from
chattering, but his knees were beyond his control. There
was a sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and
outside. The yard seemed to be full of men. Something was
being dragged across the stones. The woman's singing had
stopped abruptly. There was a long, rolling clang, as though
the washtub had been flung across the yard, and then a con-
fusion of angry shouts which ended in a yell of pain.

"The house is surrounded,' said Winston.



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"The house is surrounded,' said the voice.

He heard Julia snap her teeth together. 'I suppose we may
as well say good-bye,' she said.

'You may as well say good-bye,' said the voice. And then
another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which
Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck
in; 'And by the way, while we are on the subject, 'Here comes
a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop
off your head'! '

Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back.
The head of a ladder had been thrust through the window
and had burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through
the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs.
The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-
shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands.

Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he
barely moved. One thing alone mattered; to keep still, to
keep still and not give them an excuse to hit you! A man
with a smooth prize-fighter's jowl in which the mouth was
only a slit paused opposite him balancing his truncheon
meditatively between thumb and forefinger. Winston met
his eyes. The feeling of nakedness, with one's hands behind
one's head and one's face and body all exposed, was almost
unbearable. The man protruded the tip of a white tongue,
licked the place where his lips should have been, and then
passed on. There was another crash.
Someone had picked
up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to
pieces on the hearth-stone.

The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sug-



1984



ar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small,
thought Winston, how small it always was! There was a gasp
and a thump behind him, and he received a violent kick on
the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. One of the
men had smashed his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling
her up like a pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the
floor, fighting for breath. Winston dared not turn his head
even by a millimetre, but sometimes her livid, gasping face
came within the angle of his vision. Even in his terror it was
as though he could feel the pain in his own body, the deadly
pain which nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to
get back her breath. He knew what it was like; the terrible,
agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not
be suffered yet, because before all else it was necessary to
be able to breathe. Then two of the men hoisted her up by
knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the room like a
sack. Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yel-
low and contorted, with the eyes shut, and still with a smear
of rouge on either cheek; and that was the last he saw of
her.

He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts
which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninter-
esting began to flit through his mind. He wondered whether
they had got Mr Charrington. He wondered what they had
done to the woman in the yard. He noticed that he bad-
ly wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he
had done so only two or three hours ago. He noticed that
the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-
one. But the light seemed too strong. Would not the light



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be fading at twenty- one hours on an August evening? He
wondered whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the
time — had slept the clock round and thought it was twen-
ty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the
following morning. But he did not pursue the thought fur-
ther. It was not interesting.

There ws another, lighter step in the passage. Mr
Charrington came into the room. The demeanour of
the black-uniformed men suddenly became more sub-
dued. Something had also changed in Mr Charrington's
appearance. His eye fell on the fragments of the glass pa-
perweight.

'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply.

A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disap-
peared; Winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that
he had heard a few moments ago on the telescreen. Mr Char-
rington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair,
which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he was
not wearing his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp
glance, as though verifying his identity, and then paid no
more attention to him. He was still recognizable, but he was
not the same person any longer. His body had straightened,
and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone
only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete
transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy, the
wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to
have altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert,
cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty It occurred to
Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking,



1984



with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.



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Part Three



284 1984



Chapter i



He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in
the Ministry of Love, but there was no way of mak-
ing certain. He was in a high- ceilinged windowless cell with
walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps flood-
ed it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming
sound which he supposed had something to do with the
air supply. A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran
round the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end op-
posite the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden seat. There
were four telescreens, one in each wall.

There was a dull aching in his belly. It had been there
ever since they had bundled him into the closed van and
driven him away. But he was also hungry, with a gnaw-
ing, unwholesome kind of hunger. It might be twenty-four
hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did
not know, probably never would know, whether it had been
morning or evening when they arrested him. Since he was
arrested he had not been fed.

He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his
hands crossed on his knee. He had already learned to sit
still. If you made unexpected movements they yelled at you
from the telescreen. But the craving for food was growing
upon him. What he longed for above all was a piece of bread.
He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs in the

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pocket of his overalls. It was even possible — he thought this
because from time to time something seemed to tickle his
leg — that there might be a sizeable bit of crust there. In the
end the temptation to find out overcame his fear; he slipped
a hand into his pocket.

'Smith! ' yelled a voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith
W. ! Hands out of pockets in the cells! '

He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Be-
fore being brought here he had been taken to another place
which must have been an ordinary prison or a temporary
lock-up used by the patrols. He did not know how long he
had been there; some hours at any rate; with no clocks and
no daylight it was hard to gauge the time. It was a noisy, evil-
smelling place. They had put him into a cell similar to the
one he was now in, but filthily dirty and at all times crowded
by ten or fifteen people. The majority of them were common
criminals, but there were a few political prisoners among
them. He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty
bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to
take much interest in his surroundings, but still noticing
the astonishing difference in demeanour between the Party
prisoners and the others. The Party prisoners were always
silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to
care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults at the guards,
fought back fiercely when their belongings were impound-
ed, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled food
which they produced from mysterious hiding-places in their
clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when it tried
to restore order. On the other hand some of them seemed



1984



to be on good terms with the guards, called them by nick-
names, and tried to wheedle cigarettes through the spyhole
in the door. The guards, too, treated the common criminals
with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle
them roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour
camps to which most of the prisoners expected to be sent.
It was 'all right' in the camps, he gathered, so long as you
had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery,
favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was ho-
mosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol
distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given
only to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and
the murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the
dirty jobs were done by the politicals.

There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every
description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-mar-
keteers, drunks, prostitutes. Some of the drunks were so
violent that the other prisoners had to combine to sup-
press them. An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about
sixty, with great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white
hair which had come down in her struggles, was carried in,
kicking and shouting, by four guards, who had hold of her
one at each corner. They wrenched off the boots with which
she had been trying to kick them, and dumped her down
across Winston's lap, almost breaking his thigh-bones. The
woman hoisted herself upright and followed them out with
a yell of 'F bastards! ' Then, noticing that she was sit-
ting on something uneven, she slid off Winston's knees on
to the bench.

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'Beg pardon, dearie,' she said. 'I wouldn't 'a sat on you,
only the buggers put me there. They dono 'ow to treat a lady,
do they? ' She paused, patted her breast, and belched. 'Par-
don,' she said, 'I ain't meself, quite. '

She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.

"Ihass better,' she said, leaning back with closed eyes.
'Never keep it down, thass what I say. Get it up while it's
fresh on your stomach, like. '

She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and
seemed immediately to take a fancy to him. She put a vast
arm round his shoulder and drew him towards her, breath-
ing beer and vomit into his face.

"Wass your name, dearie? ' she said.

'Smith,' said Winston.

'Smith? ' said the woman. "Thass funny. My name's Smith
too. Why' she added sentimentally, T might be your moth-
er! '

She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was
about the right age and physique, and it was probable that
people changed somewhat after twenty years in a forced-la-
bour camp.

No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent
the ordinary criminals ignored the Party prisoners. "The
polITS,' they called them, with a sort of uninterested con-
tempt. The Party prisoners seemed terrified of speaking to
anybody, and above all of speaking to one another. Only
once, when two Party members, both women, were pressed
close together on the bench, he overheard amid the din of
voices a few hurriedly- whispered words; and in particular a



1984



reference to something called 'room one-oh-one', which he
did not understand.

It might be two or three hours ago that they had brought
him here. The dull pain in his belly never went away, but
sometimes it grew better and sometimes worse, and his
thoughts expanded or contracted accordingly. When it
grew worse he thought only of the pain itself, and of his de-
sire for food. When it grew better, panic took hold of him.
There were moments when he foresaw the things that would
happen to him with such actuality that his heart galloped
and his breath stopped. He felt the smash of truncheons on
his elbows and iron-shod boots on his shins; he saw himself
grovelling on the floor, screaming for mercy through bro-
ken teeth. He hardly thought of Julia. He could not fix his
mind on her. He loved her and would not betray her; but
that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of arith-
metic. He felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered
what was happening to her. He thought oftener of O'Brien,
with a flickering hope. O'Brien might know that he had
been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried to
save its members. But there was the razor blade; they would
send the razor blade if they could. There would be perhaps
five seconds before the guard could rush into the cell. The
blade would bite into him with a sort of burning coldness,
and even the fingers that held it would be cut to the bone.
Everything came back to his sick body, which shrank trem-
bling from the smallest pain. He was not certain that he
would use the razor blade even if he got the chance. It was
more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting



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another ten minutes' life even with the certainty that there
was torture at the end of it.

Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain
bricks in the walls of the cell. It should have been easy, but
he always lost count at some point or another. More often he
wondered where he was, and what time of day it was. At one
moment he felt certain that it was broad daylight outside,
and at the next equally certain that it was pitch darkness. In
this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be
turned out. It was the place with no darkness: he saw now
why O'Brien had seemed to recognize the allusion. In the
Ministry of Love there were no windows. His cell might be
at the heart of the building or against its outer wall; it might
be ten floors below ground, or thirty above it. He moved
himself mentally from place to place, and tried to deter-
mine by the feeling of his body whether he was perched
high in the air or buried deep underground.

There was a sound of marching boots outside. The steel
door opened with a clang. A young officer, a trim black-uni-
formed figure who seemed to glitter all over with polished
leather, and whose pale, straight-featured face was like a
wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway. He mo-
tioned to the guards outside to bring in the prisoner they
were leading. The poet Ampleforth shambled into the cell.
The door clanged shut again.

Ampleforth made one or two uncertain movements from
side to side, as though having some idea that there was an-
other door to go out of, and then began to wander up and
down the cell. He had not yet noticed Winston's presence.



1984



His troubled eyes were gazing at the wall about a metre
above the level of Winston's head. He was shoeless; large,
dirty toes were sticking out of the holes in his socks. He
was also several days away from a shave. A scrubby beard
covered his face to the cheekbones, giving him an air of
ruffianism that went oddly with his large weak frame and
nervous movements.

Winston roused himself a little from his lethargy. He
must speak to Ampleforth, and risk the yell from the tele-
screen. It was even conceivable that Ampleforth was the
bearer of the razor blade.

Ampleforth,' he said.

There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth
paused, mildly startled. His eyes focused themselves slowly
on Winston.

Ah, Smith! ' he said. 'You too! '

'What are you in for? '

'To tell you the truth — ' He sat down awkwardly on the
bench opposite Winston. 'There is only one offence, is there
not? ' he said.

And have you committed it? '

Apparently I have. '

He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for
a moment, as though trying to remember something.

'These things happen,' he began vaguely. 'I have been
able to recall one instance — a possible instance. It was an
indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive
edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word 'God' to
remain at the end of a line. I could not help it! ' he added al-



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most indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. 'It was
impossible to change the line. The rhyme was 'rod". Do you
realize that there are only twelve rhymes to 'rod' in the en-
tire language? For days I had racked my brains. There WAS
no other rhyme. '

The expression on his face changed. The annoyance
passed out of it and for a moment he looked almost pleased.
A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has
found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt and
scrubby hair.

'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole his-
tory of English poetry has been determined by the fact that
the English language lacks rhymes? '

No, that particular thought had never occurred to Win-
ston. Nor, in the circumstances, did it strike him as very
important or interesting.

'Do you know what time of day it is? ' he said.

Ampleforth looked startled again. 'I had hardly thought
about it. They arrested me — it could be two days ago — per-
haps three. ' His eyes flitted round the walls, as though he
half expected to find a window somewhere. 'There is no dif-
ference between night and day in this place. I do not see
how one can calculate the time.