No More Learning

Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that
bloody fool'. Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory
Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room —
a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face.
At thirty- five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck
and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish.
His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so
much so that although he was wearing the regulation over-
alls, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being
dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief
of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture
of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy fore-
arms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when
a community hike or any other physical activity gave him
an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery
'Hullo, hullo! ' and sat down at the table, giving off an in-
tense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over
his pink face. His powers of sweating were extraordinary.
At the Community Centre you could always tell when he



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had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat
handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there
was a long column of words, and was studying it with an
ink-pencil between his fingers.

'Look at him working away in the lunch hour,' said Par-
sons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that you've
got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I ex-
pect. Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm chasing you. It's
that sub you forgot to give me. '

'Which sub is that? ' said Winston, automatically feel-
ing for money. About a quarter of one's salary had to be
earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so nu-
merous that it was difficult to keep track of them.

'For Hate Week. You know — the house-by-house fund.
I'm treasurer for our block. We're making an all-out effort —
going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won't be my
fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the biggest outfit
of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me. '

Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy
notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the
neat handwriting of the illiterate.

'By the way, old boy' he said. 'I hear that little beggar of
mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him
a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told him I'd take the
catapult away if he does it again. '

'I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,'
said Winston.

'Ah, well — what I mean to say, shows the right spirit,
doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them,



1984



but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies,
and the war, of course. D'you know what that little girl of
mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out
Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her,
slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon
following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours,
right through the woods, and then, when they got into Am-
ersham, handed him over to the patrols. '

'What did they do that for? ' said Winston, somewhat tak-
en aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:

'My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent —
might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But
here's the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to
him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny
kind of shoes — said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes
like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner.
Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? '

'What happened to the man? ' said Winston.

Ah, that I couldn't say, of course. But I wouldn't be alto-
gether surprised if ' Parsons made the motion of aiming

a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.

'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from
his strip of paper.

'Of course we can't afford to take chances,' agreed Win-
ston dutifully.

'What I mean to say, there is a war on,' said Parsons.

As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call float-
ed from the telescreen just above their heads. However, it
was not the proclamation of a military victory this time, but



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merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.

'Comrades! ' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention,
comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the
battle for production! Returns now completed of the output
of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard
of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past
year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible
spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of
factories and offices and paraded through the streets with
banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new,
happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.
Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs '

The phrase 'our new, happy life' recurred several times. It
had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Par-
sons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening
with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom.
He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they
were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out
a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred
tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it
was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was
smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully hori-
zontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he
had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his
ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that
streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had
even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising
the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only
yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ra-



1984



tion was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it
possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four
hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily,
with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the
other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a fu-
rious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone
who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty
grammes. Syme, too — in some more complex way, involv-
ing doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE
in the possession of a memory?

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the tele-
screen. As compared with last year there was more food,
more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cook-
ing-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more
books, more babies — more of everything except disease,
crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute,
everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.
As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon
and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled
across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pat-
tern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of
life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted
like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged,
crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innu-
merable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed
so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent
spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy,
grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad
gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Al-



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ways in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of
protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something
that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories
of anything greatly different. In any time that he could ac-
curately remember, there had never been quite enough to
eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not
full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety,
rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to
pieces, bread dark- coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tast-
ing, cigarettes insufficient — nothing cheap and plentiful
except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse
as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was NOT the
natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the dis-
comfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the
stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the
cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to piec-
es, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel
it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral
memory that things had once been different?

He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was
ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed other-
wise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the
room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like
man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting sus-
picious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought
Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the
physical type set up by the Party as an ideal — tall muscu-
lar youths and deep -bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital,
sunburnt, carefree— existed and even predominated. Ac-

76 1984



tually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in
Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curi-
ous how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries:
little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with
short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable
faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to
flourish best under the dominion of the Party.

The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended
on another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music. Par-
sons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of
figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.

"The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a good job this
year,' he said with a knowing shake of his head. 'By the way,
Smith old boy, I suppose you haven't got any razor blades
you can let me have? '

'Not one,' said Winston. 'I've been using the same blade
for six weeks myself

'Ah, well — just thought I'd ask you, old boy'

'Sorry' said Winston.

The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily si-
lenced during the Ministry's announcement, had started up
again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly
found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair
and the dust in the creases of her face. Within two years
those children would be denouncing her to the Thought
Police. Mrs Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be
vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O'Brien would
be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be
vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice



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would never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who
scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of
Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized. And the girl
with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department — she
would never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that he
knew instinctively who would survive and who would per-
ish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was
not easy to say.

At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with
a violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly
round and was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair.
She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious
intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away
again.

The sweat started out on Winston's backbone. A horri-
ble pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at
once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why
was she watching him? Why did she keep following him
about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she
had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come
there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two
Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when
there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real
object had been to listen to him and make sure whether he
was shouting loudly enough.

His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was
not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it
was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger
of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at



1984



him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was
possible that his features had not been perfectly under con-
trol. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander
when you were in any public place or within range of a tele-
screen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous
tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to
yourself— anything that carried with it the suggestion of
abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to
wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredu-
lous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself
a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in New-
speak: FACECRIME, it was called.

The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after
all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was
coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days run-
ning. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on
the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work,
if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person
at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite
likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love
within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted.
Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in
his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.

'Did I ever tell you, old boy' he said, chuckling round the
stem of his pipe, 'about the time when those two nippers
of mine set fire to the old market-woman's skirt because
they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B. B. ?
Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of match-
es. Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But



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keen as mustard! That's a first-rate training they give them
in the Spies nowadays — better than in my day, even. What
d'you think's the latest thing they've served them out with?
Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little girl
brought one home the other night — tried it out on our sit-
ting-room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much
as with her ear to the hole. Of course it's only a toy, mind
you. Still, gives 'em the right idea, eh? '

At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle.
It was the signal to return to work. All three men sprang to
their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the re-
maining tobacco fell out of Winston's cigarette.



1984



Chapter 6



w



inston was writing in his diary:



It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a
narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. She
was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp
that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted
very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the
whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party
women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the
street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I

For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his
eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze
out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost over-
whelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the
top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick
over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window — to
do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black
out the memory that was tormenting him.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous
system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to
translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of
a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back;
a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thir-

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 81



ty-five to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief-case. They
were a few metres apart when the left side of the man's face
was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened
again just as they were passing one another: it was only a
twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter,
but obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the
time: That poor devil is done for. And what was frighten-
ing was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. The
most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There
was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see.
He drew his breath and went on writing:

/ went with her through the doorway and across a backyard
into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall,
and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She

His teeth were set on edge. He would have liked to spit.
Simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen
he thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married —
had been married, at any rate: probably he still was married,
so far as he knew his wife was not dead. He seemed to
breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitch-
en, an odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and
villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because
no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imag-
ined as doing so. Only the proles used scent. In his mind the
smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.

When he had gone with that woman it had been his first
lapse in two years or thereabouts.
Consorting with prosti-



1984



tutes was forbidden, of course, but it was one of those rules
that you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was
dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be
caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-
labour camp: not more, if you had committed no other
offence. And it was easy enough, provided that you could
avoid being caught in the act. The poorer quarters swarmed
with women who were ready to sell themselves. Some could
even be purchased for a bottle of gin, which the proles were
not supposed to drink. Tacitly the Party was even inclined
to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which
could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery did
not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless
and only involved the women of a submerged and despised
class. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between
Party members. But — though this was one of the crimes
that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed
to — it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually hap-
pening.

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and
women from forming loyalties which it might not be able
to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all
pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroti-
cism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it.
All marriages between Party members had to be approved
by a committee appointed for the purpose, and — though
the principle was never clearly stated — permission was al-
ways refused if the couple concerned gave the impression
of being physically attracted to one another. The only rec-

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 83



ognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the
service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on
as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an en-
ema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an
indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from
childhood onwards. There were even organizations such
as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete
celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten
by artificial insemination (ARTSEM, it was called in New-
speak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston
was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but some-
how it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party. The
Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be
killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why
this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And
as far as the women were concerned, the Party's efforts were
largely successful.

He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten —
nearly eleven years since they had parted. It was curious
how seldom he thought of her. For days at a time he was ca-
pable of forgetting that he had ever been married. They had
only been together for about fifteen months. The Party did
not permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in
cases where there were no children.

Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with
splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face
that one might have called noble until one discovered that
there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. Very early
in her married life he had decided — though perhaps it was



1984



only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most
people — that she had without exception the most stupid,
vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had
not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there
was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable
of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. 'The hu-
man sound-track' he nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet
he could have endured living with her if it had not been for
just one thing — sex.

As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiff-
en. To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden
image. And what was strange was that even when she was
clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was si-
multaneously pushing him away with all her strength. The
rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impres-
sion. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting
nor co-operating but SUBMITTING. It was extraordinari-
ly embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible. But even then
he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed
that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it
was Katharine who refused this. They must, she said, pro-
duce a child if they could. So the performance continued to
happen, once a week quite regulariy, whenever it was not
impossible. She even used to remind him of it in the morn-
ing, as something which had to be done that evening and
which must not be forgotten. She had two names for it. One
was 'making a baby', and the other was 'our duty to the Par-
ty' (yes, she had actually used that phrase). Quite soon he
grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 85



day came round. But luckily no child appeared, and in the
end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they
parted.

Winston sighed inaudibly He picked up his pen again
and wrote:

She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any
kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can
imagine, pulled up her skirt. I

He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight,
with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils, and
in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even
at that moment was mixed up with the thought of Kath-
arine's white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power
of the Party. Why did it always have to be like this? Why
could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy
scuffles at intervals of years? But a real love affair was an al-
most unthinkable event. The women of the Party were all
alike. Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loy-
alty. By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water,
by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in
the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs,
slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been
driven out of them. His reason told him that there must be
exceptions, but his heart did not believe it. They were all im-
pregnable, as the Party intended that they should be. And
what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break
down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his



1984



whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was re-
bellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. Even to have awakened
Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have been
like a seduction, although she was his wife.

But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He
wrote:

/ turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light

After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp
had seemed very bright. For the first time he could see the
woman properly. He had taken a step towards her and then
halted, full of lust and terror. He was painfully conscious of
the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly pos-
sible that the patrols would catch him on the way out: for
that matter they might be waiting outside the door at this
moment. If he went away without even doing what he had
come here to do !

It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed.
What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the
woman was OLD. The paint was plastered so thick on her
face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard
mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly
dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open,
revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no
teeth at all.

He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:

When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 87



years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same.

He pressed his ringers against his eyelids again. He had
written it down at last, but it made no difference. The thera-
py had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top
of his voice was as strong as ever.



1984



Chapter 7



' If there is hope,' wrote Winston, 'it lies in the proles. '

If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because
only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per
cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to de-
stroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be
overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies,
had no way of coming together or even of identifying one
another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just
possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members
could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes.
Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice,
at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles,
if only they could somehow become conscious of their own
strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only
to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.
If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow
morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do

it? And yet !

He remembered how once he had been walking down
a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of
voices women's voices — had burst from a side-street a little
way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger and de-
spair, a deep, loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh! ' that went humming on
like the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It's start-



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ed! he had thought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose
at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob
of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls
of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had
been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this
moment the general despair broke down into a multitude
of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls
had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy
things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult
to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The
successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were
trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of
others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper
of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere
in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloat-
ed women, one of them with her hair coming down, had
got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it
out of one another's hands. For a moment they were both
tugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched
them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost
frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few
hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout
like that about anything that mattered?
He wrote:

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until
after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcrip-

90 1984



tion from one of the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of
course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before
the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the
capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had
been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work
in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been
sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneous-
ly, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught
that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in
subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple
rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It
was not necessary to know much. So long as they contin-
ued to work and breed, their other activities were without
importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose
upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of
life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral
pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they
went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blos-
soming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at
twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the
most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home
and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, foot-
ball, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon
of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among
them, spreading false rumours and marking down and
eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of
becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctri-
nate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable



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that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that
was required of them was a primitive patriotism which
could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make
them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And
even when they became discontented, as they sometimes
did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without
general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific
grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.
The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in
their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very
little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a
whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes,
drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but
since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was
of no importance. In all questions of morals they were al-
lowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism
of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went
unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even
religious worship would have been permitted if the proles
had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were
beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and
animals are free. '

Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his
varicose ulcer. It had begun itching again. The thing you
invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing
what life before the Revolution had really been like. He took
out of the drawer a copy of a children's history textbook
which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copy-
ing a passage into the diary:



1984



In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution,
London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It
was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody
had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of
poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to
sleep under. Children no older than you had to work twelve
hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips
if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale
breadcrusts and water. But in among all this terrible poverty
there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were
lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to
look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They
were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the
picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in
a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer,
shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat.
This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was
allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the
world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the
land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If
anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or
they could take his job away and starve him to death. When
any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and
bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'. The
chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and

But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be
mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in
their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the

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cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's Banquet, and the prac-
tice of kissing the Pope's toe. There was also something
called the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, which would probably
not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law
by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any
woman working in one of his factories.

How could you tell how much of it was lies? It MIGHT
be true that the average human being was better off now
than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence
to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the
instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were in-
tolerable and that at some other time they must have been
different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing
about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but
simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you
looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies
that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals
that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even
for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a mat-
ter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on
the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine
tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Par-
ty was something huge, terrible, and glittering — a world of
steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying
weapons — a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching for-
ward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and
shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting,
triumphing, persecuting — three hundred million people all
with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities



1984



where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes,
in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always
of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of
London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and
mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman
with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a
blocked waste-pipe.

He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day
and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics
proving that people today had more food, more clothes,
better houses, better recreations — that they lived longer,
worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, hap-
pier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of
fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or dis-
proved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per
cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it
was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party
claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per
thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300 —
and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two
unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in
the history books, even the things that one accepted with-
out question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might
never have been any such law as the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS,
or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as
a top hat.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the era-
sure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his
life he had possessed— AFTER the event: that was what



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counted — concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of fal-
sification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as
thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been — at any rate, it
was at about the time when he and Katharine had parted.
But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.
The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of
the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolu-
tion were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them
was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that
time been exposed as traitors and counter-revolutionar-
ies. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where,
and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the
majority had been executed after spectacular public trials
at which they made confession of their crimes. Among the
last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had
been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for a
year or more, so that one did not know whether they were
alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth
to incriminate themselves in the usual way. They had con-
fessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the
enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the
murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against
the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before
the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the
death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confess-
ing to these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in
the Party, and given posts which were in fact sinecures but
which sounded important. All three had written long, ab-

96 1984



ject articles in "The Times', analysing the reasons for their
defection and promising to make amends.

Some time after their release Winston had actually seen
all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered
the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched
them out of the corner of his eye.