Here is the
newsflash
—
Bad news coming, thought Winston.
Bad news coming, thought Winston.
Orwell - 1984
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?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten min-
utes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put
new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth
that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it,
in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was
not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you
carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table,
dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is
free, when men are different from one another and do not
live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done
cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the
age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of
doublethink — greetings!
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 35
He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that
it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate
his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The conse-
quences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became
important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his
right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail
that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry
(a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Depart-
ment) might start wondering why he had been writing
during the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fash-
ioned pen, WHAT he had been writing — and then drop a
hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom
and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-
brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was
therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless
to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether
or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across
the page- ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he
picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and depos-
ited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be
shaken off if the book was moved.
36 1984
Chapter 3
Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He must, he thought, have been ten or elev-
en years old when his mother had disappeared. She was
a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow move-
ments and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered
more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark
clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles
of his father's shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of
them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the
first great purges of the fifties.
At this moment his mother was sitting in some place
deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms.
He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble
baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them
were looking up at him. They were down in some subter-
ranean place — the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very
deep grave — but it was a place which, already far below him,
was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of
a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening
water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see
him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down,
down into the green waters which in another moment must
hide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and
air while they were being sucked down to death, and they
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were down there because he was up here. He knew it and
they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces.
There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts,
only the knowledge that they must die in order that he
might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoid-
able order of things.
He could not remember what had happened, but he knew
in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and
his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those
dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream
scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and
in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still
seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that
now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death,
nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a
way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, be-
longed to the ancient time, to a time when there was still
privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a
family stood by one another without needing to know the
reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she
had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish
to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not re-
member how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of
loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he
saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred,
and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex
sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his
mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green
water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.
38 1984
Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a
summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded
the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred
so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain
whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his wak-
ing thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old,
rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it
and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the
opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were
swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring
in dense masses like women's hair. Somewhere near at hand,
though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream
where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow
trees.
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across
the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off
her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body
was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, in-
deed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that
instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had
thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness
it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system
of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the
Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a sin-
gle splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture
belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the
word 'Shakespeare' on his lips.
The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle
which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 39
was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers.
Winston wrenched his body out of bed — naked, for a mem-
ber of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons
annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600 — and seized a din-
gy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair.
The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next
moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which
nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied
his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing
again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps.
His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the
varicose ulcer had started itching.
'Thirty to forty group! ' yapped a piercing female voice.
'Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to
forties! '
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen,
upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but
muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already ap-
peared.
'Arms bending and stretching! ' she rapped out. 'Take
your time by me. ONE, two, three, four! ONE, two, three,
four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! ONE, two,
three four! ONE two, three, four! . . . '
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of
Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the
rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat.
As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing
on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was consid-
ered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling
1984
to think his way backward into the dim period of his early
childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late
fifties everything faded. When there were no external re-
cords that you could refer to, even the outline of your own
life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which
had quite probably not happened, you remembered the
detail of incidents without being able to recapture their at-
mosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you
could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.
Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map,
had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been
so called in those days: it had been called England or Brit-
ain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been
called London.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his
country had not been at war, but it was evident that there
had been a fairly long interval of peace during his child-
hood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid
which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was
the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester.
He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember
his father's hand clutching his own as they hurried down,
down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and
round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which
finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and
they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy
way, was following a long way behind them. She was car-
rying his baby sister — or perhaps it was only a bundle of
blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether
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his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into
a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube
station.
There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor,
and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on
metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother
and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near
them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by
side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and
a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his
face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He
reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place
of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling
from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he
was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and
unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some
terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and
could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed
to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old
man loved — a little granddaughter, perhaps — had been
killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:
'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I?
That's what comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We
didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers'
But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted
Winston could not now remember.
Since about that time, war had been literally continu-
1984
ous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the
same war. For several months during his childhood there
had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of
which he remembered vividly But to trace out the history
of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any
given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since
no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention
of any other alignment than the existing one. At this mo-
ment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at
war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no pub-
lic or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three
powers had at any time been grouped along different lines.
Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since
Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with
Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge
which he happened to possess because his memory was not
satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of part-
ners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia:
therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The
enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and
it followed that any past or future agreement with him was
impossible.
The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thou-
sandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward
(with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from
the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the
back muscles) — the frightening thing was that it might all
be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and
say of this or that event, IT NEVER HAPPENED— that,
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surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance
with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had
been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years
ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own
consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed —
if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into
history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the
Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past. ' And yet the past, though of its nature al-
terable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was
true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All
that was needed was an unending series of victories over
your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in New-
speak, 'doublethink'.
'Stand easy! ' barked the instructress, a little more genial-
iy-
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled
his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrin-
thine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to
be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling care-
fully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions
which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory
and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic,
to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe
that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the
guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary
to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the
1984
moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget
it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the pro-
cess itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to
induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become
unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the
use of doublethink.
The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And
now let's see which of us can touch our toes! ' she said en-
thusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades.
ONE-two! ONE-two! . . . '
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains
all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by
bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant qual-
ity went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had
not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For
how could you establish even the most obvious fact when
there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried
to remember in what year he had first heard mention of
Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in
the sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party
histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and
guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His
exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until
already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties
and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylin-
drical hats still rode through the streets of London in great
gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides.
There was no knowing how much of this legend was true
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 45
and how much invented. Winston could not even remem-
ber at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He
did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before
1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form — 'Eng-
lish Socialism', that is to say — it had been current earlier.
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?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten min-
utes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put
new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth
that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it,
in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was
not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you
carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table,
dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is
free, when men are different from one another and do not
live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done
cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the
age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of
doublethink — greetings!
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 35
He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that
it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate
his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The conse-
quences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became
important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his
right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail
that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry
(a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Depart-
ment) might start wondering why he had been writing
during the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fash-
ioned pen, WHAT he had been writing — and then drop a
hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom
and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-
brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was
therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless
to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether
or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across
the page- ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he
picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and depos-
ited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be
shaken off if the book was moved.
36 1984
Chapter 3
Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He must, he thought, have been ten or elev-
en years old when his mother had disappeared. She was
a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow move-
ments and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered
more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark
clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles
of his father's shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of
them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the
first great purges of the fifties.
At this moment his mother was sitting in some place
deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms.
He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble
baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them
were looking up at him. They were down in some subter-
ranean place — the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very
deep grave — but it was a place which, already far below him,
was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of
a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening
water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see
him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down,
down into the green waters which in another moment must
hide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and
air while they were being sucked down to death, and they
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were down there because he was up here. He knew it and
they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces.
There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts,
only the knowledge that they must die in order that he
might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoid-
able order of things.
He could not remember what had happened, but he knew
in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and
his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those
dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream
scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and
in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still
seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that
now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death,
nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a
way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, be-
longed to the ancient time, to a time when there was still
privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a
family stood by one another without needing to know the
reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she
had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish
to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not re-
member how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of
loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he
saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred,
and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex
sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his
mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green
water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.
38 1984
Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a
summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded
the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred
so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain
whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his wak-
ing thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old,
rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it
and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the
opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were
swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring
in dense masses like women's hair. Somewhere near at hand,
though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream
where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow
trees.
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across
the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off
her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body
was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, in-
deed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that
instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had
thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness
it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system
of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the
Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a sin-
gle splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture
belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the
word 'Shakespeare' on his lips.
The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle
which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 39
was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers.
Winston wrenched his body out of bed — naked, for a mem-
ber of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons
annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600 — and seized a din-
gy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair.
The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next
moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which
nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied
his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing
again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps.
His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the
varicose ulcer had started itching.
'Thirty to forty group! ' yapped a piercing female voice.
'Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to
forties! '
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen,
upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but
muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already ap-
peared.
'Arms bending and stretching! ' she rapped out. 'Take
your time by me. ONE, two, three, four! ONE, two, three,
four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! ONE, two,
three four! ONE two, three, four! . . . '
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of
Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the
rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat.
As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing
on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was consid-
ered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling
1984
to think his way backward into the dim period of his early
childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late
fifties everything faded. When there were no external re-
cords that you could refer to, even the outline of your own
life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which
had quite probably not happened, you remembered the
detail of incidents without being able to recapture their at-
mosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you
could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.
Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map,
had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been
so called in those days: it had been called England or Brit-
ain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been
called London.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his
country had not been at war, but it was evident that there
had been a fairly long interval of peace during his child-
hood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid
which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was
the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester.
He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember
his father's hand clutching his own as they hurried down,
down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and
round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which
finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and
they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy
way, was following a long way behind them. She was car-
rying his baby sister — or perhaps it was only a bundle of
blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether
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his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into
a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube
station.
There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor,
and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on
metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother
and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near
them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by
side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and
a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his
face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He
reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place
of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling
from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he
was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and
unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some
terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and
could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed
to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old
man loved — a little granddaughter, perhaps — had been
killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:
'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I?
That's what comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We
didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers'
But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted
Winston could not now remember.
Since about that time, war had been literally continu-
1984
ous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the
same war. For several months during his childhood there
had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of
which he remembered vividly But to trace out the history
of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any
given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since
no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention
of any other alignment than the existing one. At this mo-
ment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at
war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no pub-
lic or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three
powers had at any time been grouped along different lines.
Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since
Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with
Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge
which he happened to possess because his memory was not
satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of part-
ners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia:
therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The
enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and
it followed that any past or future agreement with him was
impossible.
The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thou-
sandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward
(with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from
the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the
back muscles) — the frightening thing was that it might all
be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and
say of this or that event, IT NEVER HAPPENED— that,
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surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance
with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had
been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years
ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own
consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed —
if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into
history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the
Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past. ' And yet the past, though of its nature al-
terable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was
true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All
that was needed was an unending series of victories over
your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in New-
speak, 'doublethink'.
'Stand easy! ' barked the instructress, a little more genial-
iy-
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled
his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrin-
thine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to
be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling care-
fully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions
which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory
and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic,
to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe
that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the
guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary
to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the
1984
moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget
it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the pro-
cess itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to
induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become
unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the
use of doublethink.
The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And
now let's see which of us can touch our toes! ' she said en-
thusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades.
ONE-two! ONE-two! . . . '
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains
all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by
bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant qual-
ity went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had
not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For
how could you establish even the most obvious fact when
there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried
to remember in what year he had first heard mention of
Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in
the sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party
histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and
guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His
exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until
already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties
and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylin-
drical hats still rode through the streets of London in great
gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides.
There was no knowing how much of this legend was true
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 45
and how much invented. Winston could not even remem-
ber at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He
did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before
1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form — 'Eng-
lish Socialism', that is to say — it had been current earlier.
