No More Learning

Indeed, he was one of the enormous
team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh
Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature,
smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuber-
ant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to
search your face closely while he was speaking to you.

'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,'
he said.

'Not one! ' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've



1984



tried all over the place. They don't exist any longer. '

Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he
had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There
had been a famine of them for months past. At any given
moment there was some necessary article which the Par-
ty shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons,
sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces;
at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of
them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the
'free' market.

'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added
untruthfully.

The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he
turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy
metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.

'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday? ' said
Syme.

'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see it
on the flicks, I suppose. '

A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.

His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know
you,' the eyes seemed to say, 'I see through you. I know very
well why you didn't go to see those prisoners hanged. ' In
an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He
would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of he-
licopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions
of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the
Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of
getting him away from such subjects and entangling him,

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if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he
was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head
a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.

'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently 'I think
it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them
kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right
out, and blue — a quite bright blue. That's the detail that ap-
peals to me. '

'Nex', please! ' yelled the white-aproned prole with the la-
dle.

Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille.
On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch — a
metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a
cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one
saccharine tablet.

"There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said
Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin on the way'

The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs.
They threaded their way across the crowded room and un-
packed their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one
corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy
liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston
took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his
nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he
had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discov-
ered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of
the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes
of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation
of meat. Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied

64 1984



their pannikins. From the table at Winston's left, a little
behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and contin-
uously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck,
which pierced the general uproar of the room.

'How is the Dictionary getting on? ' said Winston, raising
his voice to overcome the noise.

'Slowly' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinat-
ing. '

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of
Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk
of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other,
and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without
shouting.

"The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said.
'We're getting the language into its final shape— the shape
it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When
we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it
all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is
inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying
words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're
cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edi-
tion won't contain a single word that will become obsolete
before the year 2050. '

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple
of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of ped-
ant's passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his
eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost
dreamy.

'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course

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the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there
are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't
only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all,
what justification is there for a word which is simply the
opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite
in itself. Take 'good', for instance. If you have a word like
'good', what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood'
will do just as well — better, because it's an exact opposite,
which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger ver-
sion of 'good', what sense is there in having a whole string
of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all
the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'double-
plusgood' if you want something stronger still. Of course
we use those forms already, but in the final version of New-
speak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion
of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words —
in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that,
Winston? It was B. B. 's idea originally, of course,' he added
as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at
the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately
detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,'
he said almost sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still
thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those pieces that
you write in 'The Times' occasionally. They're good enough,
but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick
to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of
meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of



1984



words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in
the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? '

Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympa-
thetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit
off another fragment of the dark- coloured bread, chewed it
briefly, and went on:

'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to
narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make
thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no
words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever
be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its
meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings
rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition,
we're not far from that point. But the process will still be
continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer
and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a
little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or ex-
cuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question
of self-discipline, reality- control. But in the end there won't
be any need even for that. The Revolution will be com-
plete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and
Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satis-
faction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the
year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will
be alive who could understand such a conversation as we
are having now? '

'Except ' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.

It had been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the
proles,' but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that

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this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, how-
ever, had divined what he was about to say

"The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly. 'By
2050 — earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak
will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will
have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, By-
ron — they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely
changed into something different, but actually changed
into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even
the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will
change. How could you have a slogan like 'freedom is slav-
ery' when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The
whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will
be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means
not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is uncon-
sciousness. '

One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep
conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He
sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not
like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in
his face.

Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned
a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At
the table on his left the man with the strident voice was
still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was
perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back
to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly
agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time
Winston caught some such remark as 'I think you're so right,



1984



I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful and rather silly
feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an in-
stant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the
man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that
he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He
was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a
large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and
because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles
caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs
instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from
the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was
almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once
Winston caught a phrase — complete and final elimination
of Goldsteinism' — jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed,
all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it
was just a noise, a quack- quack- quacking. And yet, though
you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you
could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might
be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures
against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be ful-
minating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he
might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar
front — it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could
be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure
Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving
rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that
this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It
was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx.
The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but

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it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in
unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the han-
dle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew.
The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily
audible in spite of the surrounding din.

"There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know
whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It
is one of those interesting words that have two contradic-
tory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied
to someone you agree with, it is praise. '

Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston
thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, al-
though well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly
disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as
a thought- criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There
was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was some-
thing that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving
stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He be-
lieved in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother,
he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with
sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness
of information, which the ordinary Party member did not
approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to
him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he
had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree
Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law,
not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chest-
nut Tree Cafe, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The



1984



old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather
there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it
was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades
ago. Syme's fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was
a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the na-
ture of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him
instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else, for
that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough.
Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said.

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-

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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-

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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.