Chapter 1
I
t was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were
striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his
breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly
through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not
quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from
entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At
one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor
display,
had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous
face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of
about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly
handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was
no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was
seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut
off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive
in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up,
and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer
above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on
the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the
poster
with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of
those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow
you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING
YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of
fig-4 1984
ures which had something to do with the production of
pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like
a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the
right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice
sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable.
The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be
dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure,
the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue
overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was
very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened
by
coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the
winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world
looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were
whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the
sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed
to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were
plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio’d face gazed
down from every commanding corner. There was one on
the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS
WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes
looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another
poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind,
alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC.
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down
between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle,
and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the
police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did Free eBooks at
Planet eBook.com
not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was
still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment
of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and
transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made,
above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by
it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of
vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen
as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing
whether you were being watched at any given moment. How
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on
any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable
that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate
they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You
had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in
the assumption that every sound you made was overheard,
and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was
safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be
revealing.
A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work,
towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This,
he thought with a sort of vague distaste—this was London,
chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous
of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some
childhood memory that should tell him whether London
had always been quite like this. Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored
up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with
cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy 1984
garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed
sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places
where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had
sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like
chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember:
nothing remained of his childhood except a series of
brightlit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly
unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was
the official language of Oceania. For an account
of its structure and etymology see Appendix.]—was
startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an
enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete,
soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the
air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read,
picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three
slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three
thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding
ramifications below. Scattered about London there were
just three other buildings of similar appearance and size.
So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture
that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see Free eBooks at Planet
eBook.com
all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of
the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus
of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which
concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and
the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself
with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and
order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible
for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue,
Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one.
There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been
inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of
it.
It was a place impossible to enter except on official
business,
and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbedwire
entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun
nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers
were
roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed
with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features
into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable
to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the
room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this
time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and
he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved
for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a
bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked
VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese
rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved 8
1984
himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of
medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out
of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover,
in
swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back
of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however,
the burning in his belly died down and the world began to
look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled
packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously
held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the
floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back
to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood
to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took
out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized
blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in
an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal,
in the end wall, where it could command the whole room,
it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side
of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now
sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably
been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove,
and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside
the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could
be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present
position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual
geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing
that he was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had Free
eBooks at Planet eBook.com 9
just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful
book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was
of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty
years past. He could guess, however, that the book was
much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of
a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town
(just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been
stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess
it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary
shops (’dealing on the free market’, it was called), but the
rule was not strictly kept, because there were various
things,
such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible
to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance
up and down the street and then had slipped inside and
bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was
not
conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had
carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing
written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary.
This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were
no
longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain
that it would be punished by death, or at least by
twentyfive years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into
the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen
was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures,
and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty,
simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper
deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being
scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to 10
1984
writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual
to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of
course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the
pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A
tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the
decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended
upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any
certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that
date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine,
and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within
a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he
writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind
hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page,
and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak
word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of
what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you
communicate with the future? It was of its nature
impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which
case it would not listen to him: or it would be different
from
it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The
telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It
was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the
pow-Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11
er of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it
was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past
he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never
crossed his mind that anything would be needed except
courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to
do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless
monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for
years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had
dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching
unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it
always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He
was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page
in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle,
the
blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the
gin.
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly
aware of what he was setting down. His small but
childish handwriting straggled up and down the page,
shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films.
One
very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed
somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused
by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with
a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along
in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the
helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea
round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though
the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with
laughter 11984
when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with
a
helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman
might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little
boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming
with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he
was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting
her arms round him and comforting him although she was
blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as
much
as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the
bullets
off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among
them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then
there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up
right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose
must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause
from
the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the
house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they
didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt
it
aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police
turned
her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her
nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they
never——
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering
from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour
out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that
while he was doing so a totally different memory had
clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt
equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because
of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come
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home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so
nebulous could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department,
where Winston worked, they were dragging the
chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre
of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place
in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew
by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into
the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in
the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that
she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably—since
he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a
spanner—she had some mechanical job on one of the
novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about
twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift,
athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the
Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round
the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out
the
shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the
very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was
because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths
and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which
she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all
women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was
always the women, and above all the young ones, who were
the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers
of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unortho-14
1984
doxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of
being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed
in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which
seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled
him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind
that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it
was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a
peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as
hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member
of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important
and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature.
A momentary hush passed over the group of people round
the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party
member approaching. O’Brien was a large, burly man with
a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite
of
his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner.
He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose
which was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way,
curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had
still thought in such terms, might have recalled an
eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston
had seen O’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many
years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because
he was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s urbane
manner and his prize-fighter’s physique. Much more it was
because of a secretly held belief—or perhaps not even a
belief, merely a hope—that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was
not perfect. Something in his face suggested it
irresistibly. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1
And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was
written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any
rate
he had the appearance of being a person that you could
talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get
him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to
verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At
this moment O’Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it
was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in
the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was
over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple
of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked
in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl
with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some
monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the
big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that
set
one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of
one’s
neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of
the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses
here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired
woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein
was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of
the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big
Brother himself, and then had engaged in
counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had
mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of
the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was
11984
none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He
was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s
purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries,
acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out
of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and
hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the
sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps
even—so it was occasionally rumoured—in some hidingplace in
Oceania itself.
Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never
see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of
emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of
white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet
somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair
of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep,
and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was
delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines
of the Party—an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a
child should have been able to see through it, and yet just
plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that
other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken
in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing
the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the
immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating
freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of
assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that
the revolution had been betrayed—and all this in rapid
polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the
ha-Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1
bitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained
Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any
Party member would normally use in real life. And all the
while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality
which
Goldstein’s specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the
Eurasian army—row after row of solid-looking men with
expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface
of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly
similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots
formed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds,
uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half
the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face
on
the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army
behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or
even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger
automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than
either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war
with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the
other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein
was hated and despised by everybody, although every day
and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen,
in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed,
ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful
rubbish that they were—in spite of all this, his influence never
seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting
to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and
saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked 18
1984
by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast
shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators
dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood,
its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered
stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the
heresies,
of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated
clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title.
People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But
one
knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither
the Brotherhood nor THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary
Party member would mention if there was a way of
avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People
were leaping up and down in their places and shouting
at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the
maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The
little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and
her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed
fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting
very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a
wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying
out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up
a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It
struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued
inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he
was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently
against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about
the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 19
a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to
avoid
joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always
unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness,
a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a
sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people
like an electric current, turning one even against one’s
will
into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that
one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could
be switched from one object to another like the flame of a
blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not
turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary,
against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such
moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic
on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world
of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with
the
people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed
to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of
Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed
to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing
like
a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite
of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung
about his very existence, seemed like some sinister
enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the
structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred
this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the
sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head
away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to 0
1984
the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful
hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death
with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake
and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would
ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.
Better than before, moreover, he realized WHY it was that he
hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty
and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and
would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist,
which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there
was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of
chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had
become an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face
changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted
into
the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing,
huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming
to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some
of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards
in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh
of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the
face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full
of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost
filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was
saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the
sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not
distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact
of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away
again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1
in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several
seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had
made on everyone’s eyeballs was too vivid to wear off
immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself
forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a
tremulous murmur that sounded like ‘My Saviour!’ she
extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her
face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a
prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a
deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B!...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
tomtoms. 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
consciousness 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-1984
ing of ‘B-B!...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 himself.
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
hatred, 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
others 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
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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
conversation, 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 equivocal
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 absurd,
since the writing of those particular words was not 4 1984
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 difference.
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
paper—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
successfully 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
shaking 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
disappeared, 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:
VAPORIZED was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began
writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don’t care theyll shoot me in the back of
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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.1984
ምንም አስተያየቶች የሉም:
አስተያየት ይለጥፉ