1984 By George Orwell
PART III Chapter : 1 He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love,
but there was no way of making certain. He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell
with walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps flooded it with cold light,
and there was a low, steady humming sound which he supposed had something to do with
the air supply. A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit
on ran round the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a
lavatory pan with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in each wall. There was a dull aching in his belly. It had been there ever since they had bundled
him into the closed van and driven him away. But he was also hungry, with a gnawing, unwholesome
kind of hunger. It might be twenty-four hours since he had
eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did not know, probably never would
know, whether it had been morning or evening when they arrested him. Since he was arrested he had not been fed. He sat as still as he could on the narrow
bench, with his hands crossed on his knee. He had already learned to sit still. If you made unexpected movements they yelled
at you from the telescreen. But the craving for food was growing upon
him. What he longed for above all was a piece of
bread. He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs
in the pocket of his overalls. It was even possible — he thought this because
from time to time something seemed to tickle his leg — that there might be a sizeable
bit of crust there. In the end the temptation to find out overcame
his fear; he slipped a hand into his pocket. 'Smith!' yelled a voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W! Hands out of pockets in the cells!' He sat still again, his hands crossed on his
knee. Before being brought here he had been taken
to another place which must have been an ordinary prison or a temporary lock-up used by the
patrols. He did not know how long he had been there;
some hours at any rate; with no clocks and no daylight it was hard to gauge the time. It was a noisy, evil-smelling place. They had put him into a cell similar to the
one he was now in, but filthily dirty and at all times crowded by ten or fifteen people. The majority of them were common criminals,
but there were a few political prisoners among them. He had sat silent against the wall, jostled
by dirty bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to take much interest
in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference in demeanour between
the Party prisoners and the others. The Party prisoners were always silent and
terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults at the guards, fought
back fiercely when their belongings were impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled
food which they produced from mysterious hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the
telescreen when it tried to restore order. On the other hand some of them seemed to be
on good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle cigarettes
through the spyhole in the door. The guards, too, treated the common criminals
with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle them roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour
camps to which most of the prisoners expected to be sent. It was 'all right' in the camps, he gathered,
so long as you had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering
of every kind, there was homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol
distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only to
the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals. There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners
of every description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-marketeers, drunks, prostitutes. Some of the drunks were so violent that the
other prisoners had to combine to suppress them. An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty,
with great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come down in her struggles,
was carried in, kicking and shouting, by four guards, who had hold of her one at each corner. They wrenched off the boots with which she
had been trying to kick them, and dumped her down across Winston's lap, almost breaking
his thigh-bones. The woman hoisted herself upright and followed
them out with a yell of 'F— bastards!' Then, noticing that she was sitting on something
uneven, she slid off Winston's knees on to the bench. 'Beg pardon, dearie,' she said. 'I wouldn't 'a sat on you, only the buggers
put me there. They dono 'ow to treat a lady, do they?' She paused, patted her breast, and belched. 'Pardon,' she said, 'I ain't meself, quite.' She leant forward and vomited copiously on
the floor. 'Thass better,' she said, leaning back with
closed eyes. 'Never keep it down, thass what I say. Get it up while it's fresh on your stomach,
like.' She revived, turned to have another look at
Winston and seemed immediately to take a fancy to him. She put a vast arm round his shoulder and
drew him towards her, breathing beer and vomit into his face. 'Wass your name, dearie?' she said. 'Smith,' said Winston. 'Smith?' said the woman. 'Thass funny. My name's Smith too. Why,' she added sentimentally, 'I might be
your mother!' She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about the right age and physique,
and it was probable that people changed somewhat after twenty years in a forced-labour camp. No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent the ordinary criminals
ignored the Party prisoners. 'The polits,' they called them, with a sort
of uninterested contempt. The Party prisoners seemed terrified of speaking
to anybody, and above all of speaking to one another. Only once, when two Party members, both women,
were pressed close together on the bench, he overheard amid the din of voices a few
hurriedly-whispered words; and in particular a reference to something called 'room one-oh-one',
which he did not understand. It might be two or three hours ago that they
had brought him here. The dull pain in his belly never went away,
but sometimes it grew better and sometimes worse, and his thoughts expanded or contracted
accordingly. When it grew worse he thought only of the
pain itself, and of his desire for food. When it grew better, panic took hold of him. There were moments when he foresaw the things
that would happen to him with such actuality that his heart galloped and his breath stopped. He felt the smash of truncheons on his elbows
and iron-shod boots on his shins; he saw himself grovelling on the floor, screaming for mercy
through broken teeth. He hardly thought of Julia. He could not fix his mind on her. He loved her and would not betray her; but
that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of arithmetic. He felt no love for her, and he hardly even
wondered what was happening to her. He thought oftener of O'Brien, with a flickering
hope. O'Brien might know that he had been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried
to save its members. But there was the razor blade; they would
send the razor blade if they could. There would be perhaps five seconds before
the guard could rush into the cell. The blade would bite into him with a sort
of burning coldness, and even the fingers that held it would be cut to the bone. Everything came back to his sick body, which
shrank trembling from the smallest pain. He was not certain that he would use the razor
blade even if he got the chance. It was more natural to exist from moment to
moment, accepting another ten minutes" life even with the certainty that there was torture
at the end of it. Sometimes he tried to calculate the number
of porcelain bricks in the walls of the cell. It should have been easy, but he always lost
count at some point or another. More often he wondered where he was, and what
time of day it was. At one moment he felt certain that it was
broad daylight outside, and at the next equally certain that it was pitch darkness. In this place, he knew instinctively, the
lights would never be turned out. It was the place with no darkness: he saw
now why O'Brien had seemed to recognize the allusion. In the Ministry of Love there were no windows. His cell might be at the heart of the building
or against its outer wall; it might be ten floors below ground, or thirty above it. He moved himself mentally from place to place,
and tried to determine by the feeling of his body whether he was perched high in the air
or buried deep underground. There was a sound of marching boots outside. The steel door opened with a clang. A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure
who seemed to glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured
face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway. He motioned to the guards outside to bring
in the prisoner they were leading. The poet Ampleforth shambled into the cell. The door clanged shut again. Ampleforth made one or two uncertain movements
from side to side, as though having some idea that there was another door to go out of,
and then began to wander up and down the cell. He had not yet noticed Winston's presence. His troubled eyes were gazing at the wall
about a metre above the level of Winston's head. He was shoeless; large, dirty toes were sticking
out of the holes in his socks. He was also several days away from a shave. A scrubby beard covered his face to the cheekbones,
giving him an air of ruffianism that went oddly with his large weak frame and nervous
movements. Winston roused hirnself a little from his
lethargy. He must speak to Ampleforth, and risk the
yell from the telescreen. It was even conceivable that Ampleforth was
the bearer of the razor blade. 'Ampleforth,' he said. There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth paused, mildly startled. His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston. 'Ah, Smith!' he said. 'You too!' 'What are you in for?' 'To tell you the truth —.' He sat down awkwardly
on the bench opposite Winston. 'There is only one offence, is there not?'
he said. 'And have you committed it?' 'Apparently I have.' He put a hand to his forehead and pressed
his temples for a moment, as though trying to remember something. 'These things happen,' he began vaguely. 'I have been able to recall one instance — a
possible instance. It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of
the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word "God" to remain at the
end of a line. I could not help it!' he added almost indignantly,
raising his face to look at Winston. 'It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was "rod". Do you realize that there are only twelve
rhymes to "rod" in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme.' The expression on his face changed. The annoyance passed out of it and for a moment
he looked almost pleased. A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of
the pedant who has found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt and scrubby hair. 'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that
the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language
lacks rhymes?' No, that particular thought had never occurred
to Winston. Nor, in the circumstances, did it strike him
as very important or interesting. 'Do you know what time of day it is?' he said. Ampleforth looked startled again. 'I had hardly thought about it. They arrested me — it could be two days
ago — perhaps three.' His eyes flitted round the walls, as though
he half expected to find a window somewhere. 'There is no difference between night and
day in this place. I do not see how one can calculate the time.' They talked desultorily for some minutes,
then, without apparent reason, a yell from the telescreen bade them be silent. Winston sat quietly, his hands crossed. Ampleforth, too large to sit in comfort on
the narrow bench, fidgeted from side to side, clasping his lank hands first round one knee,
then round the other. The telescreen barked at him to keep still. Time passed. Twenty minutes, an hour — it was difficult
to judge. Once more there was a sound of boots outside. Winston's entrails contracted. Soon, very soon, perhaps in five minutes,
perhaps now, the tramp of boots would mean that his own turn had come. The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped into
the cell. With a brief movement of the hand he indicated
Ampleforth. 'Room 101,' he said. Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the
guards, his face vaguely perturbed, but uncomprehending. What seemed like a long time passed. The pain in Winston's belly had revived. His mind sagged round and round on the same
trick, like a ball falling again and again into the same series of slots. He had only six thoughts. The pain in his belly; a piece of bread; the
blood and the screaming; O'Brien; Julia; the razor blade. There was another spasm in his entrails, the
heavy boots were approaching. As the door opened, the wave of air that it
created brought in a powerful smell of cold sweat. Parsons walked into the cell. He was wearing khaki shorts and a sports-shirt. This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness. 'You here!' he said. Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there
was neither interest nor surprise, but only misery. He began walking jerkily up and down, evidently
unable to keep still. Each time he straightened his pudgy knees
it was apparent that they were trembling. His eyes had a wide-open, staring look, as
though he could not prevent himself from gazing at something in the middle distance. 'What are you in for?' said Winston. 'Thoughtcrime!' said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone of his voice implied at once a complete
admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous horror that such a word could be applied to
himself. He paused opposite Winston and began eagerly
appealing to him: 'You don't think they'll shoot me, do you, old chap? They don't shoot you if you haven't actually
done anything — only thoughts, which you can't help? I know they give you a fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They'll know my record, won't they? You know what kind of chap I was. Not a bad chap in my way. Not brainy, of course, but keen. I tried to do my best for the Party, didn't
I? I'll get off with five years, don't you think? Or even ten years? A chap like me could make himself pretty useful
in a labour-camp. They wouldn't shoot me for going off the rails
just once?' 'Are you guilty?' said Winston. 'Of course I'm guilty!' cried Parsons with
a servile glance at the telescreen. 'You don't think the Party would arrest an
innocent man, do you?' His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took
on a slightly sanctimonious expression. 'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,'
he said sententiously. 'It's insidious. It can get hold of you without your even knowing
it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that's a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my
bit — never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?' He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged
for medical reasons to utter an obscenity. '"Down with Big Brother!" Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I'm glad they
got me before it went any further. Do you know what I'm going to say to them
when I go up before the tribunal? "Thank you," I'm going to say, "thank you
for saving me before it was too late."' 'Who denounced you?' said Winston. 'It was my little daughter,' said Parsons
with a sort of doleful pride. 'She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to
the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don't bear her any grudge for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit,
anyway.' He made a few more jerky movements up and
down, several times, casting a longing glance at the lavatory pan. Then he suddenly ripped down his shorts. 'Excuse me, old man,' he said. 'I can't help it. It's the waiting.' He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory
pan. Winston covered his face with his hands. 'Smith!' yelled the voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W! Uncover your face. No faces covered in the cells.' Winston uncovered his face. Parsons used the lavatory, loudly and abundantly. It then turned out that the plug was defective
and the cell stank abominably for hours afterwards. Parsons was removed. More prisoners came and went, mysteriously. One, a woman, was consigned to 'Room 101',
and, Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel and turn a different colour when she heard the
words. A time came when, if it had been morning when
he was brought here, it would be afternoon; or if it had been afternoon, then it would
be midnight. There were six prisoners in the cell, men
and women. All sat very still. Opposite Winston there sat a man with a chinless,
toothy face exactly like that of some large, harmless rodent. His fat, mottled cheeks were so pouched at
the bottom that it was difficult not to believe that he had little stores of food tucked away
there. His pale-grey eyes flitted timorously from
face to face and turned quickly away again when he caught anyone's eye. The door opened, and another prisoner was
brought in whose appearance sent a momentary chill through Winston. He was a commonplace, mean-looking man who
might have been an engineer or technician of some kind. But what was startling was the emaciation
of his face. It was like a skull. Because of its thinness the mouth and eyes
looked disproportionately large, and the eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable
hatred of somebody or something. The man sat down on the bench at a little
distance from Winston. Winston did not look at him again, but the
tormented, skull-like face was as vivid in his mind as though it had been straight in
front of his eyes. Suddenly he realized what was the matter. The man was dying of starvation. The same thought seemed to occur almost simultaneously
to everyone in the cell. There was a very faint stirring all the way
round the bench. The eyes of the chinless man kept flitting
towards the skull-faced man, then turning guiltily away, then being dragged back by
an irresistible attraction. Presently he began to fidget on his seat. At last he stood up, waddled clumsily across
the cell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls, and, with an abashed air, held out
a grimy piece of bread to the skull-faced man. There was a furious, deafening roar from the
telescreen. The chinless man jumped in his tracks. The skull-faced man had quickly thrust his
hands behind his back, as though demonstrating to all the world that he refused the gift. 'Bumstead!' roared the voice. '2713 Bumstead J! Let fall that piece of bread!' The chinless man dropped the piece of bread
on the floor. 'Remain standing where you are,' said the
voice. 'Face the door. Make no movement.' The chinless man obeyed. His large pouchy cheeks were quivering uncontrollably. The door clanged open. As the young officer entered and stepped aside,
there emerged from behind him a short stumpy guard with enormous arms and shoulders. He took his stand opposite the chinless man,
and then, at a signal from the officer, let free a frightful blow, with all the weight
of his body behind it, full in the chinless man's mouth. The force of it seemed almost to knock him
clear of the floor. His body was flung across the cell and fetched
up against the base of the lavatory seat. For a moment he lay as though stunned, with
dark blood oozing from his mouth and nose. A very faint whimpering or squeaking, which
seemed unconscious, came out of him. Then he rolled over and raised himself unsteadily
on hands and knees. Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the two
halves of a dental plate fell out of his mouth. The prisoners sat very still, their hands
crossed on their knees. The chinless man climbed back into his place. Down one side of his face the flesh was darkening. His mouth had swollen into a shapeless cherry-coloured
mass with a black hole in the middle of it. From time to time a little blood dripped on
to the breast of his overalls. His grey eyes still flitted from face to face,
more guiltily than ever, as though he were trying to discover how much the others despised
him for his humiliation. The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indicated
the skull-faced man. 'Room 101,' he said. There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston's
side. The man had actually flung himself on his
knees on the floor, with his hand clasped together. 'Comrade! Officer!' he cried. 'You don't have to take me to that place! Haven't I told you everything already? What else is it you want to know? There's nothing I wouldn't confess, nothing! Just tell me what it is and I'll confess straight
off. Write it down and I'll sign it — anything! Not room 101!' 'Room 101,' said the officer. The man's face, already very pale, turned
a colour Winston would not have believed possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of
green. 'Do anything to me!' he yelled. 'You've been starving me for weeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you want me to give
away? Just say who it is and I'll tell you anything
you want. I don't care who it is or what you do to them. I've got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn't six years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut
their throats in front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!' 'Room 101,' said the officer. The man looked frantically round at the other
prisoners, as though with some idea that he could put another victim in his own place. His eyes settled on the smashed face of the
chinless man. He flung out a lean arm. 'That's the one you ought to be taking, not
me!' he shouted. 'You didn't hear what he was saying after
they bashed his face. Give me a chance and I'll tell you every word
of it. He's the one that's against the Party, not
me.' The guards stepped forward. The man's voice rose to a shriek. 'You didn't hear him!' he repeated. 'Something went wrong with the telescreen. He's the one you want. Take him, not me!' The two sturdy guards had stooped to take
him by the arms. But just at this moment he flung himself across
the floor of the cell and grabbed one of the iron legs that supported the bench. He had set up a wordless howling, like an
animal. The guards took hold of him to wrench him
loose, but he clung on with astonishing strength. For perhaps twenty seconds they were hauling
at him. The prisoners sat quiet, their hands crossed
on their knees, looking straight in front of them. The howling stopped; the man had no breath
left for anything except hanging on. Then there was a different kind of cry. A kick from a guard's boot had broken the
fingers of one of his hands. They dragged him to his feet. 'Room 101,' said the officer. The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with
head sunken, nursing his crushed hand, all the fight had gone out of him. A long time passed. If it had been midnight when the skull-faced
man was taken away, it was morning: if morning, it was afternoon. Winston was alone, and had been alone for
hours. The pain of sitting on the narrow bench was
such that often he got up and walked about, unreproved by the telescreen. The piece of bread still lay where the chinless
man had dropped it. At the beginning it needed a hard effort not
to look at it, but presently hunger gave way to thirst. His mouth was sticky and evil-tasting. The humming sound and the unvarying white
light induced a sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head. He would get up because the ache in his bones
was no longer bearable, and then would sit down again almost at once because he was too
dizzy to make sure of staying on his feet. Whenever his physical sensations were a little
under control the terror returned. Sometimes with a fading hope he thought of
O'Brien and the razor blade. It was thinkable that the razor blade might
arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed. More dimly he thought of Julia. Somewhere or other she was suffering perhaps
far worse than he. She might be screaming with pain at this moment. He thought: 'If I could save Julia by doubling
my own pain, would I do it? Yes, I would.' But that was merely an intellectual decision,
taken because he knew that he ought to take it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel anything,
except pain and foreknowledge of pain. Besides, was it possible, when you were actually
suffering it, to wish for any reason that your own pain should increase? But that question was not answerable yet. The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O'Brien came in. Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had driven all caution
out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot
the presence of the telescreen. 'They've got you too!' he cried. 'They got me a long time ago,' said O'Brien
with a mild, almost regretful irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged a broad-chested
guard with a long black truncheon in his hand. 'You know this, Winston,' said O'Brien. 'Don't deceive yourself. You did know it — you have always known
it.' Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no time to think of that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the
guard's hand. It might fall anywhere; on the crown, on the
tip of the ear, on the upper arm, on the elbow— The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralysed,
clasping the stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow
could cause such pain! The light cleared and he could see the other
two looking down at him. The guard was laughing at his contortions. One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you
wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that
it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical
pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no
heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled
left arm. Chapter : 2 He was lying on something that felt like a
camp bed, except that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some
way so that he could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usual was
falling on his face. O'Brien was standing at his side, looking
down at him intently. At the other side of him stood a man in a
white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe. Even after his eyes were open he took in his
surroundings only gradually. He had the impression of swimming up into
this room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath it. How long he had been down there he did not
know. Since the moment when they arrested him he
had not seen darkness or daylight. Besides, his memories were not continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even
the sort of consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again
after a blank interval. But whether the intervals were of days or
weeks or only seconds, there was no way of knowing. With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare
had started. Later he was to realize that all that then
happened was merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners
were subjected. There was a long range of crimes — espionage,
sabotage, and the like — to which everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession was a formality, though the
torture was real. How many times he had been beaten, how long
the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there were five or six men in black
uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons,
sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the
floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless,
hopeless effort to dodge the kicks, and simply inviting more and yet more kicks, in his ribs,
in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, on the bone
at the base of his spine. There were times when it went on and on until
the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat
him but that he could not force hirnself into losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve so forsook
him that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began, when the mere sight
of a fist drawn back for a blow was enough to make him pour forth a confession of real
and imaginary crimes. There were other times when he started out
with the resolve of confessing nothing, when every word had to be forced out of him between
gasps of pain, and there were times when he feebly tried to compromise, when he said to
himself: 'I will confess, but not yet. I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable. Three more kicks, two more kicks, and then
I will tell them what they want.' Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardly
stand, then flung like a sack of potatoes on to the stone floor of a cell, left to recuperate
for a few hours, and then taken out and beaten again. There were also longer periods of recovery. He remembered them dimly, because they were
spent chiefly in sleep or stupor. He remembered a cell with a plank bed, a sort
of shelf sticking out from the wall, and a tin wash-basin, and meals of hot soup and
bread and sometimes coffee. He remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape
his chin and crop his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his
pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over him in
search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make him sleep. The beatings grew less frequent, and became
mainly a threat, a horror to which he could be sent back at any moment when his answers
were unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not ruffians in black
uniforms but Party intellectuals, little rotund men with quick movements and flashing spectacles,
who worked on him in relays over periods which lasted — he thought, he could not be sure
— ten or twelve hours at a stretch. These other questioners saw to it that he
was in constant slight pain, but it was not chiefly pain that they relied on. They slapped his face, wrung his ears. pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg,
refused him leave to urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with
water; but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning. Their real weapon was the merciless questioning
that went on and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything
that he said, convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction until he began
weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue Sometimes he would weep half a dozen
times in a single session. Most of the time they screamed abuse at him
and threatened at every hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again; but sometimes
they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeal to him in the name of
Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even now he had not enough loyalty
to the Party left to make him wish to undo the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags after hours of
questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling tears. In the end the nagging voices broke him down
more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand
that signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what they
wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent
Party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public funds, sale
of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the
pay of the Eastasian government as far back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer,
an admirer of capitalism, and a sexual pervert. He confessed that he had murdered his wife,
although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife was still alive. He confessed that for years he had been in
personal touch with Goldstein and had been a member of an underground organization which
had included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confess everything and implicate
everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true that he had been the enemy of
the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and
the deed. There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in his mind disconnectedly,
like pictures with blackness all round them. He was in a cell which might have been either
dark or light, because he could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near at hand some kind of instrument was ticking
slowly and regularly. The eyes grew larger and more luminous. Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived
into the eyes, and was swallowed up. He was strapped into a chair surrounded by
dials, under dazzling lights. A man in a white coat was reading the dials. There was a tramp of heavy boots outside. The door clanged open. The waxed-faced officer marched in, followed
by two guards. 'Room 101,' said the officer. The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not look at Winston either; he was
looking only at the dials. He was rolling down a mighty corridor, a kilometre
wide, full of glorious, golden light, roaring with laughter and shouting out confessions
at the top of his voice. He was confessing everything, even the things
he had succeeded in holding back under the torture. He was relating the entire history of his
life to an audience who knew it already. With him were the guards, the other questioners,
the men in white coats, O'Brien, Julia, Mr Charrington, all rolling down the corridor
together and shouting with laughter. Some dreadful thing which had lain embedded
in the future had somehow been skipped over and had not happened. Everything was all right, there was no more
pain, the last detail of his life was laid bare, understood, forgiven. He was starting up from the plank bed in the
half-certainty that he had heard O'Brien's voice. All through his interrogation, although he
had never seen him, he had had the feeling that O'Brien was at his elbow, just out of
sight. It was O'Brien who was directing everything. It was he who set the guards on to Winston
and who prevented them from killing him. It was he who decided when Winston should
scream with pain, when he should have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep,
when the drugs should be pumped into his arm. It was he who asked the questions and suggested
the answers. He was the tormentor, he was the protector,
he was the inquisitor, he was the friend. And once — Winston could not remember whether
it was in drugged sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in a moment of wakefulness — a voice
murmured in his ear: 'Don't worry, Winston; you are in my keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the turning-point has come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.' He was not sure whether it was O'Brien's voice;
but it was the same voice that had said to him, 'We shall meet in the place where there
is no darkness,' in that other dream, seven years ago. He did not remember any ending to his interrogation. There was a period of blackness and then the
cell, or room, in which he now was had gradually materialized round him. He was almost flat on his back, and unable
to move. His body was held down at every essential
point. Even the back of his head was gripped in some
manner. O'Brien was looking down at him gravely and
rather sadly. His face, seen from below, looked coarse and
worn, with pouches under the eyes and tired lines from nose to chin. He was older than Winston had thought him;
he was perhaps forty-eight or fifty. Under his hand there was a dial with a lever
on top and figures running round the face. 'I told you,' said O'Brien, 'that if we met
again it would be here.' 'Yes,' said Winston. Without any warning except a slight movement
of O'Brien's hand, a wave of pain flooded his body. It was a frightening pain, because he could
not see what was happening, and he had the feeling that some mortal injury was being
done to him. He did not know whether the thing was really
happening, or whether the effect was electrically produced; but his body was being wrenched
out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart. Although the pain had brought the sweat out
on his forehead, the worst of all was the fear that his backbone was about to snap. He set his teeth and breathed hard through
his nose, trying to keep silent as long as possible. 'You are afraid,' said O'Brien, watching his
face, 'that in another moment something is going to break. Your especial fear is that it will be your
backbone. You have a vivid mental picture of the vertebrae
snapping apart and the spinal fluid dripping out of them. That is what you are thinking, is it not,
Winston?' Winston did not answer. O'Brien drew back the lever on the dial. The wave of pain receded almost as quickly
as it had come. 'That was forty,' said O'Brien. 'You can see that the numbers on this dial
run up to a hundred. Will you please remember, throughout our conversation,
that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you at any moment and to whatever degree
I choose? If you tell me any lies, or attempt to prevaricate
in any way, or even fall below your usual level of intelligence, you will cry out with
pain, instantly. Do you understand that?' 'Yes,' said Winston. O'Brien's manner became less severe. He resettled his spectacles thoughtfully,
and took a pace or two up and down. When he spoke his voice was gentle and patient. He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even
a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish. 'I am taking trouble with you, Winston,' he
said, 'because you are worth trouble. You know perfectly well what is the matter
with you. You have known it for years, though you have
fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events and
you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened. Fortunately it is curable. You have never cured yourself of it, because
you did not choose to. There was a small effort of the will that
you were not ready to make. Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging
to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue. Now we will take an example. At this moment, which power is Oceania at
war with?' 'When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with
Eastasia.' 'With Eastasia. Good. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia,
has it not?' Winston drew in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak and then did
not speak. He could not take his eyes away from the dial. 'The truth, please, Winston. Your truth. Tell me what you think you remember.' 'I remember that until only a week before
I was arrested, we were not at war with Eastasia at all. We were in alliance with them. The war was against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. Before that—' O'Brien stopped him with a movement of the
hand. 'Another example,' he said. 'Some years ago you had a very serious delusion
indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time
Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford men who were executed for treachery and sabotage
after making the fullest possible confession — were not guilty of the crimes they were
charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable
documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which
you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it
in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.' An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between
O'Brien's fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the
angle of Winston's vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question
of its identity. It was THE photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones,
Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven
years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes,
then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had
seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench
the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre
in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in
his fingers again, or at least to see it. 'It exists!' he cried. 'No,' said O'Brien. He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling
away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O'Brien turned away from the wall. 'Ashes,' he said. 'Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.' 'But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.' 'I do not remember it,' said O'Brien. Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien
was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien
had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten
his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind
could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him. O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher
taking pains with a wayward but promising child. 'There is a Party slogan dealing with the
control of the past,' he said. 'Repeat it, if you please.' '"Who controls the past controls the future:
who controls the present controls the past,"' repeated Winston obediently. "'Who controls the present controls the past,"'
said O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. 'Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past
has real existence?' Again the feeling of helplessness descended
upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether 'yes' or
'no' was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he
believed to be the true one. O'Brien smiled faintly. 'You are no metaphysician, Winston,' he said. 'Until this moment you had never considered
what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world
of solid objects, where the past is still happening?' 'No.' 'Then where does the past exist, if at all?' 'In records. It is written down.' 'In records. And—?' 'In the mind. In human memories.' 'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we
control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?' 'But how can you stop people remembering things?' cried Winston again momentarily forgetting
the dial. 'It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!' O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial. 'On the contrary,' he said, 'you have not
controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility,
in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which
is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority
of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality,
Winston. You believe that reality is something objective,
external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality
is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that
you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not
external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere
else. Not in the individual mind, which can make
mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective
and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth,
is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by
looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn,
Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort
of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become
sane.' He paused for a few moments, as though to
allow what he had been saying to sink in. 'Do you remember,' he went on, 'writing in
your diary, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four"?' 'Yes,' said Winston. O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards
Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. 'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?' 'Four.' 'And if the party says that it is not four
but five — then how many?' 'Four.' The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's
body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again
in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still
extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased. 'How many fingers, Winston?' 'Four.' The needle went up to sixty. 'How many fingers, Winston?' 'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!' The needle must have risen again, but he did
not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers
filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like
pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four. 'How many fingers, Winston?' 'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!' 'How many fingers, Winston?' 'Five! Five! Five!' 'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?' 'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!' Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brien's
arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few
seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were
loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably,
his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby,
curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector,
that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that
it was O'Brien who would save him from it. 'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien
gently. 'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front of
my eyes? Two and two are four.' 'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.' He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbs tightened again, but
the pain had ebbed away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold. O'Brien motioned with his head to the man
in the white coat, who had stood immobile throughout the proceedings. The man in the white coat bent down and looked
closely into Winston's eyes, felt his pulse, laid an ear against his chest, tapped here
and there, then he nodded to O'Brien. 'Again,' said O'Brien. The pain flowed into Winston's body. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there,
and still four. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive
until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whether he was crying
out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O'Brien had drawn back the lever. 'How many fingers, Winston?' 'Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.' 'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you
see five, or really to see them?' 'Really to see them.' 'Again,' said O'Brien. Perhaps the needle was eighty — ninety. Winston could not intermittently remember
why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of
fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one
another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not
remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count
them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that
he was still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were
still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again. 'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?' 'I don't know. I don't know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six — in all honesty I don't
know.' 'Better,' said O'Brien. A needle slid into Winston's arm. Almost in the same instant a blissful, healing
warmth spread all through his body. The pain was already half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully
at O'Brien. At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly
and so intelligent, his heart seemed to turn over. If he could have moved he would have stretched
out a hand and laid it on O'Brien arm. He had never loved him so deeply as at this
moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling, that at bottom it did not
matter whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back. O'Brien was a person who could be talked to. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much
as to be understood. O'Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy,
and in a little while, it was certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference. In some sense that went deeper than friendship,
they were intimates: somewhere or other, although the actual words might never be spoken, there
was a place where they could meet and talk. O'Brien was looking down at him with an expression
which suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind. When he spoke it was in an easy, conversational
tone. 'Do you know where you are, Winston?' he said. 'I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.' 'Do you know how long you have been here?' 'I don't know. Days, weeks, months — I think it is months.' 'And why do you imagine that we bring people
to this place?' 'To make them confess.' 'No, that is not the reason. Try again.' 'To punish them.' 'No!' exclaimed O'Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and
his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. 'No! Not merely to extract your confession, not
to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one
whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes
that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act:
the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change
them. Do you understand what I mean by that?' He was bending over Winston. His face looked enormous because of its nearness,
and hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover it was filled with a sort of exaltation,
a lunatic intensity. Again Winston's heart shrank. If it had been possible he would have cowered
deeper into the bed. He felt certain that O'Brien was about to
twist the dial out of sheer wantonness. At this moment, however, O'Brien turned away. He took a pace or two up and down. Then he continued less vehemently: 'The first thing for you to understand is
that in this place there are no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions
of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisitlon. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended
by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake,
thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies
in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them
because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon
their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim
and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were
the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian
Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly
than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from
the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public
trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude
until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths,
covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering
for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing
had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their
degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions
that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here
are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to
rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will
vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream
of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into
the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in
a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well
as in the future. You will never have existed.' Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a momentary bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as though Winston
had uttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came nearer, with the
eyes a little narrowed. 'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we
intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference
— in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first? That is what you were thinking, was it not?' 'Yes,' said Winston. O'Brien smiled slightly. 'You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different
from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience,
nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must
be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists
us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind,
we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him;
we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill
him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous
thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit
any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the
stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could
carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the
bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow
it out. The command of the old despotisms was "Thou
shalt not". The command of the totalitarians was "Thou
shalt". Our command is "Thou art". No one whom we bring to this place ever stands
out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those three miserable traitors in whose
innocence you once believed — Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford — in the end we broke them
down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering,
grovelling, weeping — and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with them they
were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow
for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they
could die while their minds were still clean.' His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was
still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston, he
is not a hypocrite, he believes every word he says. What most oppressed him was the consciousness
of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched the heavy yet graceful form strolling
to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision. O'Brien was a being in all ways larger than
himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or
could have, that O'Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind contained Winston's mind. But in that case how could it be true that
O'Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had grown stern again. 'Do not imagine that you will save yourself,
Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the
natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from
which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could
not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary
human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or
friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall
fill you with ourselves.' He paused and signed to the man in the white
coat. Winston was aware of some heavy piece of apparatus
being pushed into place behind his head. O'Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that
his face was almost on a level with Winston's. 'Three thousand,' he said, speaking over Winston's
head to the man in the white coat. Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist,
clamped themselves against Winston's temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O'Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly,
on his. 'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes fixed on mine.' At this moment there was a devastating explosion,
or what seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of
light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his
back when the thing happened, he had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that
position. A terrific painless blow had flattened him
out. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he remembered
who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was gazing into his own; but
somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken
out of his brain. 'It will not last,' said O'Brien. 'Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?' Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania and that
he himself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but
who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was
any war. 'I don't remember.' 'Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that now?' 'Yes.' 'Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the
beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without
a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?' 'Yes.' 'Eleven years ago you created a legend about
three men who had been condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece of
paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe
in it. You remember now the very moment at which
you first invented it. Do you remember that?' 'Yes.' 'Just now I held up the fingers of my hand
to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?' 'Yes.' O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand,
with the thumb concealed. 'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?' 'Yes.' And he did see them, for a fleeting instant,
before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the
old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment — he did not
know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps — of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion
of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and
two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded but before O'Brien had dropped
his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers
a vivid experience at some period of one's life when one was in effect a different person. 'You see now,' said O'Brien, 'that it is at
any rate possible.' 'Yes,' said Winston. O'Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left Winston saw the man in the
white coat break an ampoule and draw back the plunger of a syringe. O'Brien turned to Winston with a smile. In almost the old manner he resettled his
spectacles on his nose. 'Do you remember writing in your diary,' he
said, 'that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least
a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen
to be insane. Before we bring the session to an end you
can ask me a few questions, if you choose.' 'Any question I like?' 'Anything.' He saw that Winston's eyes were upon the dial. 'It is switched off. What is your first question?' 'What have you done with Julia?' said Winston. O'Brien smiled again. 'She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately-unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us
so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw
her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly,
her dirty-mindedness — everything has been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.' 'You tortured her?' O'Brien left this unanswered. 'Next question,' he said. 'Does Big Brother exist?' 'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.' 'Does he exist in the same way as I exist?' 'You do not exist,' said O'Brien. Once again the sense of helplessness assailed
him. He knew, or he could imagine, the arguments
which proved his own nonexistence; but they were nonsense, they were only a play on words. Did not the statement, 'You do not exist',
contain a logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so? His mind shrivelled as he thought of the unanswerable,
mad arguments with which O'Brien would demolish him. 'I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity. I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same
point simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?' 'It is of no importance. He exists.' 'Will Big Brother ever die?' 'Of course not. How could he die? Next question.' 'Does the Brotherhood exist?' 'That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have
finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether
the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved
riddle in your mind.' Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little faster. He still had not asked the question that had
come into his mind the first. He had got to ask it, and yet it was as though
his tongue would not utter it. There was a trace of amusement in O'Brien's
face. Even his spectacles seemed to wear an ironical
gleam. He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows
what I am going to ask! At the thought the words burst out of him: 'What is in Room 101?' The expression on O'Brien's face did not change. He answered drily: 'You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.' He raised a finger to the man in the white
coat. Evidently the session was at an end. A needle jerked into Winston's arm. He sank almost instantly into deep sleep. Chapter : 3 'There are three stages in your reintegration,'
said O'Brien. 'There is learning, there is understanding,
and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second
stage.' As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his bonds were looser. They still held him to the bed, but he could
move his knees a little and could turn his head from side to side and raise his arms
from the elbow. The dial, also, had grown to be less of a
terror. He could evade its pangs if he was quick-witted
enough: it was chiefly when he showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they got through a whole session
without use of the dial. He could not remember how many sessions there
had been. The whole process seemed to stretch out over
a long, indefinite time — weeks, possibly — and the intervals between the sessions
might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or two. 'As you lie there,' said O'Brien, 'you have
often wondered — you have even asked me — why the Ministry of Love should expend
so much time and trouble on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by
what was essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the Society
you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, "I
understand how: I do not understand why"? It was when you thought about "why" that you
doubted your own sanity. You have read the book, Goldstein's book,
or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that you did not
know already?' 'You have read it?' said Winston. 'I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing
it. No book is produced individually, as you know.' 'Is it true, what it says?' 'A description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret accumulation of knowledge — a
gradual spread of enlightenment — ultimately a proletarian rebellion — the overthrow
of the Party. You foresaw yourself that that was what it
would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians will never revolt, not in
a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason: you
know it already. If you have ever cherished any dreams of violent
insurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way in which the Party can be
overthrown. The rule of the Party is for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.' He came closer to the bed. 'For ever!' he repeated. 'And now let us get back to the question of
"how" and "why". You understand well enough how the Party maintains
itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak,' he added as Winston remained
silent. Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another
moment or two. A feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come
back into O'Brien's face. He knew in advance what O'Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its
own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass
were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must
be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom
and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the party was the eternal guardian of
the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness
to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible
thing was that when O'Brien said this he would believe it. You could see it in his face. O'Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew
what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what
lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had understood it all, weighed it all,
and it made no difference: all was justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston, against
the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and
then simply persists in his lunacy? 'You are ruling over us for our own good,'
he said feebly. 'You believe that human beings are not fit
to govern themselves, and therefore—' He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up
to thirty-five. 'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should know better than to say a thing
like that.' He pulled the lever back and continued: 'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own
sake. We are not interested in the good of others;
we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness:
only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand
presently. We are different from all the oligarchies
of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves,
were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists
came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their
own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed,
that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the
corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with
the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order
to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?' Winston was struck, as he had been struck
before, by the tiredness of O'Brien's face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was
full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless;
but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin
sagged from the cheekbones. O'Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing
the worn face nearer. 'You are thinking,' he said, 'that my face
is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and
yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the
individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of
the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?' He turned away from the bed and began strolling
up and down again, one hand in his pocket. 'We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But at present power is only a word so far
as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of
what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power
is collective. The individual only has power in so far as
he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery". Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone — free — the human being is always
defeated. It must be so, because every human being is
doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission,
if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he
is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that
power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter — external reality, as
you would call it — is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.' For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise himself
into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully. 'But how can you control matter?' he burst
out. 'You don't even control the climate or the
law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death—' O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his
hand. 'We control matter because we control the
mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation — anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble
if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not
wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century
ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.' 'But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.' 'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it
make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.' 'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.' 'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.' 'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct
animals — mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man
was ever heard of.' 'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there
would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.' 'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.' 'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.' Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken
objection: 'For certain purposes, of course, that is
not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict
an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and
that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce
a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according
as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal
to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?' Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed
him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the
right. The belief that nothing exists outside your
own mind — surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had
forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's
mouth as he looked down at him. 'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics
is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the
opposite thing. All this is a digression,' he added in a different
tone. 'The real power, the power we have to fight
for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again
his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power
over another, Winston?' Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said. 'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure
that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces
and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world
we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic
Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment,
a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more
merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards
more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were
founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except
fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of
thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent,
and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a
friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and
no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers
at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like
the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards
the Party. There will be no love, except the love of
Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh
of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more
need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty
and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of
the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston
— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly
growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the
thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine
a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.' He paused as though he expected Winston to
speak. Winston had tried to shrink back into the
surface of the bed again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien went on: 'And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped
upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always
be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you
have been in our hands — all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests,
the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a
world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it
will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated,
discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you
during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation,
always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our
mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible — and in the end utterly penitent, saved
from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph
after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what
that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand
it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part
of it.' Winston had recovered himself sufficiently
to speak. 'You can't!' he said weakly. 'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?' 'You could not create such a world as you
have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.' 'Why?' 'It is impossible to found a civilization
on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.' 'Why not?' 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.' 'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is
more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that
make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out
faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human
life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the
individual is not death? The party is immortal.' As usual, the voice had battered Winston into
helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted
in his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to
support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien had said, he returned to the
attack. 'I don't know — I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.' 'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something
called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea
that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside — irrelevant.' 'I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what
you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.' 'Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it should?' 'No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe — I don't
know, some spirit, some principle — that you will never overcome.' 'Do you believe in God, Winston?' 'No.' 'Then what is it, this principle that will
defeat us?' 'I don't know. The spirit of Man.' 'And do you consider yourself a man?.' 'Yes.' 'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last
man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent.' His manner changed and he said more harshly:
'And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?' 'Yes, I consider myself superior.' O'Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment Winston recognized one of them
as his own. It was a sound-track of the conversation he
had had with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal,
to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal
diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face. O'Brien made a small impatient gesture, as
though to say that the demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped. 'Get up from that bed,' he said. The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself to the floor and stood
up unsteadily. 'You are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the guardian of the human spirit. You shall see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes.' Winston undid the bit of string that held
his overalls together. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched
out of them. He could not remember whether at any time
since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped with
filthy yellowish rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid them to the ground he saw that
there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room. He approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him. 'Go on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall see the side view as well.' He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing
was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and
not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature's face seemed to be protruded,
because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird's face with a nobby forehead
running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above
which his eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in
look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed
to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different
from the ones he felt. He had gone partially bald. For the first moment he had thought that he
had gone grey as well, but it was only the scalp that was grey. Except for his hands and a circle of his face,
his body was grey all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here and there under the dirt there were the
red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes
of skin peeling off it. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation
of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that
of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. He saw now what O'Brien had meant about seeing
the side view. The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so
as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the
weight of the skull. At a guess he would have said that it was
the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease. 'You have thought sometimes,' said O'Brien,
'that my face — the face of a member of the Inner Party — looks old and worn. What do you think of your own face?' He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him
round so that he was facing him. 'Look at the condition you are in!' he said. 'Look at this filthy grime all over your body. Look at the dirt between your toes. Look at that disgusting running sore on your
leg. Do you know that you stink like a goat? Probably you have ceased to notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see? I can make my thumb and forefinger meet round
your bicep. I could snap your neck like a carrot. Do you know that you have lost twenty-five
kilograms since you have been in our hands? Even your hair is coming out in handfuls. Look!' He plucked at Winston's head and brought away
a tuft of hair. 'Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How many had you when you came to us? And the few you have left are dropping out
of your head. Look here!' He seized one of Winston's remaining front
teeth between his powerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston's jaw. O'Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out by
the roots. He tossed it across the cell. 'You are rotting away,' he said; 'you are
falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror
again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.' Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff
movements. Until now he had not seemed to notice how
thin and weak he was. Only one thought stirred in his mind: that
he must have been in this place longer than he had imagined. Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags
round himself a feeling of pity for his ruined body overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing he had collapsed
on to a small stool that stood beside the bed and burst into tears. He was aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness,
a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh white light: but he could
not stop himself. O'Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost
kindly. 'It will not last for ever,' he said. 'You can escape from it whenever you choose. Everything depends on yourself.' 'You did it!' sobbed Winston. 'You reduced me to this state.' 'No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you set yourself
up against the Party. It was all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee.' He paused, and then went on: 'We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You have seen what your body is like. Your mind is in the same state. I do not think there can be much pride left
in you. You have been kicked and flogged and insulted,
you have screamed with pain, you have rolled on the floor in your own blood and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed
everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation that
has not happened to you?' Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears
were still oozing out of his eyes. He looked up at O'Brien. 'I have not betrayed Julia,' he said. O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. 'No,' he said; 'no; that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.' The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which
nothing seemed able to destroy, flooded Winston's heart again. How intelligent, he thought, how intelligent! Never did O'Brien fail to understand what
was said to him. Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly
that he had betrayed Julia. For what was there that they had not screwed
out of him under the torture? He had told them everything he knew about
her, her habits, her character, her past life; he had confessed in the most trivial detail
everything that had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to her and she to him,
their black-market meals, their adulteries, their vague plottings against the Party — everything. And yet, in the sense in which he intended
the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not stopped loving her; his feelings
towards her had remained the same. O'Brien had seen what he meant without the
need for explanation. 'Tell me,' he said, 'how soon will they shoot
me?' 'It might be a long time,' said O'Brien. 'You are a difficult case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.' Chapter : 4 He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger every day,
if it was proper to speak of days. The white light and the humming sound were
the same as ever, but the cell was a little more comfortable than the others he had been
in. There was a pillow and a mattress on the plank
bed, and a stool to sit on. They had given him a bath, and they allowed
him to wash himself fairly frequently in a tin basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They had given him new underclothes and a
clean suit of overalls. They had dressed his varicose ulcer with soothing
ointment. They had pulled out the remnants of his teeth
and given him a new set of dentures. Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to keep count
of the passage of time, if he had felt any interest in doing so, since he was being fed
at what appeared to be regular intervals. He was getting, he judged, three meals in
the twenty-four hours; sometimes he wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night
or by day. The food was surprisingly good, with meat
at every third meal. Once there was even a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but the never-speaking
guard who brought his food would give him a light. The first time he tried to smoke it made him
sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out for a long time, smoking half a cigarette
after each meal. They had given him a white slate with a stump
of pencil tied to the corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he was awake he was completely torpid. Often he would lie from one meal to the next
almost without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries in which
it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He had long grown used to sleeping with a
strong light on his face. It seemed to make no difference, except that
one's dreams were more coherent. He dreamed a great deal all through this time,
and they were always happy dreams. He was in the Golden Country, or he was sitting
among enormous glorious, sunlit ruins, with his mother, with Julia, with O'Brien — not
doing anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such thoughts as he had when he was awake
were mostly about his dreams. He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual
effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no desire for conversation
or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned,
to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying. By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep,
but he still felt no impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was to lie quiet and feel
the strength gathering in his body. He would finger himself here and there, trying
to make sure that it was not an illusion that his muscles were growing rounder and his skin
tauter. Finally it was established beyond a doubt
that he was growing fatter; his thighs were now definitely thicker than his knees. After that, reluctantly at first, he began
exercising himself regularly. In a little while he could walk three kilometres,
measured by pacing the cell, and his bowed shoulders were growing straighter. He attempted more elaborate exercises, and
was astonished and humiliated to find what things he could not do. He could not move out of a walk, he could
not hold his stool out at arm's length, he could not stand on one leg without falling
over. He squatted down on his heels, and found that
with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he could just lift himself to a standing position. He lay flat on his belly and tried to lift
his weight by his hands. It was hopeless, he could not raise himself
a centimetre. But after a few more days — a few more mealtimes
— even that feat was accomplished. A time came when he could do it six times
running. He began to grow actually proud of his body,
and to cherish an intermittent belief that his face also was growing back to normal. Only when he chanced to put his hand on his
bald scalp did he remember the seamed, ruined face that had looked back at him out of the
mirror. His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank bed, his back against
the wall and the slate on his knees, and set to work deliberately at the task of re-educating
himself. He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now, he had been ready
to capitulate long before he had taken the decision. From the moment when he was inside the Ministry
of Love — and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while
the iron voice from the telescreen told them what to do — he had grasped the frivolity,
the shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power of the Party. He knew now that for seven years the Thought
police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word spoken
aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to
infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover
of his diary they had carefully replaced. They had played sound-tracks to him, shown
him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia and
himself. Yes, even... He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective
brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check
its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think
as they thought. Only—! The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down the thoughts that came
into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals: FREEDOM IS SLAVERY Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath
it: TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though shying away from something,
seemed unable to concentrate. He knew that he knew what came next, but for
the moment he could not recall it. When he did recall it, it was only by consciously
reasoning out what it must be: it did not come of its own accord. He wrote: GOD IS POWER He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty
of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved
their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things,
but those were false memories, products of self-deception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that
swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and
go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude:
the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except—! Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could
float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and
if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage
breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside
oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through
our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens. He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy,
and he was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never
to have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever
a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak. He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions — 'the
Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water' — and
trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for instance,
by such a statement as 'two and two make five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind,
an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be
unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence,
and as difficult to attain. All the while, with one part of his mind,
he wondered how soon they would shoot him. 'Everything depends on yourself,' O'Brien
had said; but he knew that there was no conscious act by which he could bring it nearer. It might be ten minutes hence, or ten years. They might keep him for years in solitary
confinement, they might send him to a labour-camp, they might release him for a while, as they
sometimes did. It was perfectly possible that before he was
shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation would be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that death never
came at an expected moment. The tradition — the unspoken tradition:
somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said — was that they shot you from behind;
always in the back of the head, without warning, as you walked down a corridor from cell to
cell. One day — but 'one day' was not the right
expression; just as probably it was in the middle of the night: once — he fell into
a strange, blissful reverie. He was walking down the corridor, waiting
for the bullet. He knew that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed out, reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments,
no more pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He walked easily, with a joy of movement and
with a feeling of walking in sunlight. He was not any longer in the narrow white
corridors in the Ministry of Love, he was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre
wide, down which he had seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He was in the Golden Country, following the
foot-track across the old rabbit-cropped pasture. He could feel the short springy turf under
his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face. At the edge of the field were the elm trees,
faintly stirring, and somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dace lay in the green
pools under the willows. Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat broke out on his backbone. He had heard himself cry aloud: 'Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!' For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination
of her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him,
but inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture
of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than
he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he knew that somewhere or other she was
still alive and needed his help. He lay back on the bed and tried to compose
himself. What had he done? How many years had he added to his servitude
by that moment of weakness? In another moment he would hear the tramp
of boots outside. They could not let such an outburst go unpunished. They would know now, if they had not known
before, that he was breaking the agreement he had made with them. He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the
Party. In the old days he had hidden a heretical
mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had retreated a step further: in the
mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but he preferred
to be in the wrong. They would understand that — O'Brien would
understand it. It was all confessed in that single foolish
cry. He would have to start all over again. It might take years. He ran a hand over his face, trying to familiarize
himself with the new shape. There were deep furrows in the cheeks, the
cheekbones felt sharp, the nose flattened. Besides, since last seeing himself in the
glass he had been given a complete new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve inscrutability
when you did not know what your face looked like. In any case, mere control of the features
was not enough. For the first time he perceived that if you
want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there,
but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape
that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right;
he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred
locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected
with the rest of him, a kind of cyst. One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would happen, but
a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking down a
corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world inside him could turn
over. And then suddenly, without a word uttered,
without a check in his step, without the changing of a line in his face — suddenly the camouflage
would be down and bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an enormous roaring
flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would
go the bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces
before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished,
unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in their own
perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom. He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual
discipline. It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating
himself. He had got to plunge into the filthiest of
filth. What was the most horrible, sickening thing
of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous face (because of constantly seeing
it on posters he always thought of it as being a metre wide), with its heavy black moustache
and the eyes that followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of its own accord. What were his true feelings towards Big Brother? There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel door swung open with a clang. O'Brien walked into the cell. Behind him were the waxen-faced officer and
the black-uniformed guards. 'Get up,' said O'Brien. 'Come here.' Winston stood opposite him. O'Brien took Winston's shoulders between his
strong hands and looked at him closely. 'You have had thoughts of deceiving me,' he
said. 'That was stupid. Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.' He paused, and went on in a gentler tone: 'You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong
with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed
to make progress. Tell me, Winston — and remember, no lies:
you know that I am always able to detect a lie — tell me, what are your true feelings
towards Big Brother?' 'I hate him.' 'You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the
last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love
him.' He released Winston with a little push towards
the guards. 'Room 101,' he said. Chapter : 5 At each stage of his imprisonment he had known,
or seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building. Possibly there were slight differences in
the air pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him
were below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated by
O'Brien was high up near the roof. This place was many metres underground, as
deep down as it was possible to go. It was bigger than most of the cells he had
been in. But he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were two small
tables straight in front of him, each covered with green baize. One was only a metre or two from him, the
other was further away, near the door. He was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly
that he could move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind,
forcing him to look straight in front of him. For a moment he was alone, then the door opened
and O'Brien came in. 'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was
in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst
thing in the world.' The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of
wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was
standing. Winston could not see what the thing was. 'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien,
'varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire,
or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial
thing, not even fatal.' He had moved a little to one side, so that
Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on
top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that
looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away
from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that
there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats. 'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing
in the world happens to be rats.' A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he
was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of
the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like
attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water. 'You can't do that!' he cried out in a high
cracked voice. 'You couldn't, you couldn't! It's impossible.' 'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment
of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of
you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other
side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you
dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side
of the wall.' 'O'Brien!' said Winston, making an effort
to control his voice. 'You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?' O'Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish
manner that he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the distance,
as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind Winston's back. 'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always
enough. There are occasions when a human being will
stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable
— something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not
cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is
not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot
withstand. even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you. 'But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don't know what it is?' O'Brien picked up the cage and brought it
across to the nearer table. He set it down carefully on the baize cloth. Winston could hear the blood singing in his
ears. He had the feeling of sitting in utter loneliness. He was in the middle of a great empty plain,
a flat desert drenched with sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out of immense
distances. Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres
away from him. They were enormous rats. They were at the age when a rat's muzzle grows
blunt and fierce and his fur brown instead of grey. 'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing
his invisible audience, 'although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have heard of the things that happen
in the poor quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her
baby alone in the house, even for five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will strip
it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing
when a human being is helpless.' There was an outburst of squeals from the
cage. It seemed to reach Winston from far away. The rats were fighting; they were trying to
get at each other through the partition. He heard also a deep groan of despair. That, too, seemed to come from outside himself. O'Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did
so, pressed something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself
loose from the chair. It was hopeless; every part of him, even his
head, was held immovably. O'Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a metre from Winston's face. 'I have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving
no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of
the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it
like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the
air? They will leap on to your face and bore straight
into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and
devour the tongue.' The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of shrill cries
which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with a split second
left — to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes
struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside
him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming
animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching
an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the
body of another human being, between himself and the rats. The circle of the mask was large enough now
to shut out the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from
his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down, the other,
an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars,
and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow
teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless. 'It was a common punishment in Imperial China,'
said O'Brien as didactically as ever. The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then — no, it was not relief, only hope,
a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the
whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment — one body
that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and
over. 'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!' He was falling backwards, into enormous depths,
away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he
had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth,
through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the
stars — always away, away, away from the rats. He was light years distant, but O'Brien was
still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of wire against
his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him
he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and not
open. Chapter : 6 The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window
fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens. Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into
an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face
which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass
up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through
the cork. It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the
speciality of the café. Winston was listening to the telescreen. At present only music was coming out of it,
but there was a possibility that at any moment there might be a special bulletin from the
Ministry of Peace. The news from the African front was disquieting
in the extreme. On and off he had been worrying about it all
day. A Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with Eurasia:
Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia) was moving southward at terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin had not mentioned any
definite area, but it was probable that already the mouth of the Congo was a battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger. One did not have to look at the map to see
what it meant. It was not merely a question of losing Central
Africa: for the first time in the whole war, the territory of Oceania itself was menaced. A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a
sort of undifferentiated excitement, flared up in him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about the war. In these days he could never fix his mind
on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at a
gulp. As always, the gin made him shudder and even
retch slightly. The stuff was horrible. The cloves and saccharine, themselves disgusting
enough in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell; and what was worst of
all was that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him night and day, was inextricably mixed
up in his mind with the smell of those— He never named them, even in his thoughts,
and so far as it was possible he never visualized them. They were something that he was half-aware
of, hovering close to his face, a smell that clung to his nostrils. As the gin rose in him he belched through
purple lips. He had grown fatter since they released him,
and had regained his old colour — indeed, more than regained it. His features had thickened, the skin on nose
and cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald scalp was too deep a pink. A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard
and the current issue of the Times, with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston's glass was empty,
he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always waiting for him,
his corner table was always reserved; even when the place was full he had it to himself,
since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him. He never even bothered to count his drinks. At irregular intervals they presented him
with a dirty slip of paper which they said was the bill, but he had the impression that
they always undercharged him. It would have made no difference if it had
been the other way about. He had always plenty of money nowadays. He even had a job, a sinecure, more highly-paid
than his old job had been. The music from the telescreen stopped and
a voice took over. Winston raised his head to listen. No bulletins from the front, however. It was merely a brief announcement from the
Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter, it appeared, the
Tenth Three-Year Plan's quota for bootlaces had been overfulfilled by 98 per cent. He examined the chess problem and set out
the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple
of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort
of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of
the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying
triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm
power. White always mates. The voice from the telescreen paused and added
in a different and much graver tone: 'You are warned to stand by for an important announcement
at fifteen-thirty. Fifteen-thirty! This is news of the highest importance. Take care not to miss it. Fifteen-thirty!' The tinking music struck up again. Winston's heart stirred. That was the bulletin from the front; instinct
told him that it was bad news that was coming. All day, with little spurts of excitement,
the thought of a smashing defeat in Africa had been in and out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Eurasian army
swarming across the never-broken frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa like
a column of ants. Why had it not been possible to outflank them
in some way? The outline of the West African coast stood
out vividly in his mind. He picked up the white knight and moved it
across the board. There was the proper spot. Even while he saw the black horde racing southward
he saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear, cutting their
comunications by land and sea. He felt that by willing it he was bringing
that other force into existence. But it was necessary to act quickly. If they could get control of the whole of
Africa, if they had airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in
two. It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown,
the redivision of the world, the destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath. An extraordinary medley of feeling — but
it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one
could not say which layer was undermost — struggled inside him. The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place,
but for the moment he could not settle down to serious study of the chess problem. His thoughts wandered again. Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger
in the dust on the table: 2 + 2 = 5 'They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you. 'What happens to you here is for ever,' O'Brien
had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which
you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt
out, cauterized out. He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no danger in it. He knew as though instinctively that they
now took almost no interest in his doings. He could have arranged to meet her a second
time if either of them had wanted to. Actually it was by chance that they had met. It was in the Park, on a vile, biting day
in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not
a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered
by the wind. He was hurrying along with frozen hands and
watering eyes when he saw her not ten metres away from him. It struck him at once that she had changed
in some ill-defined way. They almost passed one another without a sign,
then he turned and followed her, not very eagerly. He knew that there was no danger, nobody would
take any interest in him. She did not speak. She walked obliquely away across the grass
as though trying to get rid of him, then seemed to resign herself to having him at her side. Presently they were in among a clump of ragged
leafless shrubs, useless either for concealment or as protection from the wind. They halted. It was vilely cold. The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted
the occasional, dirty-looking crocuses. He put his arm round her waist. There was no telescreen, but there must be
hidden microphones: besides, they could be seen. It did not matter, nothing mattered. They could have lain down on the ground and
done that if they had wanted to. His flesh froze with horror at the thought
of it. She made no response whatever to the clasp
of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself. He knew now what had changed in her. Her face was sallower, and there was a long
scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that was not the
change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and,
in a surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion
of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had been astonished
not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle,
which made it seem more like stone than flesh. Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture of her
skin would be quite different from what it had once been. He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they
speak. As they walked back across the grass, she
looked directly at him for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of contempt
and dislike. He wondered whether it was a dislike that
came purely out of the past or whether it was inspired also by his bloated face and
the water that the wind kept squeezing from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by
side but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak. She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres
and deliberately crushed a twig. Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he
noticed. 'I betrayed you,' she said baldly. 'I betrayed you,' he said. She gave him another quick look of dislike. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you
with something something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "don't do it to me, do it
to somebody else, do it to so-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards,
that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really
mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself,
and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.' 'All you care about is yourself,' he echoed. 'And after that, you don't feel the same towards
the other person any longer.' 'No,' he said, 'you don't feel the same.' There did not seem to be anything more to
say. The wind plastered their thin overalls against
their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing to sit
there in silence: besides, it was too cold to keep still. She said something about catching her Tube
and stood up to go. 'We must meet again,' he said. 'Yes,' she said, 'we must meet again.' He followed irresolutely for a little distance,
half a pace behind her. They did not speak again. She did not actually try to shake him off,
but walked at just such a speed as to prevent his keeping abreast of her. He had made up his mind that he would accompany
her as far as the Tube station, but suddenly this process of trailing along in the cold
seemed pointless and unbearable. He was overwhelmed by a desire not so much
to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree Café, which had never seemed
so attractive as at this moment. He had a nostalgic vision of his corner table,
with the newspaper and the chessboard and the ever-flowing gin. Above all, it would be warm in there. The next moment, not altogether by accident,
he allowed himself to become separated from her by a small knot of people. He made a halfhearted attempt to catch up,
then slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite direction. When he had gone fifty metres he looked back. The street was not crowded, but already he
could not distinguish her. Any one of a dozen hurrying figures might
have been hers. Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was
no longer recognizable from behind. 'At the time when it happens,' she had said,
'you do mean it.' He had meant it. He had not merely said it, he had wished it. He had wished that she and not he should be
delivered over to the— Something changed in the music that trickled
from the telescreen. A cracked and jeering note, a yellow note,
came into it. And then — perhaps it was not happening,
perhaps it was only a memory taking on the semblance of sound — a voice was singing: Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me — The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed that his glass was
empty and came back with the gin bottle. He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but more horrible
with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin that sank him into stupor every
night, and gin that revived him every morning. When he woke, seldom before eleven hundred,
with gummed-up eyelids and fiery mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would
have been impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the bottle
and teacup placed beside the bed overnight. Through the midday hours he sat with glazed
face, the bottle handy, listening to the telescreen. From fifteen to closing-time he was a fixture
in the Chestnut Tree. No one cared what he did any longer, no whistle
woke him, no telescreen admonished him. Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went
to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of Truth and did a little work, or
what was called work. He had been appointed to a sub-committee of
a sub-committee which had sprouted from one of the innumerable committees dealing with
minor difficulties that arose in the compilation of the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. They were engaged in producing something called
an Interim Report, but what it was that they were reporting on he had never definitely
found out. It was something to do with the question of
whether commas should be placed inside brackets, or outside. There were four others on the committee, all
of them persons similar to himself. There were days when they assembled and then
promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to one another that there was not really anything
to be done. But there were other days when they settled
down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show of entering up their minutes
and drafting long memoranda which were never finished — when the argument as to what
they were supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling
over definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels — threats, even, to appeal to higher authority. And then suddenly the life would go out of
them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts
fading at cock-crow. The telescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his head again. The bulletin! But no, they were merely changing the music. He had the map of Africa behind his eyelids. The movement of the armies was a diagram:
a black arrow tearing vertically southward, and a white arrow horizontally eastward, across
the tail of the first. As though for reassurance he looked up at
the imperturbable face in the portrait. Was it conceivable that the second arrow did
not even exist? His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of gin, picked up
the white knight and made a tentative move. Check. But it was evidently not the right move, because— Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a candle-lit room with a vast white-counterpaned
bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on the floor, shaking a dice-box, and laughing
excitedly. His mother was sitting opposite him and also
laughing. It must have been about a month before she
disappeared. It was a moment of reconciliation, when the
nagging hunger in his belly was forgotten and his earlier affection for her had temporarily
revived. He remembered the day well, a pelting, drenching
day when the water streamed down the window-pane and the light indoors was too dull to read
by. The boredom of the two children in the dark,
cramped bedroom became unbearable. Winston whined and grizzled, made futile demands
for food, fretted about the room pulling everything out of place and kicking the wainscoting until
the neighbours banged on the wall, while the younger child wailed intermittently. In the end his mother said, 'Now be good,
and I'Il buy you a toy. A lovely toy — you'll love it'; and then
she had gone out in the rain, to a little general shop which was still sporadically
open nearby, and came back with a cardboard box containing an outfit of Snakes and Ladders. He could still remember the smell of the damp
cardboard. It was a miserable outfit. The board was cracked and the tiny wooden
dice were so ill-cut that they would hardly lie on their sides. Winston looked at the thing sulkily and without
interest. But then his mother lit a piece of candle
and they sat down on the floor to play. Soon he was wildly excited and shouting with
laughter as the tiddly-winks climbed hopefully up the ladders and then came slithering down
the snakes again, almost to the starting-point. They played eight games, winning four each. His tiny sister, too young to understand what
the game was about, had sat propped up against a bolster, laughing because the others were
laughing. For a whole afternoon they had all been happy
together, as in his earlier childhood. He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knew them
for what they were. Some things had happened, others had not happened. He turned back to the chessboard and picked
up the white knight again. Almost in the same instant it dropped on to
the board with a clatter. He had started as though a pin had run into
him. A shrill trumpet-call had pierced the air. It was the bulletin! Victory! It always meant victory when a trumpet-call
preceded the news. A sort of electric drill ran through the café. Even the waiters had started and pricked up
their ears. The trumpet-call had let loose an enormous
volume of noise. Already an excited voice was gabbling from
the telescreen, but even as it started it was almost drowned by a roar of cheering from
outside. The news had run round the streets like magic. He could hear just enough of what was issuing
from the telescreen to realize that it had all happened, as he had foreseen; a vast seaborne
armada had secretly assembled a sudden blow in the enemy's rear, the white arrow tearing
across the tail of the black. Fragments of triumphant phrases pushed themselves
through the din: 'Vast strategic manoeuvre — perfect co-ordination — utter rout — half
a million prisoners — complete demoralization — control of the whole of Africa — bring
the war within measurable distance of its end victory — greatest victory in human
history — victory, victory, victory!' Under the table Winston's feet made convulsive
movements. He had not stirred from his seat, but in his
mind he was running, swiftly running, he was with the crowds outside, cheering himself
deaf. He looked up again at the portrait of Big
Brother. The colossus that bestrode the world! The rock against which the hordes of Asia
dashed themselves in vain! He thought how ten minutes ago — yes, only
ten minutes — there had still been equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the news
from the front would be of victory or defeat. Ah, it was more than a Eurasian army that
had perished! Much had changed in him since that first day
in the Ministry of Love, but the final, indispensable, healing change had never happened, until this
moment. The voice from the telescreen was still pouring
forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died
down a little. The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid
no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with
everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything,
implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor,
with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The longhoped-for bullet was entering his
brain. He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what
kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving
breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides
of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right,
the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
