1
00:00:00,440 --> 00:00:04,120
Speaker 1: Section seven of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. This

2
00:00:04,240 --> 00:00:08,039
legamous recording may be freely distributed and adapted for any purpose.

3
00:00:09,400 --> 00:00:14,839
Part one, Chapter seven. If there is hope, wrote Winston,

4
00:00:14,960 --> 00:00:18,120
it lies in the proles. If there was hope, it

5
00:00:18,239 --> 00:00:21,480
must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming,

6
00:00:21,519 --> 00:00:25,239
disregarded masses eighty five percent of the population of Oceania

7
00:00:25,559 --> 00:00:28,079
could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.

8
00:00:29,199 --> 00:00:32,600
The Party could not be overthrown from within its enemies.

9
00:00:32,600 --> 00:00:35,159
If it had any enemies, had no way of coming together,

10
00:00:35,280 --> 00:00:39,159
or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary

11
00:00:39,200 --> 00:00:43,439
brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable

12
00:00:43,479 --> 00:00:46,000
that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than

13
00:00:46,039 --> 00:00:49,759
twos and threes. Rebellion meant to look in the eyes

14
00:00:49,920 --> 00:00:52,640
an inflection of the voice, at the most an occasional

15
00:00:52,679 --> 00:00:56,320
whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow

16
00:00:56,359 --> 00:00:59,000
become conscious of their own strength, would have no need

17
00:00:59,039 --> 00:01:02,240
to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake

18
00:01:02,280 --> 00:01:06,159
themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose,

19
00:01:06,159 --> 00:01:09,560
they could blow the party to pieces to morrow morning. Surely,

20
00:01:09,640 --> 00:01:11,680
sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.

21
00:01:12,599 --> 00:01:16,519
And yet he remembered how once he had been walking

22
00:01:16,560 --> 00:01:19,120
down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds

23
00:01:19,120 --> 00:01:22,400
of voices, women's voices, had burst from a side street

24
00:01:22,400 --> 00:01:25,640
a little way ahead. It was a great, formidable cry

25
00:01:25,640 --> 00:01:30,200
of anger and despair, a deep loud oh that went

26
00:01:30,280 --> 00:01:33,920
humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart

27
00:01:33,920 --> 00:01:38,200
had leapt it started. He had thought a riot, the

28
00:01:38,239 --> 00:01:41,599
pearls are breaking loose. At last, when he had reached

29
00:01:41,599 --> 00:01:43,319
the spot, it was to see a mob of two

30
00:01:43,400 --> 00:01:45,719
or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a

31
00:01:45,760 --> 00:01:48,840
street market, with faces as tragic as though they had

32
00:01:48,879 --> 00:01:52,200
been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at

33
00:01:52,200 --> 00:01:55,120
this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude

34
00:01:55,120 --> 00:01:58,319
of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls

35
00:01:58,319 --> 00:02:01,719
had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things,

36
00:02:02,000 --> 00:02:04,560
but cooking pots of any kind were always difficult to get.

37
00:02:05,560 --> 00:02:09,240
Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women,

38
00:02:09,280 --> 00:02:11,599
bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make

39
00:02:11,639 --> 00:02:14,319
off with their saucepans. While dozens of others clamored round

40
00:02:14,319 --> 00:02:17,560
the stall, accusing the stall keeper of favoritism and of

41
00:02:17,639 --> 00:02:21,000
having more saucepan somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh

42
00:02:21,000 --> 00:02:24,080
outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with

43
00:02:24,159 --> 00:02:26,280
her hair coming down, had got hold of the same

44
00:02:26,319 --> 00:02:28,039
saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one

45
00:02:28,080 --> 00:02:31,360
another's hands. For a moment, they were both tugging, and

46
00:02:31,400 --> 00:02:36,039
then the handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly, and yet,

47
00:02:36,240 --> 00:02:39,280
just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded

48
00:02:39,319 --> 00:02:42,199
in that cry from only a few hundred throats. Why

49
00:02:42,319 --> 00:02:44,240
was it that they could never shout like that about

50
00:02:44,240 --> 00:02:49,400
anything that mattered? He wrote, Until they become conscious, they

51
00:02:49,400 --> 00:02:52,319
will never rebel, And until after they have rebelled, they

52
00:02:52,319 --> 00:02:56,879
cannot become conscious. That he reflected, might almost have been

53
00:02:56,879 --> 00:02:59,879
a transcription from one of the party text books. The

54
00:03:00,120 --> 00:03:03,159
party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage.

55
00:03:03,919 --> 00:03:07,240
Before the revolution, they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists.

56
00:03:07,520 --> 00:03:10,240
They had been starved and flogged, women had been forced

57
00:03:10,280 --> 00:03:12,599
to work in the coal mines. Women still did work

58
00:03:12,599 --> 00:03:15,319
in the coal mines as a matter of fact, children

59
00:03:15,319 --> 00:03:17,520
had been sold into the factories at the age of six.

60
00:03:18,439 --> 00:03:22,000
But simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink, the party

61
00:03:22,080 --> 00:03:24,639
taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be

62
00:03:24,719 --> 00:03:27,800
kept in subjection like animals, by the application of a

63
00:03:27,800 --> 00:03:31,840
few simple rules. In reality, very little was known about

64
00:03:31,840 --> 00:03:35,400
the proles. It was not necessary to know much so

65
00:03:35,479 --> 00:03:38,039
long as they continued to work and breed. Their other

66
00:03:38,080 --> 00:03:42,680
activities were without importance, left to themselves like cattle turned

67
00:03:42,680 --> 00:03:45,520
loose upon the plains of Argentina. They had reverted to

68
00:03:45,560 --> 00:03:47,919
a style of life that appeared to be natural to them,

69
00:03:48,199 --> 00:03:51,400
a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, They grew

70
00:03:51,479 --> 00:03:53,879
up in the gutters. They went to work. At twelve,

71
00:03:54,120 --> 00:03:56,800
they passed through a brief, blossoming period of beauty and

72
00:03:56,840 --> 00:04:00,319
sexual desire. They married at twenty, there were middle aged

73
00:04:00,360 --> 00:04:02,919
at thirty. They died for the most part at sixty.

74
00:04:04,000 --> 00:04:07,039
Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty

75
00:04:07,080 --> 00:04:11,039
quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling

76
00:04:11,280 --> 00:04:14,400
filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them

77
00:04:14,400 --> 00:04:17,160
in control was not difficult. A few agents of the

78
00:04:17,199 --> 00:04:20,279
thought police moved always among them. Spreading false rumors and

79
00:04:20,360 --> 00:04:23,160
marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged

80
00:04:23,240 --> 00:04:27,160
capable of becoming dangerous, But no attempt was made to

81
00:04:27,240 --> 00:04:30,519
indoctrinate them with the ideology of the party. It was

82
00:04:30,560 --> 00:04:33,519
not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings.

83
00:04:34,439 --> 00:04:37,120
All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism,

84
00:04:37,319 --> 00:04:39,680
which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to

85
00:04:39,680 --> 00:04:43,560
make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And

86
00:04:43,639 --> 00:04:46,720
even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their

87
00:04:46,759 --> 00:04:50,600
discontent led to nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they

88
00:04:50,639 --> 00:04:54,160
could only focus it on petty, specific grievances. The larger

89
00:04:54,199 --> 00:04:58,439
evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles

90
00:04:58,519 --> 00:05:01,759
did not even have telescreens in their Even the civil

91
00:05:01,759 --> 00:05:05,000
police interfered with them very little. There was a vast

92
00:05:05,000 --> 00:05:08,040
amount of criminality in London, a whole world within a

93
00:05:08,040 --> 00:05:12,399
world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug peddlars and racketeers of

94
00:05:12,439 --> 00:05:16,079
every description. But since it all happened among the proles themselves,

95
00:05:16,079 --> 00:05:19,199
it was of no importance in all questions of morals.

96
00:05:19,240 --> 00:05:22,759
They were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual

97
00:05:22,759 --> 00:05:26,639
puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity

98
00:05:26,680 --> 00:05:30,639
went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious

99
00:05:30,639 --> 00:05:32,759
worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown

100
00:05:32,800 --> 00:05:36,199
any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion.

101
00:05:37,040 --> 00:05:41,759
As the party slogan put it, prolls and animals are free.

102
00:05:42,319 --> 00:05:45,920
Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicus ulsa. It

103
00:05:45,959 --> 00:05:49,560
had begun itching again. The thing he invariably came back

104
00:05:49,560 --> 00:05:52,040
to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the

105
00:05:52,079 --> 00:05:55,040
Revolution had really been like. He took out of the

106
00:05:55,120 --> 00:05:57,759
drawer a copy of a children's history textbook which he

107
00:05:57,800 --> 00:06:00,920
had borrowed from Missus Parsons, and began copying a passage

108
00:06:00,920 --> 00:06:05,560
into the diary. In the old days it ran before

109
00:06:05,600 --> 00:06:08,720
the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that

110
00:06:08,759 --> 00:06:11,879
we know to day. It was a dark, dirty, miserable

111
00:06:11,879 --> 00:06:14,680
place where hardly anybody had enough to eat, and where

112
00:06:14,759 --> 00:06:17,079
hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on

113
00:06:17,120 --> 00:06:19,560
their feet and not even a roof to sleep under.

114
00:06:20,680 --> 00:06:23,040
Children no older than you had to work twelve hours

115
00:06:23,079 --> 00:06:25,920
a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips

116
00:06:25,920 --> 00:06:28,439
if they worked too slowly, and fed them on nothing

117
00:06:28,439 --> 00:06:31,959
but stale bread crusts and water. But in among all

118
00:06:31,959 --> 00:06:34,600
this terrible poverty, there were just a few great, big,

119
00:06:34,639 --> 00:06:37,480
beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who

120
00:06:37,519 --> 00:06:40,199
had as many as thirty servants to look after them.

121
00:06:40,839 --> 00:06:44,319
These rich men were called capitalists. There were fat, ugly

122
00:06:44,360 --> 00:06:46,720
men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture

123
00:06:46,759 --> 00:06:49,160
on the opposite page. You can see that he is

124
00:06:49,240 --> 00:06:51,360
dressed in a long black coat which was called a

125
00:06:51,399 --> 00:06:55,120
frock coat, and a queer shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe,

126
00:06:55,240 --> 00:06:58,680
which was called a top hat. This was the uniform

127
00:06:58,680 --> 00:07:00,959
of the capitalists, and no no one else was allowed

128
00:07:00,959 --> 00:07:04,079
to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world,

129
00:07:04,160 --> 00:07:07,360
and every one else was their slave. They owned all

130
00:07:07,360 --> 00:07:09,680
the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all

131
00:07:09,720 --> 00:07:13,040
the money. If any one disobeyed them, they could throw

132
00:07:13,079 --> 00:07:15,279
them into prison, or they could take his job away

133
00:07:15,319 --> 00:07:19,199
and starve him to death. Whenever any ordinary person spoke

134
00:07:19,240 --> 00:07:21,120
to a capitalist, he had to cringe and a bow

135
00:07:21,199 --> 00:07:23,279
to him, and take off his cap and address him

136
00:07:23,279 --> 00:07:26,680
as sir. The chief of all the capitalists was called

137
00:07:26,720 --> 00:07:30,839
the king, and but he knew the rest of the catalog.

138
00:07:31,560 --> 00:07:33,959
There would be mentioned of the bishops in their lawn sleeves,

139
00:07:34,160 --> 00:07:37,360
the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks,

140
00:07:37,480 --> 00:07:41,439
the treadmill, the Catennine tales, the lord mayor's banquet, and

141
00:07:41,480 --> 00:07:44,879
the practice of kissing the pope's toe. There was also

142
00:07:44,879 --> 00:07:48,160
something called the us prima noctis, which would probably not

143
00:07:48,199 --> 00:07:51,000
be mentioned in a text book for children. It was

144
00:07:51,040 --> 00:07:53,199
the law by which every capitalist had the right to

145
00:07:53,240 --> 00:07:55,519
sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.

146
00:07:57,759 --> 00:07:59,600
How could you tell how much of it was lies?

147
00:08:00,439 --> 00:08:02,519
It might be true that the average human being was

148
00:08:02,600 --> 00:08:04,720
better off now than he had been before the Revolution.

149
00:08:05,800 --> 00:08:08,240
The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest

150
00:08:08,279 --> 00:08:11,319
in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions

151
00:08:11,319 --> 00:08:13,839
you lived in were intolerable, and that at some other

152
00:08:13,879 --> 00:08:16,759
time they must have been different. It struck him that

153
00:08:16,800 --> 00:08:19,759
the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its

154
00:08:19,800 --> 00:08:25,920
cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life,

155
00:08:25,959 --> 00:08:28,519
if you looked about, you, bore no resemblance, not only

156
00:08:28,560 --> 00:08:31,000
to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but

157
00:08:31,079 --> 00:08:33,639
even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve.

158
00:08:34,639 --> 00:08:37,000
Great areas of it, even for a party member, were

159
00:08:37,039 --> 00:08:41,039
neutral and non political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs,

160
00:08:41,279 --> 00:08:43,919
fighting for a place on the tube, darning a worn

161
00:08:43,919 --> 00:08:47,679
out sock, cadging a sacquer and tablet, saving a cigarette end.

162
00:08:48,799 --> 00:08:51,200
The ideal set up by the Party was something huge,

163
00:08:51,360 --> 00:08:54,679
terrible and glittering. A world of steel and concrete, of

164
00:08:54,720 --> 00:08:58,480
monstrous machines and terrifying weapons, A nation of warriors and

165
00:08:58,480 --> 00:09:02,320
fanatics marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same

166
00:09:02,360 --> 00:09:06,600
thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing,

167
00:09:06,759 --> 00:09:10,279
persecuting three hundred million people, all with the same face.

168
00:09:11,519 --> 00:09:15,200
The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled

169
00:09:15,200 --> 00:09:18,240
to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched up nineteenth

170
00:09:18,240 --> 00:09:21,480
century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.

171
00:09:22,399 --> 00:09:24,639
He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and

172
00:09:24,720 --> 00:09:28,159
ruinous city of a million dustpins, and mixed up with

173
00:09:28,240 --> 00:09:30,799
it was a picture of missus Parsons, a woman with

174
00:09:30,919 --> 00:09:34,200
lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked

175
00:09:34,200 --> 00:09:39,039
waist pipe. He reached down and scratched his ankle again.

176
00:09:40,200 --> 00:09:43,559
Day and night. The telescreens bruised duryas with statistics proving

177
00:09:43,600 --> 00:09:46,639
that people to day had more food, more clothes, better houses,

178
00:09:46,720 --> 00:09:53,039
better recreations, that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier,

179
00:09:53,120 --> 00:09:56,600
more intelligent, better educated than the people of fifty years ago.

180
00:09:57,279 --> 00:09:59,720
Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.

181
00:10:00,480 --> 00:10:03,039
The Party claimed, for example, that to day forty percent

182
00:10:03,080 --> 00:10:06,159
of adult prolls were literate. Before the revolution, it was

183
00:10:06,159 --> 00:10:09,759
said the number had only been fifteen percent. The Party

184
00:10:09,799 --> 00:10:12,240
claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only one

185
00:10:12,320 --> 00:10:15,279
hundred and sixty per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it

186
00:10:15,320 --> 00:10:18,559
had been three hundred and So it went on. It

187
00:10:18,600 --> 00:10:21,679
was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might

188
00:10:21,799 --> 00:10:24,240
very well be that literally every word in the history books,

189
00:10:24,480 --> 00:10:27,720
even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.

190
00:10:28,559 --> 00:10:30,559
For all he knew, there might never have been any

191
00:10:30,559 --> 00:10:33,799
such law as the use premnoctis, or any such creature

192
00:10:33,799 --> 00:10:36,600
as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.

193
00:10:38,159 --> 00:10:41,960
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure

194
00:10:42,039 --> 00:10:45,600
was forgotten. The lie became truth. Just once in his

195
00:10:45,679 --> 00:10:48,480
life he had possessed after the event. That was what

196
00:10:48,600 --> 00:10:53,399
counted concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He

197
00:10:53,480 --> 00:10:55,360
had held it between his fingers for as long as

198
00:10:55,399 --> 00:10:58,799
thirty seconds in nineteen seventy three. It must have been,

199
00:10:59,200 --> 00:11:01,000
at any rate, it was about at the time when

200
00:11:01,000 --> 00:11:04,000
he and Catherine had parted, but the really relevant date

201
00:11:04,080 --> 00:11:08,240
was seven or eight years earlier. The story really began

202
00:11:08,279 --> 00:11:10,759
in the middle sixties, the period of the Great Purges,

203
00:11:10,799 --> 00:11:13,639
in which the original leaders of the revolution were wiped

204
00:11:13,679 --> 00:11:17,360
out once and for all. By nineteen seventy none of

205
00:11:17,360 --> 00:11:20,759
them was left except Big Brother himself. All the rest

206
00:11:20,799 --> 00:11:24,159
had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter revolutionaries.

207
00:11:24,840 --> 00:11:27,480
Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where,

208
00:11:27,879 --> 00:11:30,440
and of the others a few had simply disappeared, while

209
00:11:30,519 --> 00:11:34,200
the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at

210
00:11:34,200 --> 00:11:38,039
which they made confession of their crimes. Among the last

211
00:11:38,080 --> 00:11:43,000
survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It

212
00:11:43,080 --> 00:11:45,240
must have been in nineteen sixty five that these three

213
00:11:45,320 --> 00:11:48,639
had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for

214
00:11:48,679 --> 00:11:51,000
a year or more so that one did not know

215
00:11:51,039 --> 00:11:53,759
whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly

216
00:11:53,799 --> 00:11:57,080
been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way.

217
00:11:57,600 --> 00:12:00,679
They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy. At that

218
00:12:00,840 --> 00:12:04,720
date too. The enemy was Eurasia, embezzlement of public funds,

219
00:12:04,919 --> 00:12:08,519
the murder of various trusted party members, intrigues against the

220
00:12:08,600 --> 00:12:11,000
leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the

221
00:12:11,039 --> 00:12:14,480
revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the deaths of

222
00:12:14,559 --> 00:12:18,360
hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to these things,

223
00:12:18,360 --> 00:12:21,360
they had been pardoned, reinstated in the party, and given

224
00:12:21,399 --> 00:12:24,320
posts which were in fact sinecures, but which sounded important.

225
00:12:25,240 --> 00:12:28,279
All three had written long, abject articles in the Times,

226
00:12:28,799 --> 00:12:32,200
analyzing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.

227
00:12:34,279 --> 00:12:36,879
Some time after their release. Winston had actually seen all

228
00:12:36,919 --> 00:12:40,000
three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered

229
00:12:40,039 --> 00:12:42,799
the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them.

230
00:12:42,799 --> 00:12:45,480
Out of the corner of his eye. There were men

231
00:12:45,559 --> 00:12:49,200
far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost

232
00:12:49,200 --> 00:12:51,679
the last great figures left over from the heroic days

233
00:12:51,720 --> 00:12:54,440
of the Party. The glamor of the underground struggle in

234
00:12:54,480 --> 00:12:57,360
the Civil War still faintly clung to them. He had

235
00:12:57,360 --> 00:13:00,200
the feeling, though already at that time facts and days

236
00:13:00,200 --> 00:13:03,039
were growing blurry, that he had known their names earlier

237
00:13:03,039 --> 00:13:05,840
than he had known that of Big Brother. But also

238
00:13:05,879 --> 00:13:10,519
there were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to

239
00:13:10,559 --> 00:13:14,080
extinction within a year or two. No one who had

240
00:13:14,080 --> 00:13:16,799
once fallen into the hands of the thought police ever escaped.

241
00:13:16,799 --> 00:13:19,639
In the end, there were corpses waiting to be sent

242
00:13:19,720 --> 00:13:23,480
back to the grave. There was no one at any

243
00:13:23,480 --> 00:13:26,399
of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise

244
00:13:26,440 --> 00:13:28,440
even to be seen in the neighborhood of such people.

245
00:13:29,440 --> 00:13:31,720
They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin

246
00:13:31,799 --> 00:13:35,519
flavored with cloves, which was the speciality of the cafe

247
00:13:35,559 --> 00:13:38,039
of the Three. It was Rutherford whose appearance had most

248
00:13:38,080 --> 00:13:42,840
impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose

249
00:13:42,840 --> 00:13:46,080
brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and

250
00:13:46,240 --> 00:13:50,600
during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals his cartoons

251
00:13:50,600 --> 00:13:53,879
were appearing in the times. There was simply an imitation

252
00:13:53,960 --> 00:13:58,320
of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always

253
00:13:58,320 --> 00:14:01,720
they were a rehashing of the ancient thiets, slum tenements,

254
00:14:01,840 --> 00:14:06,320
starving children, street battles, capitalists in top hats. Even on

255
00:14:06,360 --> 00:14:09,480
the barricades, the capitalists still seemed to cling to their

256
00:14:09,480 --> 00:14:12,200
top hats, an endless, hopeless effort to get back into

257
00:14:12,200 --> 00:14:15,519
the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane

258
00:14:15,559 --> 00:14:19,120
of greasy gray hair, his face pouched and seamed with

259
00:14:19,200 --> 00:14:22,399
thick negroid lips. At one time he must have been

260
00:14:22,399 --> 00:14:26,639
immensely strong. Now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging,

261
00:14:26,799 --> 00:14:29,960
falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking

262
00:14:30,039 --> 00:14:34,399
up before one's eyes, like a mountain crumbling. It was

263
00:14:34,440 --> 00:14:38,000
the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember

264
00:14:38,039 --> 00:14:39,639
how he had come to be in the cafe at

265
00:14:39,639 --> 00:14:43,159
such a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny

266
00:14:43,240 --> 00:14:46,720
music was trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat

267
00:14:46,720 --> 00:14:51,159
in their corner, almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter

268
00:14:51,200 --> 00:14:54,480
brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on

269
00:14:54,519 --> 00:14:57,000
the table beside them, with the pieces set out, but

270
00:14:57,120 --> 00:15:00,639
no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute

271
00:15:00,639 --> 00:15:03,879
in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that

272
00:15:03,879 --> 00:15:06,399
they were playing changed, and the tone of the music

273
00:15:06,480 --> 00:15:09,840
changed too. There came into it, but it was something

274
00:15:09,879 --> 00:15:14,279
hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note.

275
00:15:14,799 --> 00:15:17,960
In his mind, Winston called it a yellow note. And

276
00:15:18,000 --> 00:15:21,480
then a voice from the telescreen was singing, under the

277
00:15:21,559 --> 00:15:25,679
spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me.

278
00:15:26,720 --> 00:15:30,000
There lie they, and here lie we under the spreading

279
00:15:30,080 --> 00:15:35,480
chestnut tree. The three men never stirred, but when Winston

280
00:15:35,519 --> 00:15:38,399
glanced again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his

281
00:15:38,480 --> 00:15:41,360
eyes were full of tears, and for the first time

282
00:15:41,399 --> 00:15:44,399
he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet

283
00:15:44,440 --> 00:15:47,480
not knowing at what he shuddered, that both Eronson and

284
00:15:47,559 --> 00:15:52,519
Rutherford had broken noses. A little later, all three were

285
00:15:52,519 --> 00:15:55,799
re arrested. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh

286
00:15:55,879 --> 00:15:59,480
conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At their

287
00:15:59,519 --> 00:16:02,360
second trial, they confessed to all their old crimes over

288
00:16:02,399 --> 00:16:06,200
again with a whole string of new ones. They were executed,

289
00:16:06,240 --> 00:16:08,519
and their fate was recorded in the party histories, a

290
00:16:08,600 --> 00:16:13,639
warning to posterity. About five years after this, in nineteen

291
00:16:13,639 --> 00:16:16,480
seventy three, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which

292
00:16:16,519 --> 00:16:19,039
had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube onto his desk.

293
00:16:19,440 --> 00:16:21,399
When he came on a fragment of paper which had

294
00:16:21,399 --> 00:16:23,960
evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten.

295
00:16:24,639 --> 00:16:27,279
The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance.

296
00:16:28,000 --> 00:16:30,120
It was a half page torn out of the Times

297
00:16:30,159 --> 00:16:33,240
of about ten years earlier, the top half of the

298
00:16:33,279 --> 00:16:36,559
page so that it included the date, and it contained

299
00:16:36,559 --> 00:16:38,919
a photograph of the delegates at some party function in

300
00:16:38,960 --> 00:16:42,320
New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones,

301
00:16:42,480 --> 00:16:46,279
Ernson and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them in any case.

302
00:16:46,279 --> 00:16:49,639
Their names were in the caption at the bottom. The

303
00:16:49,679 --> 00:16:52,240
point was that at both trials all three men had

304
00:16:52,240 --> 00:16:54,919
confessed that on that date there had been on Eurasian soil.

305
00:16:55,799 --> 00:16:57,919
They had flown from a secret air field in Canada

306
00:16:58,000 --> 00:17:01,279
to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with

307
00:17:01,360 --> 00:17:04,079
members of the Eurasian General staff, to whom they had

308
00:17:04,079 --> 00:17:08,359
betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's

309
00:17:08,359 --> 00:17:11,599
memory because it chanced to be Midsummer day, but the

310
00:17:11,640 --> 00:17:14,319
whole story must be on record in countless other places

311
00:17:14,359 --> 00:17:19,039
as well. There was only one possible conclusion the confessions

312
00:17:19,039 --> 00:17:23,720
were lies. Of course, this was not in itself a discovery.

313
00:17:24,240 --> 00:17:26,319
Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the

314
00:17:26,359 --> 00:17:28,440
people who were wiped out in the purges had actually

315
00:17:28,480 --> 00:17:31,480
committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this

316
00:17:31,640 --> 00:17:34,880
was concrete evidence. It was a fragment of the abolished past,

317
00:17:35,279 --> 00:17:37,279
like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong

318
00:17:37,359 --> 00:17:41,519
stratum and destroys the geological theory. It was enough to

319
00:17:41,519 --> 00:17:43,680
blow the party to atoms if in some way it

320
00:17:43,720 --> 00:17:46,200
could have been published to the world and its significance

321
00:17:46,240 --> 00:17:51,480
made known. He had gone straight on working as soon

322
00:17:51,480 --> 00:17:53,799
as he saw what the photograph was and what it meant.

323
00:17:54,160 --> 00:17:57,480
He had covered it up with another sheet of paper. Luckily,

324
00:17:57,519 --> 00:17:59,519
when he unrolled it it had been upside down from

325
00:17:59,559 --> 00:18:02,920
the point of view of the telescreen. He took his

326
00:18:02,960 --> 00:18:05,359
scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair

327
00:18:05,440 --> 00:18:07,279
so as to get as far away from the telescreen

328
00:18:07,319 --> 00:18:11,160
as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult,

329
00:18:11,480 --> 00:18:13,799
and even your breathing could be controlled with an effort.

330
00:18:14,319 --> 00:18:16,319
But you could not control the beating of your heart,

331
00:18:16,519 --> 00:18:19,279
and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up.

332
00:18:20,160 --> 00:18:22,400
He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by,

333
00:18:22,680 --> 00:18:25,079
tormented all the while by the fear that some accident,

334
00:18:25,559 --> 00:18:28,559
a sudden draft blowing across his desk, for instance, would

335
00:18:28,559 --> 00:18:32,559
betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the

336
00:18:32,559 --> 00:18:35,920
photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers.

337
00:18:36,599 --> 00:18:39,599
Within another minute, perhaps it would have crumbled into ashes.

338
00:18:42,079 --> 00:18:45,720
That was ten eleven years ago to day. Probably he

339
00:18:45,720 --> 00:18:48,839
would have kept that photograph. It was curious that the

340
00:18:48,880 --> 00:18:51,319
fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to

341
00:18:51,400 --> 00:18:54,519
him to make a difference, even now, when the photograph itself,

342
00:18:54,759 --> 00:18:57,119
as well as the event it recorded, was only memory.

343
00:18:58,200 --> 00:19:01,559
Was the party's hold upon the past le strong, he wondered,

344
00:19:01,799 --> 00:19:04,279
because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had

345
00:19:04,319 --> 00:19:08,799
once existed, but to day, supposing that it could be

346
00:19:08,839 --> 00:19:12,400
somehow resurrected from its ashes, the photograph might not even

347
00:19:12,440 --> 00:19:16,079
be evidence. Already. At the time when he made his discovery,

348
00:19:16,119 --> 00:19:19,079
Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it

349
00:19:19,160 --> 00:19:21,400
must have been to the agents of East Asia that

350
00:19:21,440 --> 00:19:24,920
the three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then,

351
00:19:24,960 --> 00:19:27,880
there had been other changes two three He could not

352
00:19:27,920 --> 00:19:31,559
remember how many, very likely the confessions had been rewritten

353
00:19:31,559 --> 00:19:34,160
and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer

354
00:19:34,200 --> 00:19:38,279
had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but

355
00:19:38,400 --> 00:19:42,000
changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of

356
00:19:42,079 --> 00:19:44,839
nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the

357
00:19:44,920 --> 00:19:49,319
huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the

358
00:19:49,359 --> 00:19:52,960
past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He

359
00:19:53,000 --> 00:19:56,359
took up his pen again and wrote, I understand how

360
00:19:57,000 --> 00:20:00,680
I do not understand why. He He wondered, as he

361
00:20:00,720 --> 00:20:03,880
had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic.

362
00:20:04,519 --> 00:20:07,720
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At

363
00:20:07,720 --> 00:20:09,599
one time, it had been a sign of madness to

364
00:20:09,599 --> 00:20:12,319
believe that the earth goes round the sun to day,

365
00:20:12,519 --> 00:20:15,960
to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be

366
00:20:16,039 --> 00:20:19,240
alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic.

367
00:20:19,799 --> 00:20:21,960
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly

368
00:20:22,000 --> 00:20:24,960
trouble him. The horror was that he might also be wrong.

369
00:20:26,920 --> 00:20:28,880
He picked up the children's history book and looked at

370
00:20:28,920 --> 00:20:32,359
the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The

371
00:20:32,440 --> 00:20:35,759
hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though

372
00:20:35,799 --> 00:20:38,720
some huge force were pressing down upon you, something that

373
00:20:38,799 --> 00:20:42,480
penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you

374
00:20:42,519 --> 00:20:45,319
out of your beliefs, persuading you almost to deny the

375
00:20:45,359 --> 00:20:48,880
evidence of your senses. In the end, the party would

376
00:20:48,880 --> 00:20:51,400
announce that two and two made five, and you would

377
00:20:51,440 --> 00:20:54,240
have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should

378
00:20:54,279 --> 00:20:56,799
make that claim sooner or later. The logic of their

379
00:20:56,839 --> 00:21:01,000
position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but

380
00:21:01,079 --> 00:21:04,640
the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by

381
00:21:04,640 --> 00:21:09,319
their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And

382
00:21:09,400 --> 00:21:11,519
what was terrifying was not that they would kill you

383
00:21:11,559 --> 00:21:15,319
for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For

384
00:21:15,440 --> 00:21:17,400
after all, how do we know that two and two

385
00:21:17,400 --> 00:21:20,960
make four, or that the force of gravity works, or

386
00:21:20,960 --> 00:21:24,200
that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and

387
00:21:24,240 --> 00:21:26,880
the external world exist only in the mind, and if

388
00:21:26,880 --> 00:21:31,960
the mind itself is controllable, what then? But no, His

389
00:21:32,079 --> 00:21:35,400
courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The

390
00:21:35,440 --> 00:21:38,279
face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association,

391
00:21:38,400 --> 00:21:42,000
had floated into his mind. He knew with more certainty

392
00:21:42,039 --> 00:21:45,359
than before that O'Brien was on his side. He was

393
00:21:45,400 --> 00:21:49,480
writing the Diary for O'Brien too. O'Brien. It was like

394
00:21:49,519 --> 00:21:52,240
an interminable letter which no one would ever read, but

395
00:21:52,319 --> 00:21:54,799
which was addressed to a particular person, and took its

396
00:21:54,799 --> 00:21:58,039
color from that fact. The party told you to reject

397
00:21:58,079 --> 00:22:00,839
the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final,

398
00:22:00,920 --> 00:22:04,240
most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of

399
00:22:04,240 --> 00:22:07,279
the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which

400
00:22:07,319 --> 00:22:10,720
any party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle

401
00:22:10,839 --> 00:22:13,039
arguments which he would not be able to understand, much

402
00:22:13,119 --> 00:22:16,400
less answer. And yet he was in the right. They

403
00:22:16,400 --> 00:22:19,640
were wrong, and he was right. The obvious, the silly,

404
00:22:19,720 --> 00:22:23,440
and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true,

405
00:22:23,519 --> 00:22:26,839
hold on to that the solid world exists, Its laws

406
00:22:26,839 --> 00:22:30,799
do not change. Stones are hard. Water is wet. Objects

407
00:22:30,839 --> 00:22:34,480
unsupported fall towards the Earth's center. With the feeling that

408
00:22:34,519 --> 00:22:36,480
he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was

409
00:22:36,519 --> 00:22:40,640
setting forth an important axiom, he wrote, Freedom is the

410
00:22:40,640 --> 00:22:43,519
freedom to say that two plus two make four. If

411
00:22:43,519 --> 00:22:49,079
that is granted, all else follows. End of section seven,