Speaker 1: Section twenty two of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell.
This legamous recording may be freely distributed and adapted for
any purpose. Part three, Chapter four. 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 varicus ulsa 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
a great deal all through this time, and there 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 round her and his skin torter. Finally, it
was established beyond a doubt that he was growing owing 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 kilometers 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 centimeter. But after a few more days,
a few more meal times, 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 all. Only when he chanced to put
his hand on his bald scalp did he remember the
seemed 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 words 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, showed 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 judgments? 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 now, 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 East Asia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Ernson,
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. Crime stop, they called it in news speak.
He set to work to exercise himself in crime stop.
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 labor 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, smooth 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 the
joy of movement and with the 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 kilometer 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 some way beyond that was the stream
where the days 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 cheek bones 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 feel 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 forever. 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
inter eelectual 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 meter wide, with its heavy black mustache
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 with 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,
and a gentle lertone. 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 you 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. One
O one, he said. End of Section twenty two