Speaker 1: Section one of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. This
legamous recording may be distributed and adapted freely for any purpose.
Part one, Chapter one. It was a bright, cold day
in April, and the clocks were striking. Thirteen Winston Smith,
his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to
escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors
of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a
swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The
hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At
one end of it, a colored poster too large for
indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted
simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide, the
face of a man about forty five, with a heavy
black mustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs.
It was no use trying the lift. Even at the
best of times, it was seldom working, and at present
the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It
was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week.
The flat was seven flights up and Winston, who was
thirty nine and had a varicus ulcer above his right
ankle went slowly, resting several times on the way, on
each landing opposite the lift shaft. The poster with the
enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of
those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow
you about when you move. Big Brother is watching you.
The caption beneath it ran. Inside the flat, a fruity
voice was reading out a list of figures which had
something to do with the production of pig iron. The
voice came from an oblong metal pluck like a dulled mirror,
which formed part of the surface of the right hand wall.
Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though
the words were still distinguishable. The instrument, the telescreen it
was called, could be dimmed, but there was no way
of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window,
a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely
emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of
the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine,
his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades,
and the cold of the winter that had just ended outside.
Even through the shut windowpane, the world looked cold down
in the street. Little eddies of wind were whirling dust
and torn paper into spirals, And though the sun was
shining and the sky are harsh blue, there seemed to
be no color in anything except the posters that were
plastered everywhere. The black mustachioed face gazed down from every
commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite.
Big brother is watching you, the caption said, while the
dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at street level,
another poster torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind,
alternately covering and uncovering the single word inksock. In the
far distance, a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered
for an instant like a blue bottle, and darted away
again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol
snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however,
Only the thought police mattered. Behind Winston's back, the voice
from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig Iron
and the over fulfillment of the ninth three year plan.
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously, any sound that Winston
made above the level of a very low whisper would
be picked up by it. Moreover, so long as he
remained within the field of vision which the metal plak commanded,
he could be seen as well as heard. There was,
of course, no way of knowing whether you were being
watched at any given moment. How often or on what
system the thought police plugged in on any individual wire
was guess work. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they could
plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had
to live, did live from habit that became instinct, in
the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and,
except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. Winston kept his back
turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he
well knew, even a back can be revealing a kilometer away.
The Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast
and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought, with
a sort of vague distaste. This was London, chief city
of airstrip I, itself the third most populous of the
provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood
memory that should tell him whether London had always been
quite like this? Were there always these vistas of rotting
nineteenth century houses, their sides shored up with the bulks
of timber, their windows patched with cardboard, and their roofs
with corrugated iron, Their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions.
And the bombed sights where the plaster dust swirled in
the and the willow herbs straggled over the heaps of rubble,
and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch,
and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings
like chicken houses. But it was no use. He could
not remember. Nothing remained of his childhood except a series
of bright lit tableaus, occurring against no background, and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of truth mini true in new Speak. New
Speak was the official language of Oceania. For an account
of its structure and etymology, see appendix. Was startlingly different
from any other object in sight. It was an enormous,
pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up terrace after
terrace three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood,
it was just possible to read, picked out on its
white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the party.
War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength. The
Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms
above ground level and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London.
There were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size.
So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from
the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four
of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four
ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided.
The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education,
and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned
itself with war, The Ministry of Love, which maintained law
and order, and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible
for economic affairs. Their names in news speak, Mini True,
Mini packs, Mini Love, and mini plenty. The Ministry of
Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows
in it at all. Winston had never been inside the
Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometer of it.
It was a place impossible to enter except on official business,
and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed
wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine gun nests. Even
the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed
by guerrilla faced guards in black uniforms armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into
the expression of quiet optimism, which it was advisable to
wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into
the tiny kitchen. By leaving the ministry at this time
of day, he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen,
and he was aware that there was no food in
the kitchen except a hunk of dark colored bread, which
had got to be saved for to morrow's breakfast. He
took down from the shelf a bottle of colorless liquid
with a plain white label marked Victory Gin. It gave
off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice spirit.
Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock,
and gulped it down like a dose of medicine. Instantly
his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of
his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover,
in swallowing it, one had the sensation of being hit
on the back of the head with a rubber club.
The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down,
and the world began to look more cheerful. He took
a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked Victory Cigarettes and
incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on
to the floor. With the next he was more successful.
He went back to the living room and sat down
at a small table that stood to the left of
the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a
pen holder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto
sized black book with a red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason, the telescreen in the living room was
in an unusual position. Instead of being placed as was normal,
in the end wall, where it could command the whole room,
it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To
one side of it, there was a shallow alcove in
which Winston was now sitting, and which when the flats
were built had probably been intended to hold book shelves.
By sitting in the alcove and keeping well back, Winston
was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen.
So far as sight went, he could be heard, of course,
but so long as he stayed in his present position,
he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual
geography of the room that had suggested to him the
thing that he was now about to do, But it
had also been suggested by the book that he had
just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly
beautiful book. Its smooth, creamy paper, a little yellowed by age,
was of a kind that had not been manufactured for
at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that
the book was much older than that. He had seen
it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk
shop in a slummy quarter of the town. Just what
quarter he did not now remember, and had been stricken
immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members
were supposed not to go into ordinary shops dealing on
the free market, it was called, but the rule was
not strictly kept because there were various things such as
shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get
hold of in any other way. He had given a
quick glance up and down the street, and then had
slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty.
At the time he was not conscious of wanting it
for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home
in his briefcase, even with nothing written in it. It
was a compromising possession. The thing that he was about
to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal.
Nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws,
but if detected, it was reasonably certain that it would
be punished by death or at least by twenty five
years in a forced labor camp. Winston fitted a neb
into the pen holder and sucked it to get the
grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used
even for signatures, and he had procured one furtively and
with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful,
creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real
nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil. Actually,
he was not used to writing by hand, apart from
very short notes. It was usual to dictate everything into
the speak write, which was of course impossible for his
present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and
then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone
through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act.
In small, clumsy letters, he wrote April fourth, nineteen eighty four.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended
upon him. To begin with, he did not know with
any certainty that this was nineteen eighty four. It must
be round about that date, since he was fairly sure
that his age was thirty nine, and he believed that
he had been born in nineteen forty four or nineteen
forty five. But it was never possible nowadays to pin
down any date within a year or two. For whom
it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing
this diary for the future, for the unborn. His mind
hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page,
and then fetched up with a bump against the new
speak word double think. For the first time, the magnitude
of what he had undertaken came home to him. How
could you communicate with the future? It was of its
nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in
which case it would not listen to him, or it
would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time, he sat gazing stupidly at the paper.
The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It
was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost
the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten
what it was that he had originally intended to say.
For weeks past, he had been making ready for this moment,
and it had never crossed his mind that anything would
be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy.
All he had to do was to transfer to paper
the interminable, restless monologue that had been running inside his
head literally for years. At this moment, however, even the
monolog had dried up. Moreover, his varicus ulcer had begun
itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he
did so, it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by.
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the
page in front of him, the itching of the skin
above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a
slight booziness caused by the gin. Suddenly he began writing
in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was
setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and
down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally
even its full stops. April fourth, nineteen eighty four, Last
Night to the flicks, all war films. One very good
one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere
in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great,
huge fat man trying to swim away, with the helicopter
after him. First you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a paupoise. Then you saw him through the
helicopter's gun sights. Then he was full of holes, and
the sea round him turned pink, and he sank as suddenly,
as though the holes had let in the water. Audience
shouting with laughter when he sank. Then you saw a
lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it.
There was a middle aged woman, might have been a jewess,
sitting up in the bow with a little boy about
three years old in her arms. Little boy screaming with
fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if
he was trying to burrow right into her, and the
woman putting her arms round him and comforting, although she
was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him
up as much as possible, as if she thought her
arms could keep the bullets off him. Then the helicopter
planted a twenty kilo bomb in among them, terrific flash,
and the boat went all to matchwood. Then there was
a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up, up,
up right up into the air. A helicopter with a
camera in its nose must have followed it up, and
there was a lot of applause from the party seats.
But a woman down in the prole part of the
house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting. They
didn't order have showed it, not in front of the kids.
They didn't. It ain't right, not in front of kids.
It ain't until the police turned her, turned her out.
I don't suppose anything happened to her. Nobody cares what
the prolls say, typical prole reaction. They never Winston stopped writing,
partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not
know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish.
But the curious thing was that while he was doing so,
a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind,
to the point where he almost felt equal to writing
it down. It was he now realized, because of this
other incident, that he had suddenly decided to come home
and begin the diary to day. It had happened that
morning at the Ministry. If anything so nebulous could be
said to happen, it was nearly eleven hundred and in
the records department, where Winston worked. They were dragging the
chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the
center of the hall, opposite the big telescreen, in preparation
for the two minutes hate. Winston was just taking his
place in one of the middle rows when two people
whom he knew by sight but had never spoken to,
came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a
girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did
not know her name, but he knew that she worked
in the fiction department, presumably since he had sometimes seen
her with oily hands and carrying a spanner. She had
some mechanical job on one of the novel writing machines.
She was a bold looking girl of about twenty seven,
with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift athletic movements.
A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Antisex League,
was wound several times round the waist of her overalls,
just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of
seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of
the atmosphere of hockey fields and cold baths and community
hikes and general clean mindedness which she managed to carry
about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially
the young and pretty ones. It was always the women,
and above all the young ones who were the most
bigoted adherents of the party, the swallowers of slogans, the
amateur's spies, and noses out of unorthodoxy. But this particular
girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once,
when they passed in the corridor, she gave him a quick,
sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him, and
for a moment had filled him with black terror. The
idea had even crossed his mind that she might be
an agent of the thought police. That it was true
was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar
uneasiness which had fear mixed up in it, as well
as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him. The other
person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the
Inner Party and holder of some post so important and
remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature.
A momentary hush passed over the group of people round
the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an
Inner Party member approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man,
with the other a thick neck and a coarse, humorous,
brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance, he had
a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of
resettling his spectacles on his nose, which was curiously disarming,
in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture
of which, if any one had still thought in such terms,
might have recalled an eighteenth century nobleman offering his snuff box.
Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost
as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and
not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between
O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize fighters physique. Much more,
it was because of a secretly held belief, or perhaps
not even a belief, merely a hope that O'Brien's political
orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly.
And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was
written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate,
he had the appearance of being a person that you
could talk to if some how you could cheat the
telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the
smallest effort to verify this guess. Indeed, there was no
way of doing so. At this moment, O'Brien glanced at
his wristwatch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and
evidently decided to stay in the record's department until the
two minutes hate was over. He took a chair in
the same row as Winston. A couple of places away.
A small, sandy haired woman who worked in the next
cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark
hair was sitting immediately behind. The next moment, a hideous
grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil,
burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room.
It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge
and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck.
The hate had started, as usual. The face of Emmanuel Goldstein,
the enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen.
There were hisses here and there among the audience. The
little sandy haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear
and discussed Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who, once
long ago, how long ago nobody quite remembered, had been
one of the leading figures of the party, almost on
a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged
in counter revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and
had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programs of the Two
Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was
none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He
was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the party's purity.
All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies,
deviations sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other,
he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies, perhaps somewhere
beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign pay masters.
Perhaps even so, it was occasionally rumored in some hiding
place in Oceania itself. Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could
never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture
of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great,
fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small, goaty beard,
a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a
kind of senile silliness in the long, thin nose, near
the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched.
It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too,
had a sheeplike quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous
attack upon the doctrines of the Party, an attack so
exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able
to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to
fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people less
level headed than oneself might be taken in by it.
He was abusing Big Brother. He was denouncing the dictatorship
of the Party. He was demanding the immediate conclusion of
peace with Eurasia. He was advocating freedom of speech, freedom
of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought. He
was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed. And
all this in rapid policy labic speech, which was a
sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators
of the party, and even contained new speak words, more
new speak words, indeed, than any party member would normally
use in real life. And all the while, lest one
should be in any doubt as to the reality which
Goldstein's specious clap trap covered. Behind his head on the telescreen,
there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army, row
after row of solid looking men with expressionless asiatic faces,
who swam up to the surface of the screen and
vanished to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull,
rhythmic tramp of the soldier's boots formed the background to
Goldstein's bleating voice. Before the hate had proceeded for thirty seconds,
uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the
people in the room. The self satisfied sheeplike face on
the screen and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army
behind it were too much to be borne. Besides, the
sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and
anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant
than either Eurasia or East Asia, since when Oceana was
at war with one of these powers, it was generally
at peace with the other. But what was strange was
that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although
every day, at the thousand times a day, on platforms,
on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed,
held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish
that they were. In spite of all this, his influence
never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes
waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed
when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not
unmasked by the thought police. He was the commander of
a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated
to the overthrow of the state. The Brotherhood, its name
was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of
a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies of
which Goldstein was the author, and which circulated clandestineley here
and there. It was a book without a title. People
referred to it, if at all, simply as the Book,
but one knew of such things only through vague rumors.
Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was the subject that
any ordinary party member would mention if there was a
way of avoiding it. In its second minute, the hate
rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down
in their places and shouting at the tops of their
voices in an effort to drown the maddening, bleating voice
that came from the screen. The little sandy haired woman
had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and
shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy
face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair,
his powerful chest swelling and quivering, as though he were
standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark
haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out swine, swine, swine,
and suddenly she picked up a heavy news speak dictionary
and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose
and bounced off. The voice continued inexorably in a loose as.
At a moment, Winston found that he was shouting with
the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung
of his chair. The horrible thing about the two minutes
hate was not that one was obliged to act apart,
but on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid
joining in. Within thirty seconds. Any pretense was always unnecessary.
A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill,
to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer,
seemed to flow through the whole group of people like
an electric current, turning one, even against one's will, into
a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one
felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched
from one object to another, like the flame of a
blow lamp. Thus, at one moment, Winston's hatred was not
turned against Goldstein at all, but on the contrary, against
big Brother, the party, and the thought police. And at
such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided
heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity
in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant,
he was at one with the people about him, and
all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to
be true. At those moments, his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up,
an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the
hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation,
his helplessness, and the doubts that hung about his very existence,
seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable, by the mere power
of his voice, of wrecking the structure of civilization. It
was even possible, at moments to switch one's hatred this
way or that by a voluntary act, suddenly, by the
sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head
away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in
transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to
the dark haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed
through his mind. He would flog her to death with
a rubber truncheon he would tie her naked to a
stake and shoot her full of arrows. Like Saint Sebastie.
He would ravish her and cut her throat. At the
moment of climax, better than before. Moreover, he realized why
it was that he hated her. He hated her because
she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted
to go to bed with her and would never do so.
Because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask
you to encircle it with your arm, there was only
the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity. The hate
rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become
an actual sheep's fleet, and for an instant the face
changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep face
melted into the figure of an Eurasian soldier who seemed
to be advancing, huge and terrible, his submachine gun roaring
and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen,
so that some of the people in the front row
actually flinched backwards in their seats, But in the same moment,
drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile
figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black haired,
black mustache, showed full of power and mysterious calm, and
so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody
heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a
few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are
uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually, but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the
face of Big Brother faded away, and instead the three
slogans of the party stood out in bold capitals. War
is peace, freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength. But the
face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds
on the screen, as though the impact that it had
made on everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off. Immediately,
the little sandy haired woman had flung herself forward over
the back of the chair in front of her with
a tremulous murmur that sounded like my savior. She extended
her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face
in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering
a prayer. At this moment, the entire group of people
broke into a deep, slow rhythmical chant of B B
B B over and over again, very slowly. With a
long pause between the first B and the second, a heavy,
murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which
one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and
the throbbing of Tom Tom's For perhaps as much as
thirty seconds, they kept it up. It was a refrain
that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly
it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and
majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an
act of self hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by
means of rhythmic noise. Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold
in the two minutes. Hate he could not help sharing
in the general delirium, But this subhuman chanting of B
B B B always filled him with horror. Of course,
he chanted with the rest. It was impossible to do otherwise.
To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do
what every one else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.
That there was a space of a couple of seconds
during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have
betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that
the significant thing happened, if indeed it did happen, Momentarily
he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up, he had
taken off his spectacles and was in the act of
resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But
there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met,
and for as long as it took to happen, Winston knew, yes,
he knew that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself.
An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their
two minds had opened, and the thoughts were flowing from
one end to the other through their eyes. I am
with you, O'Brien, seemed to be saying to him. I
know precisely what you were feeling. I know all about
your contempt, your hatred, your disgust, but don't worry. I
am on your side. And then the flash of intelligence
was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as if
everybody else's. That was all, and he was already uncertain
whether it had happened. Such incidents never had any sequel.
All that they did was to keep alive in him
the belief or hope that others beside himself were the
enemies of the party. Perhaps the rumors of vast underground
to conspiracies were true, after all, perhaps the Brotherhood really existed.
It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and
confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was
not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it,
some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses
that might mean anything or nothing, snatches of overheard conversation,
faint scribbles on lavatory walls. Once, even when two strangers
met a small movement of the hand which had looked
as though it might be a signal of recognition, it
was all guesswork, very likely he had imagined everything. He
had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O'Brien again.
The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed
his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous, even if
he had known how to set about doing it. For
a second, two seconds they had exchanged an equivocal glance,
and that was the end of the story. But even
that was a memorable event in the locked loneliness in
which one had to live. Winston roused himself and sat
up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was
rising from his stomach. His eyes refocused on the page.
He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing, he had
also been writing, as though by automatic action, and it
was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before.
His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing
in large, neat capitals, Down with big Brother, down with
big Brother, Down with big Brother, Down with big Brother,
Down with big Brother, over and over again, filling half
a page. He could not help feeling a twinge of panic.
It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words
was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening
the diary. But for a moment he was tempted to
tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that
it was useless. Whether he wrote down with Big Brother
or whether he refrained from writing it made no difference.
Whether he went on with the diary or whether he
did not go on with it made no difference. The
thought police would get him just the same. He had committed,
would still have committed even if he had never set
pen to paper. The essential crime that contained all others
in itself, thought crime, they called it. Thought crime was
not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might
dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner
or later they were bound to get you. It was
always at night. The arrests invariably happened at night. The
sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder,
the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard
faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases,
there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People
simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed
from the registers. Every record of everything you had ever
done was wiped out. Your one time existence was denied
and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated, vaporized was the
usual word for a moment he was seized by a
kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried, untidy scrawl.
They'll shoot me. I don't care. They'll shoot me in
the back of the neck. I don't care. Down with
big brother. They always shoot you in the back of
the neck. I don't care down with big brother. He
sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and
laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently.
There was a knocking at the door. All ready He
sat as still as a mouse in the futile hope
that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt.
But no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of
all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like
a drum, but his face, from long habit was probably expressionless.
He got up and moved heavily towards the door. End
of Section one,