Speaker 1: Section six of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. This
Speaker 1: legamous recording may be distributed and adapted freely for any purpose.
Speaker 1: Part one, Chapter six. Winston was writing in his diary.
Speaker 1: It was three years ago. It was on a dark
Speaker 1: evening in a narrow side street near one of the
Speaker 1: big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in
Speaker 1: the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light.
Speaker 1: She had a young face painted very thick. It was
Speaker 1: really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of
Speaker 1: it like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party
Speaker 1: women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in
Speaker 1: the street, and no telescreens. She said, two dollars I
Speaker 1: For the moment, it was too difficult to go on.
Speaker 1: He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them,
Speaker 1: trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He
Speaker 1: had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of
Speaker 1: filthy words at the top of his voice, or to
Speaker 1: bang his head against the wall, to kick over the
Speaker 1: table and hurled the ink pot through the window, to
Speaker 1: do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might
Speaker 1: black out the memory that was tormenting him. Your worst enemy,
Speaker 1: he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment,
Speaker 1: the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into
Speaker 1: some visible symptom. He thought of a man whom he
Speaker 1: had passed in the street a few weeks back, a
Speaker 1: quite ordinary looking man, a party member, aged thirty five
Speaker 1: to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief case. There
Speaker 1: were a few meters apart when the left side of
Speaker 1: the man's face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm.
Speaker 1: It happened again just as they were passing one another.
Speaker 1: It was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the
Speaker 1: clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered
Speaker 1: thinking at the time that poor devil is done for.
Speaker 1: And what was frightening was that the action was quite
Speaker 1: possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking
Speaker 1: in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that,
Speaker 1: so far as he could see. He drew his breath
Speaker 1: and went on writing. I went with her through the
Speaker 1: doorway and across a back yard into a basement kitchen.
Speaker 1: There was a bed against the wall and a lamp
Speaker 1: on the table turned down very low. She His teeth
Speaker 1: was set on edge. He would have liked to spit
Speaker 1: simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen. He thought
Speaker 1: of Catherine, his wife. Winston was married, had been married
Speaker 1: at any rate, probably he still was married, so far
Speaker 1: as he knew his wife was not dead. He seemed
Speaker 1: to breathe again the warm, stuffy odor of the basement kitchen,
Speaker 1: an odor compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous,
Speaker 1: cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the
Speaker 1: party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so.
Speaker 1: Only the proles used scent. In his mind, the smell
Speaker 1: of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication. When he
Speaker 1: had gone with that woman, it had been his first
Speaker 1: lapse in two years or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden,
Speaker 1: of course, but it was one of those rules that
Speaker 1: you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was dangerous,
Speaker 1: but it was not a life and death matter. To
Speaker 1: be caught with the prostitute might mean five years in
Speaker 1: a forced labor camp, not more if you had committed
Speaker 1: no other offense, and it was easy enough provided that
Speaker 1: you could avoid being caught in the act, the poorer
Speaker 1: courts swarmed with women who were ready to sell themselves.
Speaker 1: Some could even be purchased for a bottle of gin,
Speaker 1: which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly, the
Speaker 1: Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution as an outlet
Speaker 1: for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery
Speaker 1: did not matter very much, so long as it was
Speaker 1: furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a
Speaker 1: submerged and despised class. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between
Speaker 1: party members, but though this was one of the crimes
Speaker 1: that the accused in the Great Purges invariably confessed to,
Speaker 1: it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.
Speaker 1: The aim of the Party was not merely to event
Speaker 1: men and women from forming loyalties which it might not
Speaker 1: be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to
Speaker 1: remove all pleasure from the sexual act, not love so
Speaker 1: much as eroticism was the enemy inside marriage as well
Speaker 1: as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to
Speaker 1: be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and
Speaker 1: though the principle was never clearly stated, permission was always
Speaker 1: refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being
Speaker 1: physically attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of
Speaker 1: marriage was to beget children for the service of the party.
Speaker 1: Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly
Speaker 1: disgusting minor operation, like having an enemy. This again was
Speaker 1: never put into plain words, but in an indirect way,
Speaker 1: it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards.
Speaker 1: There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti Sex League,
Speaker 1: which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were
Speaker 1: to be begotten by artificial insemination artsem, it was called
Speaker 1: in New speak, and brought up in public institution. This,
Speaker 1: Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow
Speaker 1: it fitted in with the general ideology of the party.
Speaker 1: The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or
Speaker 1: if it could not be killed, then to distort it
Speaker 1: and dirty it. He did not know why this was so,
Speaker 1: but it seemed natural that it should be so, and
Speaker 1: as far as the women were concerned, the Party's efforts
Speaker 1: were largely successful. He thought again of Catherine. It must
Speaker 1: be nine ten, nearly eleven years since they had parted.
Speaker 1: It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For
Speaker 1: days at a time, he was capable of forgetting that
Speaker 1: he had ever been married. They had only been together
Speaker 1: for about fifteen months. The party did not permit divorce,
Speaker 1: but it rather encouraged separation in cases where there were
Speaker 1: no children. Catherine was a tall, fair haired girl, very straight,
Speaker 1: with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a
Speaker 1: face that one might have called a noble until one
Speaker 1: discovered that there was, as nearly as possible, nothing but
Speaker 1: behind it. Very early in her married life, he had decided,
Speaker 1: though perhaps it was only that he knew her more
Speaker 1: intimately than he knew most people, that she had, without exception,
Speaker 1: the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered.
Speaker 1: She had not a thought in her head that was
Speaker 1: not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none
Speaker 1: that she was not capable of swallowing if the party
Speaker 1: handed it out to her. The human sound track he
Speaker 1: nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have
Speaker 1: endured living with her if it had not been for
Speaker 1: just one thing. Sex. As soon as he touched her,
Speaker 1: she seemed to WinCE and stiffen to embrace her was
Speaker 1: like embracing a jointed, wooden image. And what was strange
Speaker 1: was that, even when she was clasping him against her,
Speaker 1: he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him
Speaker 1: away with all her strength. The rigidity of her muscles
Speaker 1: managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with
Speaker 1: shut eyes, neither resisting nor co operating, but submitting. It
Speaker 1: was extraordinarily embarrassing, and after for a while, horrible. But
Speaker 1: even then he could have borne living with her if
Speaker 1: it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. But
Speaker 1: curiously enough, it was Catherine who refused this. They must,
Speaker 1: she said, produce a child if they could. So. The
Speaker 1: performance continued to happen once a week, quite regularly, whenever
Speaker 1: it was not impossible. She even used to remind him
Speaker 1: of it in the morning, as something which had to
Speaker 1: be done that evening and which must not be forgotten.
Speaker 1: She had two names for it. One was making a baby,
Speaker 1: and the other was our duty to the party. Yes,
Speaker 1: she had actually used that phrase. Quite soon he grew
Speaker 1: to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed
Speaker 1: day came round, But luckily no child appeared, and in
Speaker 1: the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon
Speaker 1: afterwards they parted. Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his
Speaker 1: pen again and wrote, She threw herself down on the bed,
Speaker 1: and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the
Speaker 1: most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt. Ay.
Speaker 1: He saw himsel elf standing there in the dim lamp light,
Speaker 1: with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils,
Speaker 1: and in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment,
Speaker 1: which even at that moment was mixed up with the
Speaker 1: thought of Catherine's white body, frozen forever by the hypnotic
Speaker 1: power of the party. Why did it always have to
Speaker 1: be like this? Why could he not have a woman
Speaker 1: of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals
Speaker 1: of years. But a real love affair was an almost
Speaker 1: unthinkable event. The women of the party were all alike.
Speaker 1: Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as party loyalty,
Speaker 1: by careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by
Speaker 1: the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and
Speaker 1: in the spies and the youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans,
Speaker 1: and martial music. The natural feeling had been driven out
Speaker 1: of them. His reason told him that there must be exceptions,
Speaker 1: but his heart did not believe it. They were all impregnable,
Speaker 1: as the party intended that they should be. And what
Speaker 1: he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to
Speaker 1: break down that wall of virtue, even if it were
Speaker 1: only once in his whole life. The sexual act successfully
Speaker 1: performed was rebellion. Desire was thought crime. Even to have
Speaker 1: awakened Catherine. If he could have achieved it would have
Speaker 1: been like a seduction, although she was his wife. But
Speaker 1: the rest of the story had got to be written down.
Speaker 1: He wrote, I turned up the lamp when I saw
Speaker 1: her in the light. After the darkness, the feeble light
Speaker 1: of the paraffin lamp had seemed very bright. For the
Speaker 1: first time he could see the woman properly. He had
Speaker 1: taken a step towards her, and then halted, full of
Speaker 1: lust and terror. He was painfully conscious of the risk
Speaker 1: he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible
Speaker 1: that the patrols would catch him on the way out.
Speaker 1: For that matter, they might be waiting outside the door
Speaker 1: at this moment. If he went away without even doing
Speaker 1: what he had come here to do. It had got
Speaker 1: to be written down, It had got to be confessed.
Speaker 1: What he had suddenly seen in the lamp light was
Speaker 1: that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so
Speaker 1: thick on her face that it looked as though it
Speaker 1: might crack, like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of
Speaker 1: white in her hair. But the truly dreadful detail was
Speaker 1: that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing
Speaker 1: except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all,
Speaker 1: he wrote hurriedly in scrabbling handwriting. When I saw her
Speaker 1: in the light. She was quite an old woman, fifty
Speaker 1: years old at least. But I went ahead and did
Speaker 1: it just the same. He pressed his fingers against his
Speaker 1: eyelids again. He had written it down at last, but
Speaker 1: it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The
Speaker 1: urge to shout filthy words at the top of his
Speaker 1: voice was as strong as ever. End of Section six