Speaker 1: Section three of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. This
legamous recording may be distributed and adapted freely for any purpose.
Part one, Chapter three. Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years
old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque,
rather silent woman, with slow movements and magnificent fair hair.
His father, he remembered, more vaguely, as dark and thin,
dressed always in neat, dark clothes. Winston remembered especially the
very thin soles of his father's shoes, and wearing spectacles.
The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up
in one of the first great purges of the fifties.
At this moment, his mother was sitting in some place
deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms.
He did not remember his sister at all, except as
a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large watchful eyes.
Both of them were looking up at him. They were
down in some subterranean place, the bottom of a well,
for instance, or a very deep grave. But it was
a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards.
They were in the saloon of a sinking ship looking
up at him through the darkening water. There was still
air in the saloon. They could still see him and
he them, but all the while they were sinking down
down into the green waters, which in another moment must
hide them from sight forever. He was out in the
light and air, while they were being sucked down to death,
and they were down there because he was up here.
He knew it, and they knew it, and he could
see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach,
either in their faces or in their hearts, only the
knowledge that they must die in order that he might
remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable
order of things. He could not remember what had happened,
but he knew in his dream that in some way
the lives of his mother and his sister had been
sacrificed to his own. It was one of those dreams which,
while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of
one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of
facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after
one is awake. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston
was that his mother's death nearly thirty years ago had
been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no
longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time,
to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship,
and when the members of a family stood by one
another without needing to know the reason. His mother's memory
tore at his heart, because she had died loving him
when he was too young and selfish to love her
in return, and because somehow he did not remember how
she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that
was private and unalterable. Such things he saw or could
not happen to day to day. There were fear, hatred,
and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or
complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the
large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up
at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down
and still sinking. Suddenly he was standing on short, springy
turf on a summer evening, when the slanting rays of
the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was
looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he
was never fully certain whether or not he had seen
it in the real world. In his waking thoughts, he
called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit
bitten pasture, with a foot track wandering across it, and
a mole hill here and there in the ragged hedge
on the opposite side of the field. The boughs of
the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze,
their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women's hair.
Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was
a clear, slow moving stream. Where Dace was swimming in
the pools under the willow trees. The girl with dark
hair was coming towards them across the field. With what
seemed a single movement. She tore off her clothes and
flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth,
but it aroused no desire in him, Indeed, he barely
looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was
admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her
clothes aside, with its grace and carelessness, it seemed to
annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as
though big Brother, and the Party and the thought police
could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid
movement of the arm. That too, was a gesture belonging
to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word
Shakespeare on his lips. The telescreen was giving forth an
ear splitting whistle, which continued on the same note for
thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen. Getting up to
for office workers, Winston wrenched his body out of bed naked.
For a member of the outer party received only three
thousand clothing coupons annually, and a suit of pajamas was
six hundred, and seized a dingy singlet and a pair
of shorts that were lying across a chair. The physical
jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment, he
was doubled up by a violent coughing fit, which nearly
always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his
lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again
by lying on his back and taking a series of
deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of
the cough, and the varicus ulca had started itching. Thirty
to forty group yapped a piercing female voice, thirty to
forty group, take your places please, thirties to forties. Winston
sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which
the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed
in tunic and gym shoes had already appeared, arms bending
and stretching. She wrapped out, take your time by me
one two three four, one two three four, Come on, comrades,
put a bit of life into it. One two three four,
one two three four. The pain of the coughing fit
had not quite driven out of Winston's mind. The impression
made by his dream and the rhythmic movements of the
exercise restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms
back and forth, wearing on his face the look of
grim enjoyment, which was considered proper during the physical jerks.
He was struggling to think his way backward into the
dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult.
Beyond the late fifties. Everything faded when there were no
external records that you could refer to. Even the outline
of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge
events which had quite probably not happened. You remembered the
detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere,
and there were long blank pearser to which you could
assign nothing. Everything had been different then, Even the names
of countries and their shapes on the map had been different.
Airstrip I, for instance, had not been so called in
those days. It had been called England or Britain, though London,
he felt fairly certain, had always been called London. Winston
could not definitely remember a time when his country had
not been at war, but it was evident that there
had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood,
because one of his early memories was of an air
raid which appeared to take every one by surprise. Perhaps
it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen
on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but
he did remember his father's hand clutching his own, as
they hurried down, down, down, into some place deep in
the earth, round and round a spiral staircase, which rang
under his feet, and which finally so wearied his legs
that he began whimpering, and they had to stop and rest.
His mother in her slow, dreamy way was following a
long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister,
or perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets that
she was carrying. He was not certain whether his sister
had been born. Then finally they had emerged into a noisy,
crowded place, which he had realized to be a tube station.
There were people sitting all over the stone flagged floor,
and other people packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks,
one above the other. Winston and his mother and father
found themselves a place on the floor, and near them,
an old man and an old woman was sitting side
by side on a bunk. The old man had on
a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed
back from very white hair. His face was scarlet, and
his eyes were blue and full of tears. He reeked
of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin
in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that
the tears welling from his eyes were pure gin. But
though slightly drunk, he was also suffering under some grief
that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way, Winston
grasps that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness
and could never be remedied had just happened. It also
seemed to him that he knew what it was. Some
one whom the old man loved, a little grand daughter perhaps,
had been killed. Every few minutes. The old man kept repeating,
we didn't ought to have trusted him. I said, so,
Mar didn't. I that's what comes of trusting him? I said,
so All along we didn't ought to have trusted the buggers.
But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted? Winston
could not now remember, since about that time war had
been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always
been the same war. For several months during his childhood
there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some
of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the
history of the whole period to say who was fighting
whom at any given moment would have been utterly possible,
since no written record and no spoken word ever made
mention of any other alignment than the existing one at
this moment. For example, in nineteen eighty four, if it
was nineteen eighty four, Oceania was at war with Eurasia
and in alliance with East Asia. In no public or
private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers
had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually,
as Winston Well knew, it was only four years since
Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance
with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive
knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was
not satisfactorily under control. Officially, the change of partners had
never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia. Therefore, Oceania
had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of
the moment always represented absolute evil, and had followed that
any past or future agreement with him was impossible. The
frightening thing he reflected for the ten thousandth time as
he forced his shoulders painfully backward with hands on hips.
They were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise
that was supposed to be good for the back muscles.
The frightening thing was that it might all be true,
if the party could thrust its hand into the past
and say, of this or that event it never happened.
That surely was more terrifying than mere torture and death.
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance
with Eurasia. He Winston Smith knew that Oceania had been
an alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four
years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in
his own consciousness, which, in any case must soon be annihilated.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed,
if all records told the same tale, then the lie
passed into history and became truth. Who controls the past,
ran the party slogan, controls the future? Who controls the
present controls the past? And yet the past, though of
its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true
now was true, from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple.
All that was needed was an unending series of victories
over your own memory. Reality control. They called it in
news speak. Doublethink stand easy, barked the instructress. A little
more genially. Winston sank his arms to his sides and
slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away
into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not
to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out,
knowing them to be contradictory, and believing in both of them.
To use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying
claim to it, to believe that the democracy was impossible,
and that the party was the guardian of democracy. To
forget whatever it was nest necessary to forget, then to
draw it back into memory again at the moment when
it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again.
And above all, to apply the same process to the
process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety. Consciously to induce unconsciousness,
and then once again to become unconscious of the act
of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the
word doublethink involved the use of double think. The instructress
had called them to attention again. And now let's see
which of us can touch our toes, she said, enthusiastically,
right over from the hips, please comrades one two, one two.
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the
way from his heels to his buttocks, and often ended
by bringing on another coughing fit. The half pleasant quality
went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had
not merely been altered, it had actually been destroyed. For
how could you establish even the most obvious fact when
there existed no record outside your own memory. He tried
to remember in what year he had first heard mention
of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at
some time in the sixties, but it was impossible to
be certain. In the party histories, of course, big Brother
figured as the leader and guardian of the revolution since
its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed
backwards in time, until already they extended into the fabulous
world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists,
in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets
of London in great gleaming motor cars or horse carriages
with glass sides. There was no knowing how much of
this legend was true and how much invented. Winston could
not even remember at what date the Party itself had
come into existence. He did not believe he had ever
heard the word ingsock before nineteen sixty, but it was
possible that, in its old speak form English socialism, that
is to say, it had been current earlier, everything thing
melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger
on a definite lie. It was not true, For example,
as was claimed in the Party history books, that the
Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood.
But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence.
Just once in his whole life he had held in
his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of an
historical fact. And on that occasion Smith screamed the shrewish
voice from the telescreen six o sevent nine. Smith, w yes,
you bend lower, please, you can do better than that.
You're not trying lower, please, that's better, comrade, Now stand
at ease the whole squad and watch me. A sudden,
hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His
face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay, never show resentment.
A single flicker of the eyes could give you away.
He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above
her head, and one could not say gracefully, but with
remarkable neatness and efficiency, bent over and tucked the first
joint of her fingers under her toes. There comrades, that's
how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again.
I'm thirty nine and I've had four children. Now look
she bent over again. You see my knees aunt bent.
You can all do it if you want to, she
added as she straightened herself up. Any one under forty
five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't
all have the privilege of fighting in the front line,
but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our
boys on the Malabar Front and the sailors in the
floating fortresses. Just think what they have to put up with.
Now try again. That's better, comrade, That's much better, she
added encouragingly, as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in
touching his toes with knees unbent for the first time
in several years. End of Section three.