That was ten -- eleven years ago. Today, probably, he
would have kept that photograph. It was curious that the fact
of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a
difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the
event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party's hold upon
the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence
which existed no longer had once existed?
But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected
from its ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence.
Already, at the time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no
longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents
of Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed their country.
Since then there had been other changes -- two, three, he could
not remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been
rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no
longer had the smallest significance. The past not only
changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with
the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood
why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages
of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive
was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:
I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether
he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a
minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to
believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe
that the past is inalterable. He might be alone in
holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the
thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the
horror was that he might also be wrong.
He picked up the children's history book and looked at the
portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The
hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge
force were pressing down upon you -- something that penetrated
inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening
you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the
evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce
that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.
It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or
later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the
validity of experience, but the very existence of external
reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of
heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that
they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might
be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make
four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is
unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist
only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what
then?
But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own
accord. The face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious
association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with more
certainty than before, that O'Brien was on his side. He was
writing the diary for O'Brien -- to O'Brien: it was like
an interminable letter which no one would ever read, but which
was addressed to a particular person and took its colour from
that fact.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and
ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart
sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him,
the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him
in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to
understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They
were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the
true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that!
The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are
hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the
earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to
O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom,
he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make
four. If that is granted, all else follows.
x x x
From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of
roasting coffee -- real coffee, not Victory Coffee -- came
floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For
perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of
his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell
as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his
varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three
weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a
rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your
attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a
Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in
bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or
sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal
recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude,
even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly
dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife,
it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this
evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the
April air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he
had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at
the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the
creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On
impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off
into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then
north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly
bothering in which direction he was going.
'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies
in the proles.' The words kept coming back to him, statement of
a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in
the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what
had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was walking up a
cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered
doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were
somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles of
filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of
the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off
on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers -- girls
in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who
chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you
what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent
creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged
barefooted children who played in the puddles and then
scattered at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter
of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most
of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with
a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red
forearms folded across thelr aprons were talking outside a
doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he
approached.
' "Yes," I says to 'er, "that's all very well," I says.
"But if you'd of been in my place you'd of done the same as
what I done. It's easy to criticize," I says, "but you ain't
got the same problems as what I got." '
'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where
it is.'
The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied
him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not
hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary
stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The
blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a
street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such
places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols
might stop you if you happened to run into them. 'May I see
your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time did
you leave work? Is this your usual way home?' -- and so on and
so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking home by
an unusual route: but it was enough to draw attention to you if
the Thought Police heard about it.
Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were
yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the
doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out of a doorway a
little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a
puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapt back again, all
in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like
black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards
Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.
'Steamer!' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead!
Lay down quick!'
'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the
proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself
on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave
you a warning of this kind. They seemed to possess some kind of
instinct which told them several seconds in advance when a
rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled
faster than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head.
There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a
shower of light objects pattered on to his back. When he stood
up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from
the nearest window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses
200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the
sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was
already forming around the ruins. There was a little pile of
plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle
of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he
saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from
the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to
resemble a plaster cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid
the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within three
or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had
affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going
on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly twenty hours,
and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ('pubs',
they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy
swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a
smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a
projecting house- front three men were standing very close
together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper
which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even
before he was near enough to make out the expression on their
faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of their
bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they
were reading. He was a few paces away from them when suddenly
the group broke up and two of the men were in violent
altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of
blows.
'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you
no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!'
'Yes, it 'as, then!'
'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for
over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down
reg'lar as the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in
seven-'
'Yes, a seven 'as won! I could pretty near tell you
the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in
February -- second week in February.'
'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and
white. An' I tell you, no number-'
'Oh, pack it in!' said the third man.
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