April 4th, 1984.
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 1984. 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 1944 or 1945; 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 Newspeak word
doublethink. 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 monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose 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 4th, 1984. 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 a
helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters
gunsights, 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 him 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 20 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 didnt oughter of showed it
not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of
kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont
suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles
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
today.
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 centre 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 Anti-Sex 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 spies and
nosers-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 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 which,
if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled
an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. 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-fighter's 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 somehow
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 wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and
evidently decided to stay in the Records 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 on to the screen. There were hisses here
and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman
gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. 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 programmes 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
paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured --
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 goatee 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 sheep-like 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
polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual
style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak
words: more Newspeak 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
claptrap 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 soldiers' 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 sheep-like 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 Eastasia, since when Oceania 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 and a 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 clandestinely 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
rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a
subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there
was a way of avoiding it.
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