''You have thought sometimes,' said O'Brien, 'that my face
-- the face of a member of the Inner Party -- looks old and
worn. What do you think of your own face?'
He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that he
was facing him.
'Look at the condition you are in!' he said. 'Look at this
filthy grime all over your body. Look at the dirt between your
toes. Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you
know that you stink like a goat? Probably you have ceased to
notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see? I can make my
thumb and forefinger meet round your bicep. I could snap your
neck like a carrot. Do you know that you have lost twenty-five
kilograms since you have been in our hands? Even your hair is
coming out in handfuls. Look!' He plucked at Winston's head and
brought away a tuft of hair. 'Open your mouth. Nine, ten,
eleven teeth left. How many had you when you came to us? And
the few you have left are dropping out of your head. Look
here!'
He seized one of Winston's remaining front teeth between
his powerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot
through Winston's jaw. O'Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out
by the roots. He tossed it across the cell.
'You are rotting away,' he said; 'you are falling to
pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look
into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That
is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put
your clothes on again.'
Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements.
Until now he had not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was.
Only one thought stirred in his mind: that he must have been in
this place longer than he had imagined. Then suddenly as he
fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of pity for
his ruined body overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing
he had collapsed on to a small stool that stood beside the bed
and burst into tears. He was aware of his ugliness, his
gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting
weeping in the harsh white light: but he could not stop
himself. O'Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly.
'It will not last for ever,' he said. 'You can escape from
it whenever you choose. Everything depends on yourself.'
'You did it!' sobbed Winston. 'You reduced me to this
state.'
'No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you
accepted when you set yourself up against the Party. It was all
contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did
not foresee.'
He paused, and then went on:
'We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You
have seen what your body is like. Your mind is in the same
state. I do not think there can be much pride left in you. You
have been kicked and flogged and insulted, you have screamed
with pain, you have rolled on the floor in your own blood and
vomit. You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed
everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation
that has not happened to you?'
Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still
oozing out of his eyes. He looked up at O'Brien.
'I have not betrayed Julia,' he said.
O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. 'No,' he said;
'no; that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.'
The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed
able to destroy, flooded Winston's heart again. How
intelligent, he thought, how intelligent! Never did O'Brien
fail to understand what was said to him. Anyone else on earth
would have answered promptly that he had betrayed Julia.
For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under
the torture? He had told them everything he knew about her, her
habits, her character, her past life; he had confessed in the
most trivial detail everything that had happened at their
meetings, all that he had said to her and she to him, their
black-market meals, their adulteries, their vague plottings
against the Party -- everything. And yet, in the sense in which
he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not
stopped loving her; his feelings towards her had remained the
same. O'Brien had seen what he meant without the need for
explanation.
'Tell me,' he said, 'how soon will they shoot me?'
'It might be a long time,' said O'Brien. 'You are a
difficult case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured
sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.'
x x x
He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger
every day, if it was proper to speak of days.
The white light and the humming sound were the same as
ever, but the cell was a little more comfortable than the
others he had been in. There was a pillow and a mattress on the
plank bed, and a stool to sit on. They had given him a bath,
and they allowed him to wash himself fairly frequently in a tin
basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They had
given him new underclothes and a clean suit of overalls. They
had dressed his varicose ulcer with soothing ointment. They had
pulled out the remnants of his teeth and given him a new set of
dentures.
Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been
possible now to keep count of the passage of time, if he had
felt any interest in doing so, since he was being fed at what
appeared to be regular intervals. He was getting, he judged,
three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he wondered
dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food
was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once
there was even a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but
the never-speaking guard who brought his food would give him a
light. The first time he tried to smoke it made him sick, but
he persevered, and spun the packet out for a long time, smoking
half a cigarette after each meal.
They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil
tied to the corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he
was awake he was completely torpid. Often he would lie from one
meal to the next almost without stirring, sometimes asleep,
sometimes waking into vague reveries in which it was too much
trouble to open his eyes. He had long grown used to sleeping
with a strong light on his face. It seemed to make no
difference, except that one's dreams were more coherent. He
dreamed a great deal all through this time, and they were
always happy dreams. He was in the Golden Country, or he was
sitting among enormous glorious, sunlit ruins, with his mother,
with Julia, with O'Brien -- not doing anything, merely sitting
in the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such thoughts as he had
when he was awake were mostly about his dreams. He seemed to
have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the
stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no
desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not
to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be
clean all over, was completely satisfying.
By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he
still felt no impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was
to lie quiet and feel the strength gathering in his body. He
would finger himself here and there, trying to make sure that
it was not an illusion that his muscles were growing rounder
and his skin tauter. Finally it was established beyond a doubt
that he was growing fatter; his thighs were now definitely
thicker than his knees. After that, reluctantly at first, he
began exercising himself regularly. In a little while he could
walk three kilometres, measured by pacing the cell, and his
bowed shoulders were growing straighter. He attempted more
elaborate exercises, and was astonished and humiliated to find
what things he could not do. He could not move out of a walk,
he could not hold his stool out at arm's length, he could not
stand on one leg without falling over. He squatted down on his
heels, and found that with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he
could just lift himself to a standing position. He lay flat on
his belly and tried to lift his weight by his hands. It was
hopeless, he could not raise himself a centimetre. But after a
few more days -- a few more mealtimes -- even that feat was
accomplished. A time came when he could do it six times
running. He began to grow actually proud of his body, and to
cherish an intermittent belief that his face also was growing
back to normal. Only when he chanced to put his hand on his
bald scalp did he remember the seamed, ruined face that had
looked back at him out of the mirror.
His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank bed,
his back against the wall and the slate on his knees, and set
to work deliberately at the task of re-educating himself.
He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw
now, he had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken
the decision. From the moment when he was inside the Ministry
of Love -- and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julia
had stood helpless while the iron voice from the telescreen
told them what to do -- he had grasped the frivolity, the
shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power
of the Party. He knew now that for seven years the Thought
police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass.
There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had
not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to
infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary
they had carefully replaced. They had played sound-tracks to
him, shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of
Julia and himself. Yes, even . . . He could not fight against
the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It
must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be
mistaken? By what external standard could you check its
judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of
learning to think as they thought. Only !
The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began
to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote
first in large clumsy capitals:
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:
TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE
But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though
shying away from something, seemed unable to concentrate. He
knew that he knew what came next, but for the moment he could
not recall it. When he did recall it, it was only by
consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not come of
its own accord. He wrote:
next