GOD IS POWER
He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past
never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia.
Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson,
and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged
with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their
guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered
remembering contrary things, but those were false memories,
products of selfdeception. How easy it all was! Only surrender,
and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a
current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled,
and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the
current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your
own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He
hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy,
except !
Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were
nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,'
O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap
bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats
off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him
do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of
submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought
burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it.
It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly.
The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or
other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real'
things happened. But how could there be such a world? What
knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All
happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds,
truly happens.
He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he
was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized,
nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The
mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought
presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive.
Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.
He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He
presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the
earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water'
-- and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the
arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed
great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical
problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and
two make five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed
also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to
make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be
unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as
necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how
soon they would shoot him. 'Everything depends on yourself,'
O'Brien had said; but he knew that there was no conscious act
by which he could bring it nearer. It might be ten minutes
hence, or ten years. They might keep him for years in solitary
confinement, they might send him to a labour-camp, they might
release him for a while, as they sometimes did. It was
perfectly possible that before he was shot the whole drama of
his arrest and interrogation would be enacted all over again.
The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected
moment. The tradition -- the unspoken tradition: somehow you
knew it, though you never heard it said-was that they shot you
from behind; always in the back of the head, without warning,
as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell.
One day -- but 'one day' was not the right expression;
just as probably it was in the middle of the night: once -- he
fell into a strange, blissful reverie. He was walking down the
corridor, waiting for the bullet. He knew that it was coming in
another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed out,
reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no
more pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He
walked easily, with a joy of movement and with a feeling of
walking in sunlight. He was not any longer in the narrow white
corridors in the Ministry of Love, he was in the enormous
sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down which he had seemed to
walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He was in the Golden
Country, following the foot- track across the old
rabbit-cropped pasture. He could feel the short springy turf
under his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face. At the edge
of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring, and
somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dace lay in the
green pools under the willows.
Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat
broke out on his backbone. He had heard himself cry aloud:
'Julia ! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!'
For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of
her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but
inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of
his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had
ever done when they were together and free. Also he knew that
somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What
had he done? How many years had he added to his servitude by
that moment of weakness?
In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots
outside. They could not let such an outburst go unpunished.
They would know now, if they had not known before, that he was
breaking the agreement he had made with them. He obeyed the
Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old days he had
hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity.
Now he had retreated a step further: in the mind he had
surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart
inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but he preferred
to be in the wrong. They would understand that- O'Brien would
understand it. It was all confessed in that single foolish cry.
He would have to start all over again. It might take
years. He ran a hand over his face, trying to familiarize
himself with the new shape. There were deep furrows in the
cheeks, the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose flattened. Besides,
since last seeing himself in the glass he had been given a
complete new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve
inscrutability when you did not know what your face looked
like. In any case, mere control of the features was not enough.
For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a
secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all
the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must
never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that
could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think
right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he
must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter
which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of
him, a kind of cyst.
One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell
when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be
possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking down a
corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world
inside him could turn over. And then suddenly, without a word
uttered, without a check in his step, without the changing of a
line in his face -- suddenly the camouflage would be down and
bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill
him like an enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same
instant bang! would go the bullet, too late, or too early. They
would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim
it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out
of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in their
own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.
He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an
intellectual discipline. It was a question of degrading
himself, mutilating himself. He had got to plunge into the
filthiest of filth. What was the most horrible, sickening thing
of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous face (because
of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as
being a metre wide), with its heavy black moustache and the
eyes that followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his
mind of its own accord. What were his true feelings towards Big
Brother?
There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel
door swung open with a clang. O'Brien walked into the cell.
Behind him were the waxen-faced officer and the black-uniformed
guards.
'Get up,' said O'Brien. 'Come here.'
Winston stood opposite him. O'Brien took Winston's
shoulders between his strong hands and looked at him closely.
'You have had thoughts of deceiving me,' he said. 'That
was stupid. Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.'
He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:
'You are improving. Intellectually there is very little
wrong with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed to
make progress. Tell me, Winston -- and remember, no lies: you
know that I am always able to detect a lie -- tell me, what are
your true feelings towards Big Brother?'
'I hate him.'
'You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to
take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough
to obey him: you must love him.'
He released Winston with a little push towards the guards.
'Room 101,' he said.
x x x
At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed
to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building.
Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure. The
cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level.
The room where he had been interrogated by O'Brien was high up
near the roof. This place was many metres underground, as deep
down as it was possible to go.
It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But
he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that
there were two small tables straight in front of him, each
covered with green baize. One was only a metre or two from him,
the other was further away, near the door. He was strapped
upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not
even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind,
forcing him to look straight in front of him.
For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and
O'Brien came in.
'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101.
I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it.
The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'
The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something
made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on
the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was
standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.
'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from
individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by
fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths.
There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even
fatal.'
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